Air – Generation Mars

May 7, 2021

Ingenuity sounds

The atmosphere of Mars is thin, but it still transfers sound.

NASA's Perseverance Captures Video, Audio of Fourth Ingenuity Flight – NASA Mars Exploration

Sounds of the Mars Helicopter’s whirring rotors add another new dimension to the historic project.

NASA Mars Exploration

How cool is this?

February 10, 2018April 27, 2018

Solar Wind (Slight Return)

Circling back to my note on solar wind and the Martian atmosphere.

In the note, I described how the solar wind interacts with the ionosphere of Mars to create an induced magnetosphere. Recent data from ESA’s Mars Express mission suggests that this induced magnetosphere actually protects the Martian atmosphere from the ion loss expected to be caused by that same solar wind. Thus, the long held idea that the solar wind blew away Mars’ atmosphere is now in question.

The article below outlines an alternative hypothesis. Rather than losing atmosphere to the solar wind, maybe Mars can’t hold onto one because its gravity is just too weak.

Leaky atmosphere linked to lightweight planet

The Red Planet’s low gravity and lack of magnetic field makes its outermost atmosphere an easy target to be swept away by the solar wind, but new evidence from ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft shows that the Sun’s radiation may play a surprising role in its escape.

phys.org

January 23, 2018May 3, 2018

Solar Wind

Here are two articles from just the past year, each presenting diametrically opposed findings. This is science! And it’s what makes trying to write accurate science fiction such a pleasant challenge. Continue reading “Solar Wind”

January 10, 2018April 27, 2018

Making oxygen

There is plenty of oxygen on Mars, just not in the nice O2 form that we need to breathe. Getting that requires some effort but will be worth it: oxygen is not the sort of thing we want to have to haul with us from Earth, particularly not for long-term colonization. The buzzphrase applied to technology that uses existing resources is In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and this is what we are going to do, in one form or another. Continue reading “Making oxygen”