Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion |
Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion |
Mar 21 2006, 12:18 AM
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 40 Joined: 20-March 06 Member No.: 720 |
How will it be to make a manned landing at Mercury at its closest to the sun (perihelion) on its equator when the sun is in the zenith ,what are the dangers of a landing then? Do we need to be protected against the sunheat and radiation then? How strong is the heat and radiation of the sun then ,and is it dangerous when the solaractivity is high then? What kind of spacesuits do we need then? Better protected suits than we have used on the apollo moonlandings i think. Can you explain how a landing on Mercury will be when it is at perihelion and land on its equator with the sun directly overhead? I hope it will ever happen. Lets start discuss about it.
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Jan 8 2007, 02:52 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
Dr. Robert Bussard of the Bussard ramjet interstellar vessel concept fame,
has been promoting a new type of fusion engine called inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC). IEC involves "a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product." See this video of a talk Bussard gave on the IEC for the details: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606 The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion By Dr. Robert W. Bussard 57th IAC, Valencia, Spain, October 2-6, 2006 http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006...IAC%20Paper.pdf So there may be no point in going to Mercury to mine Helium 3. Speaking of mining Mercury, what minerals might the planet have that would make going there for that purpose worth it? No doubt mining the planetoids would be much easier and cheaper. Perhaps Mercury would make a good solar observation station. -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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Jan 8 2007, 07:16 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
So there may be no point in going to Mercury to mine Helium 3. Speaking of mining Mercury, what minerals might the planet have that would make going there for that purpose worth it? No doubt mining the planetoids would be much easier and cheaper. Perhaps Mercury would make a good solar observation station. I'm not sure if it would be worth going to Mercury for Helium 3 even if that were the only form of fusion and it worked great. In fact, I doubt it. By no means is there anything else on Mercury would going to get and bring back. You'd lose money bringing diamonds back from Mercury even if they were already pre-cut and in fireproof burlap sacks. This may be hard to believe, but the minimum-energy path to Mercury is greater than that to any other solid object... in the universe. And there's no atmosphere to brake your descent. And the escape velocity is nontrivial for your trip home, with the same delta-v on the way back to Earth. A muscular there-and-back mission could take place FASTER than one to Pluto, but far more expensively. There would be no reason to send a (visual) solar observatory to Mercury. Why not just orbit the Sun at the same distance -- what use is it to have the ground beneath you, at an alarming increase of delta-v (and spending ~50% of the time unable to see your target) for the privilege? I'd go back to the start here and opine that it wouldn't be worth going to Mercury for Helium 3 even if the only other form of energy available to the human species was burning wood and scaling back our population to pre-industrial levels. Basically, I don't think it's a break-even no matter what. Mercury is not economically viable. |
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