Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'mars thermal equilibrium'.
Found 1 result
-
I've been telling people for YEARS, including here on these forums, that Mars really wouldn't be that difficult to keep warm on because the atmosphere is so thin. On a cold day on Earth, your main source of heat-loss is convection, but on Mars the atmosphere is FAR too thin to suck much heat out of you. And besides that, you have to wear spacesuits on Mars anyways (due to the very thin atmosphere), which provide a considerable amount of passive insulation... Anyways, now the American Meteorological Society has finally released some hard facts on this I'd like to present everybody with. The following article (the link is to the summary, you can download the PDF of the article for free on the page) contains a mathematical analysis and scientific discussion of windchill on Mars, as well as a helpful table of Earth Equivalwnt Temperatures (EET's) for a variety of temperatures and windspeeds on Mars. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00158.1 To give an idea of what the data looks like, a temperature of -40 C on Mars with a 20 kilometer/hour wind is the equivalent of a -10 Celsius (14 degrees Farenheit) day on Earth with still air and no direct sunshine (so slightly warmer-feeling than a -10 C night, as the upper atmosphere is warmer during the day and you get slightly more infrared radiation from the sky than at night...) Of course, -10 C would be easy to keep warm in walking around in a spacesuit on Earth, perhaps doing physical labor. Maybe even *too* warm (spacesuits are heavy and bulky, and you exert yourself a lot just moving in them...) Regards, Northstar
