/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3025566]

Let's say that a permanent martian base was to be built, how would you power it? also how would you power the spacecraft headed there?

I'm stumped on this question, as nuclear reactors and solar panels would seem to not be feasible in the Martian environment... can any of you please answer help?

[Anonymous No.3025599]

anyone?

[Anonymous No.3025602]

Well there is little atmosphere on Mars so solar pannels can generate a lot of power there.As long as somebody goes out every so often to sweep the dust of.

As far as getting there radioactive decay. You have a element that decays This produces heat and you use that.

[Anonymous No.3025608]

>>3025566
why are nuclear reactors not feasible?

[Nuca-Cola my trip is on my other comp No.3025607]

LFTR up in this motherfucker. Nice and stable, super safe, and thorium has enormous concentrations on certain parts of Mars.

[Anonymous No.3025624]

>>3025566
you could get to mars with exactly as much fuel as it takes to get to the moon
no deceleration in space

[Anonymous No.3025631]

>>3025608

I was just thinking on how would you be able to cool down a reactor, since water cooling the rods wouldn't seem possible on the trip there, and yeah... im not really sure how it all works though...

[Anonymous No.3025643]

>>3025624
Technically true, but every impact from any sort of space debris would alter your course, requiring correction, hence, fuel.

[Anonymous No.3025657]

>>3025624
You would want to be going faster on your trip to Mars. It took a week for the Apollo missions to get to the Moon, and that is thousands of times closer than Mars. You would also need more fuel to provide more force to accelerate more shit, like all the extra food and equipment a trip of that magnitude would require.

[Anonymous No.3025667]

>>3025643
with our current technology we wouldn't survive many impacts on the way to mars. Also just because there's a small chance of impact doesn't change the fact that even in our solar system it is very probable if I drew a line from our planet to mars it would probably not hit a single particle along the way. Of course drawing a line is an oversimplification but the point remains valid

side note: course correction can be performed by extremely low power consumption ion thrusters

[Anonymous No.3025668]

Minovsky Particles. Also, I would use a mass graviton accelerator to get us there.

By the way, it's the year 2071

[Nuca-Cola my trip is on my other comp No.3025672]

>>3025631
This is why LFTR is so nice. Your entire cooling system can be closed cycle, and doesn't even need water. Good old closed cycle brayton turbines. Closed fuel cycle too

[Anonymous No.3025678]

>>3025657
Don't we just need to build a better booster.

[Anonymous No.3025677]

>>3025667
Excuse me, meant micro asteroids.

[Anonymous No.3025683]

>>3025657

Why in such a rush?

>>3025566

Closed loop water recirculation + whatever water is on the surface.

Nuclear is the only viable option.

[Anonymous No.3025689]

>>3025631
Without water you just need to build bigger radiatiors for the secondary loop.

You could instead sink pipes into the permafrost and dump the heat there, though this could prove hazardous as, depending on the chemical composition of the permafrost, violent outgassing may occur.

Another possibility is using several smaller reactors, which would increase redundancy and facilitate cooling.

And another is using several RTGs, instead of reactors.

Of course, the outgassing that I mentioned, could itself be harnessed to function as a kind of steam turbine, with the exhaust captured and used as raw material for production of consumables(air, water, fuel).

[Anonymous No.3025690]

>>3025672

>implying other reactors aren't closed cycle

[Anonymous No.3025691]

>>3025657
>store food on lunar base
>take off with just crew and shuttle from earth
>refuel and stock the pantry from the lunar surface
>launch from moon

[Anonymous No.3025698]

>>3025602

>As long as somebody goes out every so often to sweep the dust of.

I reckon I know who'll end up doing that.

[Anonymous No.3025707]

Orbital satellites beaming down solar energy.

We'll have to start sooner or later, and if you can think of a better way to heat that sucker up, I'd like to hear it.

Then start crashing comets into the surface to get some hydro in the atmosphere.

[Anonymous No.3025719]

>>3025707
that's basically what they do in Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question." Then before you know it a computer is god

[Anonymous No.3025721]

heh, these are some good ideas here...

also, how would you go on powering the craft heading there? i mean some kind of propellant could be used to get there, but i dont think solar panels would be enough to power the life support and that kind of stuff.

[Anonymous No.3025728]

>>3025698
It's you!

[Anonymous No.3025736]

>>3025721

I would love for it to be orion. We wouldn't even need to spark it until we were well outside lunar orbit.

Nuclear saltwater?

[Anonymous No.3025749]

>>3025736

would you mind elaborating on your picture, i don't quite understand it

[Anonymous No.3025752]

USE HEAVY WATER

SG1 FTW

[Anonymous No.3025775]

>>3025749

It's how much delta-v you need to get from one orbit to the other. So if time is no object, you can transfer from one of these orbits to the other quite simply.

In fact, as you can see, it's simpler in one way to get from LEO to mars than it is to get from the surface to LEO.

[Anonymous No.3025790]

>>3025775

oh ok, i see now

[Anonymous No.3026977]

use water

[Anonymous No.3027008]

>>3025721
>>3025721
No reason we couldn't use a solar sail, or a nuclear powered transport.

I mean, I assume we're talking about taking off from Earth in a courier vehicle, attaching to a transport, using that to go to Mars, landing in the courier, doing science, taking off in the courier, attaching to the transport, and coming back.

[Anonymous No.3027488]

>>3025566
You might want to read this, it's quite interesting :
How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet


Share your own customer images
Search inside this book
>How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet by Robert Zubrin

[Anonymous No.3027496]

Solar panels work. It's good enough for the Mars rovers.

Also, small-scale fission when needed.

[Anonymous No.3027502]

>>3025602

Bullshit, solar pannels don't produce shit because Mars is too far from the sun, so their efficiency is like reduced 10 folds or something

[Anonymous No.3027526]

Gravity waves.

[Anonymous No.3027547]

Plenty of wind on mars also seconding water.

[Anonymous No.3027554]

Again with cooling a reactor: for a more high-power system you could conceivably harvest water to fill a coolant reservoir which could then be cooled by vanes in the air and/or heatpipes sunk into the ground.

Think of a pool, 50 meters wide, 100 long and 2-5 deep, divided into a meandering shape. The water is circulated through the pool, through which the cooling vanes protrude into the ground or air.

For higher cooling potential, it could be situated near the poles, with polar ice ready to be dumped onto the heatpipes to prevent unforeseen consequenses.

[Anonymous No.3027561]

>>3027502

Really? It's only one and a half AU from the sun, and so it ought to get around half what we get.

[Anonymous No.3027569]

You can build a nuclear reactor without using water cooling. Two such designs are molten salt reactors and traveling wave reactors.

[Anonymous No.3027577]

>>3027561

Yeah I would have thought so too. But this semester I had astrophysics class in which we read parts of that book >>3027488 (which is based on real science even though it's fiction), and the author mentioned solar panels weren't the way to go. I'll be right back with the actual explanation.

[Anonymous No.3027608]

>>3027554
On the long run, the reactor waste heat could be used to heat up waters in a sloped, underground artificial habitat, with the vaporized water rising to the ceiling to lose heat near the surface windows, to rain down on the sloped floor.

This would simulate a natural water cycle, enabling non-, or less-enhanced terrestrial species to be brough up.

Of course, this wouldn't be necessary for survival, and would probably only be considered decades or centuries after the initial colonization, when the local industries and society would be more stable and able to fund such a project.

[Anonymous No.3027611]

Explanation from >>3027577


"Powering a house on Mars with solar photovoltaics is a really bad idea. It's not even an economical way to produce electricity on Earth, where the solar flux is two and a half times greater than here (on Mars). Worse, there are the dust storms to contend with, which can reduce the light energy received from the sky by a factor of ten for weeks or even months at a time. This means you have to overdesign your solar array ten times bigger if you want to be able to get an acceptable level of power throughout the year."

[Anonymous No.3027642]

or how about we just stay here and make peace on earth..

ok sry, go back to your discussion

[Anonymous No.3027650]

>>3027547
>wind power
>on mars
>ohmygodswhat

Yeah, maybe a few thousand years from now, if the planet gets 'formed and has a more substantial atmosphere to enact force on them windmills.

[Anonymous No.3027654]

>>3027502
Just stop it. This is beyond theory. It's what actually makes the mars rovers go.

[Anonymous No.3027658]

>>3027642
False dichotomy.

[Anonymous No.3027667]

>>3027642
The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.

--Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
The Father of Rocketry

Because Alpha Centauri is always relevant.

I wish some probe finds even the least microbial life there, just so I can use my best drone-voice and say "Indigenous life-forms"

[Anonymous No.3027677]

>>3027654
Mars rovers don't need huge amounts of energy to move around since they move slowly as fuck. I believe. Powering a permanent base where we could live with solar panels sounds a little foolish to me. But I could be wrong.

[Anonymous No.3027788]

>>3027650
Just need to set those windmills up at the poles where the wind speed would make it quite possible now. no idea how to get them there though.

[Anonymous No.3027895]

>>3027788
Wind engineer here. Ain't the density of Mars atmosphere like, really fucking low? That puts a serious damper on the amount of energy you can get.

[Anonymous No.3027914]

>>3027788
>>3027895
Yeah, the windmills just aren't cost-effective when the atmospheric pressure is so low, no matter the windspeed.

[Anonymous No.3027938]

2 words for powering the base on mars niggas:

Artificial
Leaves

[Anonymous No.3027945]

Nuclear powerplants everywhere.

[Anonymous No.3027972]

apologies /sci/ 16.8 times less air when in fact 168 times less air decimal point where I shouldn't
16.8 could have worked at 400kph guess I came to the wrong board with lousy math.

[Anonymous No.3027996]

>>3027972
Don't feel bad. At least it was an honest mathematical mistake, instead of the usual fanatic sticking-to-guns-no-matter-what bullshit that I usually exhibit.

[Nuca-Cola !dbLFTRZqOI No.3028079]

hey
hey
hey guys
hey
look at this
hey

[Anonymous No.3028161]

>>3028079
Men.
We will make planetfall at Acidalia tomorrow at oh-eight-hundred.
Make whatever preparations are necessary.

Dismissed!

[Anonymous No.3028220]

>>3028161

Holy flurking schnit!

The Ascetic Virtues.

If you mention it, someone will re-install it. Today, that someone is me.

[Anonymous No.3028389]

>>3028220
>>3027667
Not necessarily a great game but the characters and quotes were FANASTIC my email sig is still "Beware he who would deny you access to information. For in his heart, he dreams himself your master.' Commissioner Pravin Lal

[Anonymous No.3028453]

>>3025672
>liquid fluorine thorium reactors
>brayton cycle

WTFamireading.jpg

[Anonymous No.3028485]

>>3028453
magic

[Nuca-Cola !dbLFTRZqOI No.3028769]

>>3028453
yup. closed cycle, and their efficiencies go up with temperature. LFTRs usually operate around 600-800C, meaning your brayton sits at a cozy 48% efficient, and takes up WAY less space.

[Anonymous No.3028804]

>>3028389
Yeah, I like how the characters unfolded through the technology and project animations. I think my favorite is this one:

The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.

-- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Blessed Struggle"

[Anonymous No.3028836]

>>3025624
>>3025624
please tell me this is false...

[Anonymous No.3028852]

nuclear reactors would work fine in the martian environment, just bury them in the ground to maintain a constant temperature. and its not like there's any environment to contaminate with the waste.

[Anonymous No.3028888]

Magnets, yes magnets. I don't fucking understand why magnets aren't used as another energy source. Unless I'm wrong I feel like you could use the repelling energy between the opposite poles of powerful electromagnets to power an internal combustion engine. That could be applied to almost anything if we could do that. Again, I could be wrong.

[Anonymous No.3028901]

>>3028769
No, no, I know exactly what you're trying to talk about (I'm actually a nuclear engineer). But there are several things wrong with your whole concept. Molten salt reactors (which is what you're talking about) can potentially rely on Brayton cycles (they don't have to), but in either case they would have to operate in a primary and secondary loop with one being a liquid coolant (i.e. the primary loop). What would be better to build would be a single loop plant running on a Brayton Cycle, i.e. a high temperature gas reactor.

Also, pro-tip, because of the lower air pressure, you're heat sink is going to be working primarily on radiative heat transfer rather than convective. So knock that efficiency figure in half and that's what you're realistically looking at.

[Anonymous No.3028903]

>>3028888
0/10 not even close

[Anonymous No.3028916]

>>3028903

I'm not trolling. I feel like magnets should be used more often. Once again I am legitimately not trolling at all.

[Anonymous No.3028929]

solar, wind, later on possibly geothermal

[Nuca-Cola !dbLFTRZqOI No.3028932]

>>3028901
oh, right, damn you thin martian atmosphere.

either way, nuclear energy is our best bet on mars at least at first, the thorium is relatively abundant, and most importantly lftrs don't really have reactor problems. it's not like it's capable of a run away.
also also i'm not really comfortable with a pure gas cycle. for some reason helium in a high neutron flux environment concerns me a little.

[Anonymous No.3028980]

>>3028932
Meh, I actually feel the exact opposite way. I could foresee major problems with corrosion in dealing with molten salts. At the same time helium is not corrosive at all and has very little residual radioactivity after being exposed to neutron flux (because there's no real neutron activation reactions with helium at that temperature), but I could see temperature tolerances being an issue. A good overhaul on the materials end would be able to fix all of those problems (granted, those are several years out).

[Anonymous No.3029158]

>>3028929
>Implying that mars has enough volcanic activity in order to get geothermal plants runnings.

[Nuca-Cola !dbLFTRZqOI No.3029183]

>>3028980
although now that you mention it, a totally helium cycle reactor might work out pretty well in terms of saving space.
brb modifying my home reactor design
(speaking of which, do you happen to know any decent sources on industrial scale fluorination processes?)

[Anonymous No.3029262]

>>3029183
Negative, ghostrider.

[Nuca-Cola !dbLFTRZqOI No.3029282]

>>3029262
damnit!
ironic how LFTR is more chemical than nuclear
i still need to find out all that licensing fees and wait times and shit

[Anonymous No.3029301]

vespene gas...duh

[Anonymous No.3029353]

>Problem with no air on mars
>Enclose everything and fill the space with air.