... 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)
Curiosity cost $2.5 billion. Round it up to 3 since it's a round trip. You'll have to bring back 200,000 pounds of platinum to break even. That's like 3 or 4 Sherman tanks.
Resource prices will also drop in response to a larger supply. That's what I was taught once upon a time. Now of course you have the likes of Goldman Sachs manipulating prices by stockpiling resources to lower supply.
I was imagining that your typical nickel-iron meteorite would have a couple of percent of interesting impurities. I couldn't find any really good sources of information, but it sounds like -- with the exception of Cobalt -- any other recoverable metals would be in the parts per million, so not worth the trouble.
On the other hand my plan to cast meteoritic iron into shells and shoot them to Earth might still be practical, if only there was something suitably valuable to put into them...
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!
Isn't is mostly a bandwidth issue right now? I mean, physics prevent us from currently improving the latency, but we could improve bandwidth for sure. Right now it's fairly low due to distances and power for transmissions.
Reading the NASA site just now the MRO transmits from 400Kbps-5Mbps with a max window of about 16 hours a day. The rover has about 8 minutes per sol to transmit data to the MRO at a rate of about 128Kbps-256Kbps. If the rover goes direct to earth then it drops to 300bps-32Kbps.
I seems like at the very least we could improve by increasing the number of satellites to build out full planet coverage and also keep a transmission point in view of earth at all times. Yes, not cheap, I know.
I think most people wouldn't be very upset if the constant HD stream from a Mars rover is 5-15 minutes delayed.
The real issue is the cost, bandwidth and infrastructure in place to make that happen. Scientists would rather want to use bandwidth, power, launch mass and real-estate on the rovers for science instruments - orbiters around Mars which relays data must be upgraded to handle more bandwidth, the DSN on Earth that receives the data can't be dedicated fulltime to one data stream, etc.
(That said, the new laser communication systems NASA is experimenting is pretty awesome, and will greatly improve bandwidth for space missions)
As I understand it the satellites used as relays are in quite low orbits which limit the amount of time available for rovers to upload. A communication satellite in areosynchronous orbit or at a lagrange point could give more upload time. But presumably that would require more capable transmitters on the rover.
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?
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.