Mars in 39 Days? How about THREE Days?

[JimBowie1958]

If one has a ship made of graphene, plasma jet engines and powered by any of the new nuclear fusion power generators in development (which requires practically 0 weight in fuel compared to the ships total weight) we could have a trip to Mars at its farthest distance completed in (4 * SQRT (2.5/1)) = 6.3 days, and in 2.8 days at its closest distance to Earth.

Pluto could be reachedin a range of 22 to 29 days.

Plasma Rocket engines for NASA
Plasma Rocket Could Travel to Mars in 39 Days

Industrial scale production of graphene
Polish team claims leap for wonder material graphene

Discussion of acceleration/deceleration travel at 1g acceleration:
Interplanetary travel at 1g acceleration [Archive] - Straight Dope Message Board

Formula for calculating travel time in days:
4 * SQRT (A/G)
A = astronomical units of distance
G = #gs acceleration

 

[ScienceRocks]

When this day occurs a city on mars will be possible! I doubt I will live to see the day this occurs.

 

[Mr. H.]

Good read. Good links.

 

[JimBowie1958]

OK, now consider interstellar flight.

AU = 92,955,807 mi

1 LY = 6,000,000,000,000 mi

1 LY = 64,546 AU

Plugging these numbers into the above formula at 1G acceleration, it takes 1,016 days to go 1 light year.

Alpha Centari is 4.37 LY from Earth, or 282,000 AU and would take 2,124 days or 5.8 years at 1G acceleration/deceleration to get there.

Siriusis 8.58 LY from Earth, or 553,000 AU and would take 2,976days or 8.1 years at 1G acceleration/deceleration to get there.

We are on the cusp of potentially having interstellar flight. Scooting safely by the Oort Cloud or the Asteroid Belt is merely a matter of engineering and navication.

 

[Widdekind]

When this day occurs a city on mars will be possible! I doubt I will live to see the day this occurs.

in my estimation, "terra-forming" over-sized asteroids -- big enough to gravitate, so we call them "planets" -- will never be worthwhile. (As an aside, please ponder the costs -- then realize, that de facto, that much Money-value has already been "invested" in our earth, which is why our "home base" has huge unrecognized FMV.)

instead, (mobile) space habitats, equipped with artificial gravity ("they'll rotate"), EM shielding ("magnetic fields"), etc. will be far more efficient, economical, practical. For example, when you try to live on an "over-sized asteroid", often the rock "shifts around" (earthquakes), or heats up & vents (volcanoes) -- on the space-shuttle, or ISS, those are called "system failures", and are destructive & costly. Artificial space-habitats could be built (e.g. O'Neill cylinders) which would never (themselves) undergo such disasters ("no hurricanes in space").

i estimate, that "terra-forming" will never be cost-effective; if-and-when humans can exploit space profitably, humans will live in "Battlestar Galactica / Noah's Space-Arks".

for a profitable "short term", development & deployment, of orbital farms ("it's always sunny in space") could grow arbitrary tonnages of crops, under controllable conditions, without storms & pests; and would be a big first step, towards generating artificial, self-sustaining, space-habitats

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd says its a sign fer space aliens to invade earth...

Student researcher spies odd lava spirals on Mars
26 Apr.`12 — A researcher has spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth.

These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii's Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find. "I was quite surprised and puzzled when I first saw the coils," Andrew Ryan, a graduate student at Arizona State University, said in an email. He reported the discovery in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The biggest surprise? The largest Martian lava spiral measured 100 feet across — bigger than any on Earth. It is further evidence that Mars was volcanically active recently — geologically speaking within the past 20 million years.

For more than a decade, scientists debated whether this maze of valleys near the Martian equator was sculpted by ice or volcanic processes. As part of a class project last year, Ryan analyzed about 100 high-resolution photos of the region snapped by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been photographing the Martian surface since 2006. One evening, while taking a second look at the images, Ryan zoomed in and noticed the lava coils. He counted 269 spirals ranging from 16 feet to 100 feet across.

Ryan said he was not surprised the features were overlooked in the past since they blended in with the terrain. The coils looked strikingly similar to Hawaiian lava flows, leading Ryan to conclude that lava — not ice — was the driving force. Planetary scientist David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, said the new work provides convincing evidence that the curious patterns were forged from volcanic activity.

This "illustrates just how complicated Mars' geologic history appears to really be," Paige wrote in an email. He was not part of the research team. It's believed that rivers of molten lava flowed through the Martian valleys into a broad basin where they settled and formed the coil shapes. The spiral shapes were preserved as the lava cooled. There are no clear signs that the region today is volcanically active. With more observations, Ryan said it is possible lava coils may exist elsewhere on the red planet.

Source

See also:

UFO Spaceship Orbiting the Sun, or a Camera Glitch?
UFO hunters have spotted a curious object near the sun in a new NASA image. It is, in the words of a blogger for the website Gather, "what looks like a metallic, jointed spaceship with a gigantic extension, perhaps a boom arm, anchored off its lower end." The YouTube video drawing attention to the object has quickly made its way to discussion forums and the tabloid press, and many seasoned UFO believers are calling it a definite "spot."

But does this image, which was taken by a camera on board NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Tuesday (April 24), really show a spaceship dropping by the sun to harvest some solar energy, as one YouTube commenter suggested? Or is this object something much more mundane? We asked scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) — the group that analyzes data from Lasco 2, the telescopic camera that snapped the picture.

According to Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer in the NRL's solar physics branch, the "spaceship" is merely a collection of streaks left by cosmic rays, charged particles from space, which whizzed through the camera's sensor, or CCD, as the image was taken. [See footage] "The streaks in question are consistent with energetic particle (proton) impacts on the CCD, something which is apparent in just about every image," Rich told Life's Little Mysteries. "Notably," he added, "these artifacts do not persist from image to image," — proving they are momentary blips in the camera sensor rather than an actual object in the field of view. Some images taken by the Lasco 2 camera are swarming with artifacts, caused by particles zipping across the CCD in every direction.

As a cosmic ray passes through a camera's image sensor, it deposits a large amount of its electric charge in the pixels that it penetrates. If the particle passes through at a shallow angle to the plane of the camera, it affects several pixels along its path. The result is a bright streak on the image. In the image in question, a burst of cosmic rays happen to hit the camera lens at just the right angles to create the form of a hinged spaceship. The "boom arm," angled at a slant across the rows and columns of pixels, was formed by a cosmic ray streaking through the camera sensor diagonally and at a shallow angle, depositing charge in several pixels along a diagonal line.

Cameras on Earth are less susceptible to interference by charged particles from space, because the Earth's protective magnetosphere blocks them from hitting the planet's surface, Alfred McEwen, director of the Planetary Imaging Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona, explained last year, when another artifact was mistaken for an alien base on Mars. "But with space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it's very common to see these cosmic ray hits," he said.

Source

 

[uscitizen]

Actually Mars is a lunchtime roundtrip for me.

Did y'all forget about deceleration time?

 

[zzzz]

Actually Mars is a lunchtime roundtrip for me.

Did y'all forget about deceleration time?

Actually with LSD you can do the trip in under an hour.

 

[jmasterson]

This beats the one way trips I saw proposed by someone in the news a few months ago. The idea is to send old people to mars with no plan to bring them home. They would work to prepare a settlement for future trips to mars and live out the remainder of their lives on Mars. It was a serious proposal.

 

[daveman]

OK, now consider interstellar flight.

AU = 92,955,807 mi

1 LY = 6,000,000,000,000 mi

1 LY = 64,546 AU

Plugging these numbers into the above formula at 1G acceleration, it takes 1,016 days to go 1 light year.

Alpha Centari is 4.37 LY from Earth, or 282,000 AU and would take 2,124 days or 5.8 years at 1G acceleration/deceleration to get there.

Siriusis 8.58 LY from Earth, or 553,000 AU and would take 2,976days or 8.1 years at 1G acceleration/deceleration to get there.

We are on the cusp of potentially having interstellar flight. Scooting safely by the Oort Cloud or the Asteroid Belt is merely a matter of engineering and navication.

8.1 years ship's time. Back here on earth, decades would go by. Lots of good science fiction been written about time dilation.

By the way, after 4 years of acceleration at 1 G, you've reached well over 90% of the speed of light. Explanation and math here: How long would it take to accelerate a person to the speed of light without dying? [Archive] - Straight Dope Message Board

 

[jmasterson]

"Lots of good science fiction been written about time dilation" Orson Scott Card's Ender Series might be the best