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I wonder if landing on one of the moons of Mars, Phobos or Deimos is not more realistic than on Mars itself


Pawelk198604

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When I played KSP in old days I often do the mission to DUNA with kerbal but it always one-way mission Zubrin type ;) 

 

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I wonder maybe it would be more feasible to make a mission to one of Mars moon rather than Mars itself? 

 

 

(And the same trues goes for Duna and it's moons ;) )

 

 

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It's physically easier. You'll just have to go for asteroid ice rather than martial methalox - and you can even use ISRU for a big interplanetary mothership.

However, it is politically unacceptable - and politics decide where the money goes in manned spaceflight. No Buck Rogers, no bucks - the public wants to go on Mars.

1 hour ago, Pawelk198604 said:

(And the same trues goes for Duna and it's moons ;) )

Oh, big difference! Ike is more like our Moon, which means a non-trivial gravity well.

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44 minutes ago, MaverickSawyer said:

Ike, however, is a good spot to set up a relay station. It's in a near-stationary orbit over Duna, so set up a probe core, battery, RTG, and a relay antenna, and boom, one third of Duna now has constant communication.

Intermittently... unless you're using that pesky simplified stock system.

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21 minutes ago, DDE said:

Intermittently... unless you're using that pesky simplified stock system.

Okay, fair point... you'd need two other DSO commsats for full local planetary coverage and at least one long-range relay capable of shunting the signal back to Kerbin for complete control... but I was looking at it from the standpoint of using a local control point either in orbit or on the surface of Duna while I have a crew there. 

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The Phobos and Deimos landing is easier than a Mars landing.
But they are just dull captured asteroids, while the Mars is a planet with absolutely different and more complicated geological history.
So, the scientific significance is  incomparable.

 

30 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

Is Ike indeed geostationary?

No, it pretends to be dunostationary.

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1 hour ago, sh1pman said:

Is Ike indeed geostationary? I never noticed that. If KSP had proper 3-body physics, you could put a station in L1 point of Duna and Ike, and it would be stationary for both bodies!

The Duna-Ike system is mutually tidally locked, Pluto-Charon-style.

43 minutes ago, Nuke said:

i wonder if a human landing on an neo would be a better stepping stone option for future mars missions. provided you can find one that is easier to get to than mars.

That was the old NASA plan - and it utterly bombed, although I’m not clear at what point.

And no, a NEO removes a lot of the crucial challenge associated with an Earth-Mars interplanetary transfer.

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1 hour ago, sh1pman said:

Even better! Why don't we have Lagrange points... Double-stationary space station would be amazing.

Wouldn’t an exact SMA match with Ike (via Hyperedit or editing the save file) work out just like a Lagrange point?

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2 hours ago, DDE said:

Wouldn’t an exact SMA match with Ike (via Hyperedit or editing the save file) work out just like a Lagrange point?

It would... sort of. L4 and L5 are actually *stable*, whereas a SMA match is neutrally stable (but KSP has no perturbations)... but this requires an exact match.

14 hours ago, DDE said:

Intermittently... unless you're using that pesky simplified stock system.

Stock system or not, its intermittent. Once per Duna-Ike day, Duna would block the reception at Ike. Once per Duna-Ike day, Ike would block the reception at Duna.

The result is com blackouts twice per day. This assumes a ground station on each at the sub-Duna and sub-Ike point. The Duna ground station is obscured by duna itself when facign away from Kerbin, and gets the signal by bouncing off Ike... that is until it blocks Ike (blackout 1). It would then receive the signal directly when facing Kerbin, until Ike blocks its signal (blackout 2).

Something at Ike-Duna fake L4 or L5 solves this... but then you still have the far side of duna and Ike in substantial comm shadow.

I'd rather just put a triangle of 3 RA-100s near the SOI edge with very very similar SMAs, and be done with it. Blackouts would be very rare... and realistically (n body physics) it would be more stable, as L1, L2, and L3 lagrange points are neutral/unstable, so smaller comnets around Duna-Ike will require a lot of station keeping.

A stable setup of L4 and L5 comsats leaves the far sides of each body without relay service

 

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The only point for living in a mining site is because someone told you to do so, or you are slaved ehm, work there.

If you are everyone else you just have to gather money, man & machine, plot a trajectory, send them there, then watch the profits roll back in.

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10 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I'd rather just put a triangle of 3 RA-100s near the SOI edge with very very similar SMAs, and be done with it.

Lack of drag in KSP makes going below MKO worthless. I prefer carefully calculated formations at 1200 km... and I do cheat by rewriting SMAs for perfect alignment.

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Buzz Aldrin advocates for s Deimos landing before an actual Mars landing in his book mission to Mars. A Deimos mission would be slated 3.5 years before the actual Mars landing as a base for the teleportation of equipment on Mars, allowing robot to be controlled with humans near by to respond should they need quick thinking. It has also been theorized that Deimos might contain material ejected from Mars in antiquity, in which there is a chance to discover frozen ancient Martian life.

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On 1/10/2019 at 10:05 AM, DDE said:

Breaking the Zubrin rule of “in an out under one administration”.

Thoguh, this is not really a practical policy, as exploring mars for just four years is impractical. To justify the expenditure, you need more like three missions over a decade, or a very long distance rover. A mission to Mars cannot be a pawn in a political struggle, or it’s not happening at all.

Although to be fair, once a crew launches for mars, what can an incoming president who opposes the space program do, short of cancelling future missions, which are not guaranteed anyway. Stage an “accident” for the crew? (Real potential for cringy sci-fi here)

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13 minutes ago, Ozymandias_the_Goat said:

for just four years

The only three out of eleven, or something like that, didn't get eight years.

15 minutes ago, Ozymandias_the_Goat said:

A mission to Mars cannot be a pawn in a political struggle, or it’s not happening at all.

Or you could use an... enduring leader. Two terms there, a puppet prime minister here, two extended terms over there, and then a potential for a promotion...

Spoiler

1039535673.jpg

Unexpected consequences may apply

 

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24 minutes ago, DDE said:

Or you could use an... enduring leader. Two terms there, a puppet prime minister here, two extended terms over there, and then a potential for a promotion...

Why fight with the senate for funding when one can merely become the senate?

 

26 minutes ago, DDE said:

The only three out of eleven, or something like that, didn't get eight years.

Even the first soviet rockets had failure rates lower than that.

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On 1/10/2019 at 12:41 PM, DDE said:

Lack of drag in KSP makes going below MKO worthless. I prefer carefully calculated formations at 1200 km... and I do cheat by rewriting SMAs for perfect alignment.

lack of drag makes below MKO worthless? drag is worse the lower one is. Lack of drag makes much lower orbits more viable than they would otherwise be (due to rapid decay), so I'm not sure I get your point.

Also 1200km is exactly the SMA of Mun, and that means you'll not have comms to the far side of Mun without another relay (although if placed very close to Mun's SOI edge, you can cover most of the farside)

You'll also have none of the far side of Minmus. Minmus orbits with an SMA of 47,000 km, while the edge of kerbin's SOI is 84,159 km. With a triangle of RA-100s orbiting at about 75,000km, you'll have strong connections to Com-16's anywhere in the system, and service to the backsides of Mun and Minmus (for best results on minmus, even with a 1.0 occlusion modifier, have them in plane with the orbit of minmus so that you should even have service at the poles)

On 1/10/2019 at 1:57 PM, Ozymandias_the_Goat said:

Buzz Aldrin advocates for s Deimos landing before an actual Mars landing in his book mission to Mars. A Deimos mission would be slated 3.5 years before the actual Mars landing as a base for the teleportation of equipment on Mars, allowing robot to be controlled with humans near by to respond should they need quick thinking. It has also been theorized that Deimos might contain material ejected from Mars in antiquity, in which there is a chance to discover frozen ancient Martian life.

I think you meant tele-operation. The question is... why bother with Deimos which rotates and thus breaks line of sight, when you can just part your ship in orbit around mars and operate robots from there? Why bother with the challenge of setting a craft down on Deimos (even if the very low gravity makes it fairly easy)?

Sure it may contain ejected material from Mars, but why spend all that effort hunting for scraps of mars on Deimos, when you have Mars itself down below? We already have martian meteorites here on Earth. Sure, deimos should have them in a higher concentration, but we have all the resources of Earth to find them... the resources available for searching Deimos for such ejecta would be very limited.

I don't see the point... I'm also disappointed that we still haven't send a rover to a putative shallow ancient shore/slow flowing delta/ some area where (if life was present) there would be the highest likelyhoodof finding a fossilized microbial mat.

Gale Crater wasn't toooo bad of a choice, but it was fairly high up along the apparent ancient shore, and I guess water would have been more or less constantly receding.

On Earth the oldest matts found were about 3.5 billion years old... So I think we'd want to send a rover to where the water was last (if there was a northern ocean)... or some place with inverted relief

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_relief

It would be super cool if it was a fossile bacterial mat responsible for the inverted relief

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42 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

lack of drag makes below MKO worthless? drag is worse the lower one is. Lack of drag makes much lower orbits more viable than they would otherwise be (due to rapid decay), so I'm not sure I get your point.

Also 1200km is exactly the SMA of Mun, and that means you'll not have comms to the far side of Mun without another relay (although if placed very close to Mun's SOI edge, you can cover most of the farside)

You'll also have none of the far side of Minmus. Minmus orbits with an SMA of 47,000 km, while the edge of kerbin's SOI is 84,159 km. With a triangle of RA-100s orbiting at about 75,000km, you'll have strong connections to Com-16's anywhere in the system, and service to the backsides of Mun and Minmus (for best results on minmus, even with a 1.0 occlusion modifier, have them in plane with the orbit of minmus so that you should even have service at the poles)

Looks like I’ve managed a typo of “beyond”.

Furthermore, since I’ve always played a sandbox with RemoteTech, a) Communotron 16 was worthless outside of LKO anyway, b) Mun’s SMA is 10x of that, c) I was never in a rush to go full Yutu, whereas with Minmus’s lack of tidal lock and extremely slow orbits make landings in arbitrary locations trivial.

Actually, scratch most of that; under RT Communotron 16 has a fixed maximum range of 2500 km, and since I wanted reliable comms with LKO vessels using it, those 2500 km were the hard upper bound on my innermost relay constellation for any body I wanted sustained operations around (and I still had a ton of trouble, because the predecessor of the 16-S the DP-10 had a range of merely 500 km).

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14 minutes ago, DDE said:

Looks like I’ve managed a typo of “beyond”.

Makes more sense, beyond vs below is opposite. I still disagree though.

A triangle with Mun inside of it makes coverage of the far side really simple. It allows for less clutter in the tracking station, and fewer flights in the save file. If it means that my relays use larger parts (but same part number), so be it. Its not like lifting heavy payloads into orbit is a challenge anymore. Even in a 3x system.

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Furthermore, since I’ve always played a sandbox with RemoteTech, a) Communotron 16 was worthless outside of LKO anyway ...

Actaully, scratch most of that, under RT Communotron 16 has a fixed maximum range of 2500 km, and since I wanted reliable comms with LKO vessels it imposed a hard upper bound on my innermost relay constellation.

I haven't played with remote tech, but I would hope that like the stock system, a weaker antenna on one end can be compensated with a stronger antenna on the other end, no? thats why I mentioned RA-100s and not RA-2's or RA-15s (although RA-15s aren't too bad, especially using HG-5s instead of comm-16s)

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b) Mun’s SMA is 10x of that

Ooos, yea, 12,000 km, not 1,200 km

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5 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

a weaker antenna on one end can be compensated with a stronger antenna on the other end, no

No, it bluntly bases connection range on the weaker antenna involved, which makes you lug around huge dishes on either vessel (and I used a slightly buffed config because of that and Outer Planets); it’s further combined with a limited cone angle, meaning that you also have to manually target a given relay constellation (or, if you’re too close, a given relay sat); plus all relay-to-relay connections have to be set up manually. So, my 1200 km relay sat each had one fixed Duna-class dishe set to target Active Vessel, a lvl 2 telescoping omni for reliable LKO and LEO comms, and two of the DTS antennae (45° cones, Minmus range) to interface with Mun and Minmus orbital relays.

A bonus for multiple omnis per vessel had just been introduced when 1.4 dropped and I fell behind updates and out of KSP. Oh, and no soft occlusion whatsoever, plus a minimum requirement of 6 crew for a control centre, and optional lightspeed lag.

P.S. And yes, surviving RT does make me look down on new stock comms.

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