Mars InSight - landing on 26 Nov 2018

Wildman Rocketry
Onebadhawk
Shop deals on ebay
The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
cwbullet said:
I hope we land a man Mars before 2020.
Click to expand...

Not just "colonizing" Mars would cause this:

Colonizing Mars means contaminating Mars – and never knowing for sure if it had its own native life
November 6, 2018

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threa...or-sure-if-it-had-its-own-native-life.149082/

"I believe it’s critical that every attempt be made to obtain evidence of any past or present life on Mars well in advance of future missions to Mars that include humans. What we discover could influence our collective decision whether to send colonists there at all."

I believe it is far, FAR more important to confirm the independent development of life or panspermia spread of life than it is to put humans on Mars just to do it. As a matter of fact, I'd like to see an international treaty to NOT put humans on Mars until everything possible is done to determine of there is or ever was life on Mars.
 
Winston said:
Not just "colonizing" Mars would cause this:

Colonizing Mars means contaminating Mars – and never knowing for sure if it had its own native life
November 6, 2018

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/colonizing-mars-means-contaminating-mars-–-and-never-knowing-for-sure-if-it-had-its-own-native-life.149082/

"I believe it’s critical that every attempt be made to obtain evidence of any past or present life on Mars well in advance of future missions to Mars that include humans. What we discover could influence our collective decision whether to send colonists there at all."

I believe it is far, FAR more important to confirm the independent development of life or panspermia spread of life than it is to put humans on Mars just to do it. As a matter of fact, I'd like to see an international treaty to NOT put humans on Mars until everything possible is done to determine of there is or ever was life on Mars.
Click to expand...

That cannot be done unless every single square inch of Mars is searched for life (as well as below the surface) so essentially this would be declaring that humans may never ever ever set foot on Mars.
 
An extraordinarily EXPENSIVE way to colonize Mars at that. We didn't seem to be too worried about moon contamination.
 
Marc_G said:
Ambitious goal, to get this done in just 13 months. :)

Frankly, I'd rather spend the cost of a human mission to mars on a swarm of small bots that could scour the planet for signs of past life and any other cool science goals.
Click to expand...

I show my professional bias here, but nothing beats a geologist in the field for that kind of stuff. Tech doesn't hurt, though!
 
JStarStar said:
That cannot be done unless every single square inch of Mars is searched for life (as well as below the surface) so essentially this would be declaring that humans may never ever ever set foot on Mars.
Click to expand...
No, not "every square inch" of Mars would need to be examined or could be. That goes along with the qualification "everything possible" with a better qualifier "everything practically possible" which is providing an additional qualifier that should not need to be added, the "practical" qualifier.

The path taken should be the one currently planned with a more aggressive program of exploration that can be done for less cost and at no risk to human life than a program sending space radiation and zero G bone calcium degrading units to contaminate Mars mainly for political prestige and anthropocentric adventure, the robotic path having the great additional advantage of developing technologies highly useful on planet Earth like AI and robotics versus multi-million dollar zero G toilets.

InSight Mars Mission's Road to Launch



Partial transcript from the video, how does this not totally nix any manned exploration until everything possible is done to find life on Mars using sterilized robots?:

"We know water exists on Mars and where there's water there could be signs of life but we must ensure any organisms we discover weren't simply stowaways from Earth. This is where the planetary protection team comes into play. Planetary protection is what we do to responsibly explore other planets and moons in our solar system in order to do that we need to make sure that we send a clean spacecraft there.

We would hate to get to another planet or moon and think we discovered life but it was actually something that we brought with us. So we collect our samples on InSight, any part of InSight that's going to land on the surface of Mars, we bring it back to our lab and we process it using a NASA procedure. If we run into a situation where you take a sample and it comes back as having higher number of bacteria than what we want then we make sure that the engineers go back and clean those surfaces for the whole idea that we don't want to cloud our ability to potentially find life on another planet or moon."
 
MattJL said:
I show my professional bias here, but nothing beats a geologist in the field for that kind of stuff. Tech doesn't hurt, though!
Click to expand...
I agree, but on Earth a geologist or biologist doesn't need to worry about contaminating his area of exploration with life in the way they might contaminate what otherwise might be a biologically sterile environment like Mars when what we need to know is if it's biologically sterile or not. It's like going into an ultimate "clean room," one in a integrated circuit manufacturing plant ("foundry") in dirty ditch digger clothes and looking for contamination.
 
Winston said:
As a matter of fact, I'd like to see an international treaty to NOT put humans on Mars until everything possible is done to determine of there is or ever was life on Mars.
Click to expand...

A constantly changing, and presumably never-ending, condition to meet.

Even if we send new probes to Mars every two weeks for the indefinite future -- 26 probes per year (never mind for now that orbital mechanics makes this impossible anyway), in 50 years we will have 1300 probes on Mars.

Mars has a surface area of 144.8 million square kilometers, even if we send 1300 probes they can only cover a minuscule percentage of the entire surface (and again don't forget underground).

If all these probes were perfectly evenly distributed, each probe would be responsible for covering 111,384 square kilometers, so it's unlikely each probe would be able to exhaustively cover all that area.

Presumably any life detected on Mars would undergo intensive DNA testing which would reveal similarities or differences with terrestrial biology.

Even unmanned probes cannot be guaranteed as utterly sterile, no matter what clean-room conditions they are built and launched under, they still carry some microscopic bacterial material.
 
Last edited:
Sure. There is no economic model which allows such a massive number of unmanned probes to "certify" that Mars has no indigenous biology within 50 years, 100 years or 1000 years.

Far better to continue developing our DNA testing techniques so that any alien life found on Mars or anywhere else can be differentiated from terrestrial life.
 
saw a headline, 'how to watch(the landing) online and in person'. I suppose they mean at JPL...else if one could see it in person, why send the probe:)?
Rex
 
Space travel for human's is far in the future, anyone living today won't see it.
That is, at great distances and regularly...
Personally, I would rather see us pursue research into the depths of our Ocean's a little more.
While it is necessary to continue to advance in space exploration, we are running before we learn to walk sending man to Mars, in my personal opinion.
USO's have so many sightings, and are said to be Aliens from other worlds.
How do we not know if it is intelligent life that has developed below the waves of the Ocean's in the depths?
ie; Octopi, for one. There is no evolution of them that we have discovered as of yet.
Who knows what could, or has, evolved in the depths of our waters that covers 70% of our surface of Earth.
(And why do we call it Earth? When it is covered 70% by water.)
And infused in pockets well below the surface.
To advanced intelligence below the waves, they may consider us as insects...
Unless we explore it, we will never know.
Is it because it is more difficult, or more dangerous than Space?
Is it because it is more costly than exploring Space?
Or is it because we can't breath it (like Space) and we don't think intelligent life couldn't exist?
 
Well, it's going to happen sooner or later where we will find it necessary to spread our seed as it were. This rock isn't going to be around forever. Propagation of a species will eventually necessitate seeking other worlds outside our own. It's not just a matter of exploration but a way to sustain our existence in a truly vast spectrum. We have to spread.
 
JStarStar said:
Far better to continue developing our DNA testing techniques so that any alien life found on Mars or anywhere else can be differentiated from terrestrial life.
Click to expand...
That won't work. Small fragments of RNA or DNA which WOULD result from human contamination degraded by UV, radiation, and perchlorates in the Martian soil would not be long enough sequences to be positively associated with human contamination, just life... from where? Further degradation into far more primitive biochemical markers would make any source ID totally impossible.

Any human mission to find life would land as close as possible to a most likely habitat for that life - i.e. some existing subsurface water ice or liquid water. INEVITABLE human contamination would spread into the target area and everywhere else via wind born dust. "All we are is dust in the wind," especially on Mars.

Edit: The above problem would preclude ever proving current or past Martian life via biochemical markers alone. However, it wouldn't preclude finding current intact or fairly intact Martian cellular life OR fossil evidence of past Martian life, but neither of those would be especially difficult to find using even current robotic methods - once we look in the right place(s). The current robotic exploration plan makes that the goal - find the right places. I'd just like to see it vastly accelerated and that would still be cheaper than a manned mission.
 
Last edited:
There are very sophisticated ways of distinguishing terrestrial vs. alien bio-markers. One method involves the racemic ratios of a set of amino acids. It is actually possible, if you keep the contamination reasonably small, to distinguish between the contamination signal and the indigenous signal. In fact, using the R/L ratios can provide some indication of the age of the life (in geological terms), whether it is extinct or extant.

If anyone is interested, you should pick up a copy of “The Spark of Life” by Wills and Bada.
 
RocketPro said:
There are very sophisticated ways of distinguishing terrestrial vs. alien bio-markers. One method involves the racemic ratios of a set of amino acids. It is actually possible, if you keep the contamination reasonably small, to distinguish between the contamination signal and the indigenous signal. In fact, using the R/L ratios can provide some indication of the age of the life (in geological terms), whether it is extinct or extant.

If anyone is interested, you should pick up a copy of “The Spark of Life” by Wills and Bada.
Click to expand...
There are copies in relatively nearby libraries, so I've placed a copy on reserve for inter-library loan. From what text from it I can find on-line, it seems that the authors are quite concerned about the importance of robotic spacecraft sterilization (as is NASA, obviously) and whether the Soviets sterilized the probes they mostly crashed into Mars.
 
JStarStar said:
There is no economic model which allows such a massive number of unmanned probes to "certify" that Mars has no indigenous biology within 50 years, 100 years or 1000 years.
Click to expand...
And how many economic models of vastly more expensive human missions to the many sites on the planet that robots could visit far more economically are there that could "certify" that Mars has no indigenous biology within 50, 100, or 1000 years?
 
Winston said:
There are copies in relatively nearby libraries, so I've placed a copy on reserve for inter-library loan. From what text from it I can find on-line, it seems that the authors are quite concerned about the importance of robotic spacecraft sterilization (as is NASA, obviously) and whether the Soviets sterilized the probes they mostly crashed into Mars.
Click to expand...

The probes we've already sent, starting with Mars 3 and Viking, were almost certainly contaminated on a microscopic level, so the battle is already lost.
 
JStarStar said:
The probes we've already sent, starting with Mars 3 and Viking, were almost certainly contaminated on a microscopic level, so the battle is already lost.
Click to expand...

Well, most of the Mars community doesn’t believe all is lost...BTW, Viking was the best-sterilized thing we’ve ever sent to Mars.

But...there is a newly active and lively discussion about what Planetary Protection (forward and backward) means in a mixed governmental/private mode. For more info and reading, Google “planetary protection mars”. The new PPO, Lisa Pratt, is looking into all of this actively.
 
The point is that setting an impossible theoretical goal of examining every square millimeter of Mars to certify beyond any infinitesimal doubt no life exists or has ever existed on the planet, would effectively prohibit humans going there forever.

Better yet to send probes (unmanned and eventually manned) for intensive study, to take all reasonable precautions to prevent inadvertent contamination and to continually improve DNA typing procedures so if biology is eventually discovered on mars, it can be differentiated from "stowaway" organisms from Earth.
 
JStarStar said:
The point is that setting an impossible theoretical goal of examining every square millimeter of Mars to certify beyond any infinitesimal doubt no life exists or has ever existed on the planet, would effectively prohibit humans going there forever.

Better yet to send probes (unmanned and eventually manned) for intensive study, to take all reasonable precautions to prevent inadvertent contamination and to continually improve DNA typing procedures so if biology is eventually discovered on mars, it can be differentiated from "stowaway" organisms from Earth.
Click to expand...
Did you somehow miss the post were I said set a PRACTICAL robotic search and specifically said NOT every spot on Mars? Here's a link to that:

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/mars-insight-landing-on-26-nov-2018.149343/#post-1833673

Anyway, what you describe in your second paragraph is what I can completely agree with and have stated here before to be what I think is the most logical policy: explore via robotics to find the most likely places for life or past life or signs of same and then if humans still provide a cost/benefit advantage over the robotics and AI which will have developed over that time, send humans.

This isn't bad. A very rough decision tree:

Human Mars Mission Contamination Issues

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/reports/CB-1089/lupisella.pdf

The following paper is even better. Thing is, it doesn't NEED to be "too late" if an international agreement is made to NOT send humans until an agreed upon adequate level of search for evidence of life via robotic probes is completed. However, as I've pointed out before, money and politics too often pervert science. National prestige and many billions of dollars are at stake and could compromise the most important discovery in history - life evolving elsewhere and/or the panspermia propagation of it.

Searching for Life on Mars Before It Is Too Late
Astrobiology, Volume 17, Number 10, 2017
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/ast.2017.1703

Abstract

Decades of robotic exploration have confirmed that in the distant past, Mars was warmer and wetter and its surface was habitable. However, none of the spacecraft missions to Mars have included among their scientific objectives the exploration of Special Regions, those places on the planet that could be inhabited by extant martian life or where terrestrial microorganisms might replicate. A major reason for this is because of Planetary Protection constraints, which are implemented to protect Mars from terrestrial biological contamination. At the same time, plans are being drafted to send humans to Mars during the 2030 decade, both from international space agencies and the private sector. We argue here that these two parallel strategies for the exploration of Mars (i.e., delaying any efforts for the biological reconnaissance of Mars during the next two or three decades and then directly sending human missions to the planet) demand reconsideration because once an astronaut sets foot on Mars, Planetary Protection policies as we conceive them today will no longer be valid as human arrival will inevitably increase the introduction of terrestrial and organic contaminants and that could jeopardize the identification of indigenous martian life. In this study, we advocate for reassessment over the relationships between robotic searches, paying increased attention to proactive astrobiological investigation and sampling of areas more likely to host indigenous life, and fundamentally doing this in advance of manned missions.

While populist articles like this are complete garbage, not answering the important questions involved at all:

Humans will contaminate Mars with life — the question is how to do it right
What planetary protection will look like for a SpaceX colony
4 Oct 2016

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13113626/elon-musk-mars-colony-spacex-human-life

Musk said he isn’t too worried about encountering Martian life, since all signs seem to point to the planet being a dead world. "So far, we’re really not seeing any sign of surface life on Mars. There’s really nothing on the surface of Mars," he argued at a press conference after his speech last week.

Because it's just up to Elon Musk. If preservation of the human race is the reason then increase asteroid and comet impact defense spending from its current pitiful amount. It's vastly cheaper than starting a human colony on Mars.
 
we knew it was going to land for some time, the big question was; how fast was it going to land :). apparently about 5 mph.
Rex
 
Rex R said:
we knew it was going to land for some time, the big question was; how fast was it going to land :). apparently about 5 mph.
Rex
Click to expand...

I say this about my rockets sometimes :)

Is/Was there some onboard video of it landing?
 

Similar threads

Marc_G
Mars Insight falls silent after successful mission
Replies
16
Views
708
CalebJ
CalebJ
Huxter
MOXIE: Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment
Replies
5
Views
271
OzHybrid
OzHybrid
cwbullet
GO Rocketry South Carolina / ICBM Research Launch - 18-19 NOV
Replies
13
Views
603
cwbullet
cwbullet
jsdemar
My V2 landed on Mars
Replies
5
Views
381
JimByrne
J
Marc_G
Mars InSight in a power crisis
Replies
12
Views
1K
KenECoyote
KenECoyote

Latest posts

Back
Top