Mars Rover Photos - Panoramas (OffT here but neat)

http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2...-colorful-mars

http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/09/13203964-panorama-reveals-a-colorful-mars

Very neat. Woner how they could build a manned rocket to Mars, Earth launch in one go or build her in Space from several launch payloads?

The big snag is the time aspect as has been said before. Due to the
relationship between the orbits of the two planets, one has to do one of two
things. If you go there, you will have little time on the planet or you will
have to wait 2.5 years to get back. If you accept this reality, it seems
less than cost effective to go and come back again straight away, so if I
were serious and had no budget issues with changing governments, I'd first
send to mars a set of modules that could support life long term and grow
food or at the very least allow the time on the planet for a complete orbit.
Then once this was seen to be working, I'd send the people along with a
best guess of spare parts for at least 2 and a half years. If one were doing
this, then it might be also a good idea to send, ahead of time a craft
capable of getting my crew off the planet as well. The snag is that if you
wait for each part to be proved successful, you have to wait a complete mars
orbit to send the next part, so most of us here will either be dead or very
old before a human tread the planet.
My guess is that they will opt for a short stay, and the project will then
be forgotten.

Brian

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Blind user, so no pictures please!
"David E. Powell" wrote in message
...
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2...-colorful-mars

http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/09/13203964-panorama-reveals-a-colorful-mars

Very neat. Woner how they could build a manned rocket to Mars, Earth
launch in one go or build her in Space from several launch payloads?

In sci.space.shuttle message , Mon, 13
Aug 2012 08:39:14, Brian Gaff posted:

The big snag is the time aspect as has been said before. Due to the
relationship between the orbits of the two planets, one has to do one of two
things. If you go there, you will have little time on the planet or you will
have to wait 2.5 years to get back.

Not necessarily.

One can do what you describe, and one can do it at intervals of 780
days.

But one can also do a gravity assist at Venus at one leg, when Earth
Mars and Venus are appropriately positioned - and that can shorten the
overall trip time. At least, it can apparently do so for a Mars flyby,
and it should be easier to set up if one can choose the time spent at
Mars.

The site http://www.spacetoday.net/ has (IIRC) recently been linking
to suggestions that such flyby trips might be done in the 1970s/1980s
with Apollo-based systems - but I cannot recall what sites it linked to
for those.

Google for ... Apollo Mars Venus flyby ... suggests www.wired.com/,
e.g. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...ary-billiards-
triple-planet-manned-marsvenus-flybys-1967/.

Those are for paths which are something like Hohmann minimum-energy
orbits - with a little more energy, other possibilities should occur.
Going too far - one, at any time, can do the Earth to/from Mars trip in
a time of 0.177 Earth years plus 0.i77 Mars years - but that includes a
phasing wait of 0 to 1 period in a low solar orbit. Is Jay Score around
yet?

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