... It's an iron meteorite, similar to ones found in years past by Curiosity's forerunners Spirit and Opportunity, but is considerably larger than any of the ones the MER rovers came across… in fact, at 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide this may very well be the biggest meteorite ever discovered on Mars!
I am seriously wondering what the density of meteoritic material on the surface of Mars is. I am also seriously wondering if it might be an economically recoverable resource. Instead of launching an asteroid mining mission, you could land on Mars, drive your rover around picking up nickel-iron meteorites on the surface, and load them up on your rocket and return them to Earth.
Now of course you need more delta-v than an asteroid mission, but on the other hand we already know where Mars is, and unlike many asteroid mining candidates it has a relatively friendly orbit: no wild inclination, not outrageously elliptical, and somewhat frequent (and very regular) conjunctions with Earth.
The extra 5000 m/s of delta-v to return anything to Earth is certainly significant, but since you can use in situ propellant production it's not nearly so bad as it sounds.
You really don't want to go all the way to Mars for nickel or iron :-). Now if chunks of platinum, gold, silver, and palladium are laying about to be picked up, well that is a different story. 100kg of that stuff my be worth 3 - 5 million $ when you got it back here.
On the plus side, if you don't need to smelt iron ore to get metallic iron you can build stuff on Mars without first building a massive processing plant. (steel mills are smaller than iron smelters in my experience)
It's hard to imagine the trip just for those metals, but it might make early settlement easier if you have metals you'd normally have to mine on Earth, just sitting around. That said, probably not a problem for our lifetimes.
Economics of the current price of metals is not helpful here. The opportunity cost of spending time, earth resources, and effort into getting more metal that we already have on earth is not worth it. The value of mars exploration is to get things / people out there and discover what we can do, not to appease some bean counter or increment some billionaire's bank balance.
Mars will almost certainly have more meteorites since it has much less of an atmosphere than earth for them to burn up. It coild be viable if we get infrastructure there first.
It would be really cool to see more hackers work on ways to improve outer-world-internet, so we could follow live streams of these space based events in real time (instead of watch gamers yell at their screen, live)
As others have said, the light time is an issue, but it's also not a constant data stream - we uplink data directly to the rover, but can only get data downlinked by relaying it through the MRO and Odyssey orbiters. That happens 2-3 times a day (or sol).
The Mars rover is using radio signals to communicate with Earth. Radio signals are part of the electromagnetic spectrum and thus travel at the speed of light. Even at the speed of light, it's going to take some number of minutes for radio signals sent from Mars to reach Earth. Unless those hackers are inventing the warp drive, you can't get much faster than that!
I'm curious about the final section of the article which refers to anomalous neutron readings. Two obvious possibilities are that the failure mode is producing bad data or that there is water somewhere unexpected. Does anyone know more?
[+] [-] curtis|9 years ago|reply
From http://io9.gizmodo.com/curiosity-rover-finds-a-huge-metal-me...:
... It's an iron meteorite, similar to ones found in years past by Curiosity's forerunners Spirit and Opportunity, but is considerably larger than any of the ones the MER rovers came across… in fact, at 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide this may very well be the biggest meteorite ever discovered on Mars!
I am seriously wondering what the density of meteoritic material on the surface of Mars is. I am also seriously wondering if it might be an economically recoverable resource. Instead of launching an asteroid mining mission, you could land on Mars, drive your rover around picking up nickel-iron meteorites on the surface, and load them up on your rocket and return them to Earth.
Now of course you need more delta-v than an asteroid mission, but on the other hand we already know where Mars is, and unlike many asteroid mining candidates it has a relatively friendly orbit: no wild inclination, not outrageously elliptical, and somewhat frequent (and very regular) conjunctions with Earth.
The extra 5000 m/s of delta-v to return anything to Earth is certainly significant, but since you can use in situ propellant production it's not nearly so bad as it sounds.
And we already want to go to Mars anyway.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
On the plus side, if you don't need to smelt iron ore to get metallic iron you can build stuff on Mars without first building a massive processing plant. (steel mills are smaller than iron smelters in my experience)
[+] [-] M_Grey|9 years ago|reply
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