It's a great achievement with some really interesting work done on the landing algorithms with terrain recognition and it seemed to have worked exceptionally well.
Looking forward for the next landing in May of the Chinese rover and all the science these robots will produce. Also, the test of Ingenuity, the helicopter, will be very interesting to watch, that could really pave the way for a different exploration style in the future.
And finally, maybe the next transfer window will already see some Starships, that would really change everything.
Early starships got me thinking: given the high likelihood of a failed starship landing, and maybe having the ability to send one before fully engineering a payload…
What would you ballast a starship with for the practice missions?
Useful materials which might survive a RUD and aim for someplace near a likely landing zone? If you crash the parts of a milling machine, a lathe, some tooling, some assorted metals stock, and a bunch of assorted wire, well sure you just cleared out a machine shop auction, but maybe there comes a day when an early Mars colony would be thrilled to go clean up your “landing” site.
Solar cells Would not handle a rud. But Just fill the entire thing with solar cells.
If they want to produce methane and co2 on Mars they will need lots of power.
Because "refine" really means "melt at temperatures ranging from 500 to 4000 degrees celsisu and then extract via various mechanical processes and/or using various reactants which often require gigantic plants to produce and are highly unstable".
Basically all of the history of science until 200 years ago was figuring out "mine and extract" and the course of civilization is very much linked with the price & quality of metal structures they could produce. But it's gotten so good we take it for granted.
However that is because of gigantic plants situated in specific areas where energy is cheap that do this thing at an amazing scale.
Aluminum is cheap as chips, except that it used to be more expensive than platinum (and at a much higher impurity ratio than the stuff we use for baking or for making cheap cases).
Heck, gold is "a thing" because we could purify and mold it without bringing it to a melting point and it was, for a very long time, the only metal available to us to do anything with, way before the bronze age.
And the problem with the refinement process is that you can't really "be smart" about it, reaching very high temperatures is one of those things you can't really scale down in an efficient way. You'd have to propel 100,000 tons of factory to mars in order to efficiently refine anything remotely close to the metals we had access to 100 years ago.
Which is not to touch on the mining bit, that is in itself very complicated (see how slowly and shallowly rovers are currently able to drill).
Are there workarounds for this? Maybe, I don't think anyone knows them though, they are not the kind of thing that's within easy reach. Maybe if we happen to stumble upon large reserves of bismuth or lead or gallium or mercury close to the surface of Mars, and build a whole branch of engineering around using those to build machinery... ? But my limited knowledge of geophysics and geology tells me that finding those in large amounts is very unlikely.
For reference, if you take an oven, that can reach, say, 450 degrees celsius (home) and up to 700 (industrial). Those aren't enough to refine any "useful" metal (e.g. iron) and building them requires materials that were produced at 1500+ degrees.
IANAChemist/IANAMaterialScientist/IANABlacksmith though, so take with a spoon of salt.
We don't have to be efficient, just small and reliable, no matter how slow... if there were enough small machines to turn out enough materials to build new ones faster than the failure rate, then geometric growth wins, and you can build whatever you want, eventually.
I don't think you're getting my point, consider reading again. There's a fundamental limit you will hit here, you can't just "make it slower" or "make it worst" to lower that limit.
There is a fundamental limit of power... I get that. The Perseverance Mars Rover has one experiment that requires 180 watts of power, (The Oxygen Generator experiment) and it has a 110 watt RTG powering everything. They charge up some lithium batteries during down time, and use them to make up the difference.
In the limit, If something takes 5,000 watts, you could run it for a few minutes/day, with that same RTG, provided you had suitable energy storage.
Perhaps they could gather grains of material, and just sort them, one at a time, only keeping the iron rich material, or use a permanent magnet to gather ferrous material. You could sinter the grains together using a microwave or laser pulse.
The results don't need great quality, just enough tensile and compressive strength to be mechanically stable during additive or subtractive manufacture.
Lots of minds have been thinking about refining metals for a very long time, but they haven't been thinking about doing it on Mars, with limited power, and very far outside the box of normal constraints, like cost.
This is one time capitalism doesn't apply at all... and most solutions assume capitalist incentives and costs, instead of going back to first principles thinking.
It could be something very low-tech even. Just a machine that turns solar-energy + some mechanical power into say mars-dust bricks, non-stop for use in future missions? Maybe something that just keeps digging a perpetually deeper and deeper trench in a straight line so that subsequent missions don't need big drills to find out below-surface samples?
But thinking about it now, I can't envision that we here would be able to come up with something sublime/novel that a huge army of really-smart people haven't already after spending decades thinking about it. Then again, we have a lot of smart people concentrated in this forum, so who knows if a weird/silly conversation triggered by IT-minded people, acts as a catalyst for the engineer-lurkers that see it.
All of those things need to be launched from earth, that is still expensive. Then transported to Mars, expensive. Then landed on Mars, expensive.
And then you land your digger, at a cost of at least a couple 100 million, and you have a dumb robot that digs a small hole?
We should do industrial build up, but for me that starts with solving cheap transportation from earth to Mars first. Then you can hope to bring things like nuclear reactors, that can actually produce the power you need significant work.
Currently we are going for science reason and very few people are even working on going with humans or industrialisation.
Ingenuity is maybe the most interesting and coolest advance for space travel. The idea of a remote drone to explore Mars is just rad! I can totally nerd out about that!
A great video where the host visits the drone, interviews its makers, and goes over the cool technical aspects of it and its mission: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM
That is not Ingenuity's source code, that's the software framework used to link the various software modules. It's generic to any mission / instrument.
Looking forward for the next landing in May of the Chinese rover and all the science these robots will produce. Also, the test of Ingenuity, the helicopter, will be very interesting to watch, that could really pave the way for a different exploration style in the future.
And finally, maybe the next transfer window will already see some Starships, that would really change everything.