As for Planetary protection, Human risk mitigation, etc., I think the best way to discern how Mars and Humans will interact is for Humans and Mars to interact and plan accordingly knowing you're not going to know what you don't know...but with humans on the surface, you'll find out soon enough.
For backward protection of earth this is the obvious solution. Send people and equipment. If there is anything deadly lurking they will die. The risk is way low, low enough to expose a group of people even if not considered low enough to risk all of earth. Two years on Mars are enough. Or even a few weeks with 8 months return flight duration.The forward contamination is simply not existing. Not in the sense there is a risk of exterminating local life before we can find it.
I'll be honest and borderline cavalier.If anyone got sick on Mars because of some form of domestic "infection" then that's part of the risk. No more, no less of any other critical infrastructure failure or accident. Also, we'd learn a lot by treating it there as we'd need to learn it anyways. So Earth contamination is a non-starter for that. IMO. I assume a this point in the process we have built up enough of bio lab presence for both research and are health. And wen an just as well put all the minds on Earth against the problem as well. And hopefully if there was time, send additional supplies accordingly.And if by chance there is some form of basic microbial or "lesser than" life on Mars that we encounter and subsequently annihilate, I would hope we were able to obtain samples before such an event occurred. However I do not think any such event would or should preclude us from continuing exploration and colonization. Be careful, stay alert, 'try" to do no harm. But go we should and when there, continue on we must. IMO.
Why assume that there is enough bio lab presence there to study and treat in situ? That seems a very advanced stage like decades into the future. And - to make it entirely one way, from Earth to Mars, nothing ever comes back?
Mars could, if we treat it right, be like another exoplanet with micromartians, actually genuine microbial ETs in our own solar system. The nearest such might be light years away or even further if we lose the opportunity for Mars. Why such a great hurry? Mars will still be there a decade later, or a century later, why not take our time and do things properly? And meanwhile we can send humans to the Moon, to asteroids, to the moons of Mars, to Venus, Mercury, Jupiter's moons, why in such a rush to send them to the one place in the inner solar system that's most vulnerable to our microbes.
Because most astrobiologists I know (actually all of them) would like to see work that can be done in their lifetime done in their lifetime, not put off for nebulous reasons into the indefinite future.
Quote from: Dalhousie on 06/20/2016 10:43 pmBecause most astrobiologists I know (actually all of them) would like to see work that can be done in their lifetime done in their lifetime, not put off for nebulous reasons into the indefinite future.Even if that work destroys the subject matter of astrobiology on Mars so that from then on you can only work with past life rather than present day life there? Chris McKay for one talked about biologically reversible exploration of Mars. He has the idea that if we find micromartians there, that we should reverse our contamination of Mars, and then try to make Mars more suitable for the micromartians because they would be so unique and interesting. He may have changed his position since then but he used to talk about that quite passionately.
We can do in situ studies from Earth or with humans in orbit around Mars. Humans in orbit can explore multiple sites at the same time, with the HERRO studies then they get as much work done as three teams on the surface - and that's from several years ago now. Drilling is best done robotically - humans in spacesuits are not good at drilling, especially in a vacuum, as we found on the Moon. Robotic moles can drill to many kilometers of depth in principle.
Exploring from orbit seems likely to increase the pace of discovery
The problem with the proposal to establish that Mars is lifeless before sending humans is the length of time this is likely to take! The surface area of Mars is given as 144.8 trillion m^2. To accomplish the task within a millennium requires ruling out life at a rate of more than 400 million m^2 per day! Who's going to be interested in sustaining such an effort over such a long period of time? Nobody, that's who. And that's before we come to the question of who's going to pay for it!Requiring the absence of life on Mars to be proven before sending humans is, in practice, a prohibition of ever sending humans to Mars. Those who would prioritise human exploration and colonisation will not be prepared to wait, and IMO are likely to have by far the greater political clout. The most that will be done are strategies to minimise the risk of contamination and maximise the ability to discriminate between Martian and Earth organisms.But fundamentally, the best chance of finding and characterising Martian life is to send humans to do it!
Biologivcally reversible exploration is an interesting concept that needs to be explored. However, Chris McKay, whom I know and have worked in on several occasions is also a strong supporter of crewed missions to Mars and always has been.
I think the above is both unrealistic and wrong.The HERRO study was deeply flawed in many ways, from starting assumptions to analyses to conclusions. A teleoperated mission will not deliver as much as three crewed missions to the surface. There may or may not be a place for a teleoperated precursor missions before people land on Mars. the more I look at it, the more of a false step it would be.Drilling is not best done robotically. I have worked with fully autonomous drills, and they are slow and failure prone. Drilling on the Moon during Apollo was a success. Robotic moles that can drill to many kilometers of depth exist neither in fact nor in principle, they are only science fiction. Teleoperated drilling to shallow depths is already used in marine survey work, as is shallow drilling with automated but human supervised rigs in the mining industry. But both have humans on hand to deal with problems which happen requently in any drilling.
Improvements are likely to be limited. Elimination of latency might result in a factor of ten improvement in work flow over present automated systems, currently limited two being commanded once a day , based on Lunokhod experience. Any more than that and there are power supply problems. Even if these were surmounted with systems using stored power resupplied by power collection facilities, there will still be problems with the limited number of sciences that can be investigated. In even comparable disciplines, crews on the surface will out perform any autonomous systems in the results of work achieved by three or four orders of magnitude and teleoperated systems by two or three orders. Not counting the studies only possible with people on the ground.
Quote from: Dalhousie on 06/21/2016 12:45 amBiologivcally reversible exploration is an interesting concept that needs to be explored. However, Chris McKay, whom I know and have worked in on several occasions is also a strong supporter of crewed missions to Mars and always has been.I know that also. What happens if those two enthusiasms he has collides though, and you can't do a biologically reversible mission with humans on the surface, and you find some vulnerable Mars life form there?
Okay - but the HERRO study is the only comparison study I know of to compare telerobotic exploration with exploration using crew on the ground. If it is deeply flawed, someone else should do a new improved study - it's out of date anyway and needs to be updated.
Drilling on the Moon during Apollo did work but they had a fair bit of difficulty doing their two meter drills, with the astronauts sometimes falling over and so on as they attempted to do the drill by hand.
We haven't really had experience in robotic moles on Mars yet but the designers think it will work. Conditions rather different from Earth with the regolith gardened by small meteorite impacts to considerable depth - most of the ideas involve percussive self hammering moles. ExoMars will have a drill able to drill to 2 meters and the Insight Lander, a drill to go down 5 meters. Insight uses a self hammering mole from DLR. Details.
Ten meters at least isn't much of an advance over those, and that's deep enough to get beyond any effects of surface cosmic radiation. There are drills designed on paper to go down kilometers. Without water, any drilling there is different from Earth experiences. And with those Earth examples the people who do the repairs don't have to use spacesuits. If it's deep under the sea, I think they often use robotic submersibles?
In any case if that's the price to pay to keep Mars free of Earth's microbes, that's how you have to do it, but you haven't convinced me that it's easier to send humans to the surface yet, if you ignore planetary protection issues.
Okay on power requirements - remember that humans on the surface would need far more by way of power than robots, and in addition, would need oxygen, food etc, somehow sorted out. Why not use the same method, e.g. generating fuel in situ, to power the rovers?
Also you could use batteries and solar power. The lunar rover had a range of 35.9 km and weight of 210 kg. That can be improved on surely. So it's certainly feasible to send a battery operated rover to Mars with a range of over 30 km just from the battery power alone. Then you could also use the Mars One idea of spreading thin film panels over the surface to repower it - have a charging point which you set up to recharge the battery. Meanwhile it continues slowly as our current Opportunity does, just using its own solar panels until the batteries are recharged.
The pace of discovery would increase hugely - at present teams on Earth communicate with Mars once a day. Even if they could communicate once an hour, that would speed many things up 24 fold. In a month you could do as much as we currently do in two years. So broadband communications with Mars, one of the first things you'd do before a human mission there, would increase the pace of discovery hugely. You could also use simulated real time, a way of eliminating much of the latency issues even operated from Earth. With humans on the spot to do the most challenging teleoperating from orbit.
I don't understand what you mean by "limited number of sciences" in this context - doesn't it depend on what instruments you send to the surface, whether humans or telerobots or robots operated from Earth?
A telerobotic rover on the ground is likely to be able to do much the same things a human in a spacesuit can do, given that a human in a spacesuit is quite clumsy, if the rover has binocular vision and haptic feedback. Give it hands and general purpose tools and it doesn't need to be limited in what it can do. Especially bear in mind that telerobotics will continue to improve. Also humans can operate many rovers on the surface and while they are controlling another, the first one can continue with more routine tasks, a bit like a game of civilization.
I think many of the ideas from 3D VR games and technology will get incorporated into our future space missions. After all they have had orders of magnitude more developer time than space mission software and have lead to many useful innovations.
I think actually that we may get practical experience of telerobotics in space with lunar missions in the near future. When that happens I think we'll find that machines are far more capable than they were in the days of lunakhod, operated from Earth most of the time, semi-autonomous, route finding on their own, able to do many things just by themselves with occasional help from Earth. And that's how I would envision telerobotic exploration of Mars proceeding - operated remotely from Earth, or semi-autonomous, doing a lot of their own driving from place to place and then the crew in orbit around Mars step in to control robots that need particular help. In a situation like that I think that it would be much more than a 3 to 1 ratio compared with them working directly on the surface in spacesuits. They'd also have colour corrected vision, white balanced. And everythign they saw would be streamed back to Earth in HD meaning that after an asronaut has just walked past a place and maybe glanced at a rock via telerobotics, amateurs and experts back on Earth can explore that footage with the same direct telepresence, binocular vision etc experience, and maybe alert them to something they missed. I think a proper comparison study has to take all of this into account.