Enormous kites flown by robots could help power a Mars colony
SPACE 7 May 2021
By
Leah Crane
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Giant kites could help generate renewable energy on Mars
ICHAUVEL/Getty Images
Any long-term base camp on Mars will need to be powered by renewable energy. A proposal developed in response to a competition run by the European Space Agency suggests using a giant kite flown by robots to harness high Martian wind speeds, which could provide enough energy to sustain several astronauts in their everyday work.
Producing and storing renewable energy on Mars is difficult. It is further from the sun than Earth, so it only gets 43 per cent of the sunlight Earth does, making solar power less effective. Much of the technology we use on Earth, such as
wind turbines and regular batteries, is far too heavy to reasonably ship to Mars.
To solve these problems, Roland Schmehl at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues have proposed using an enormous, lightweight kite with its strings controlled by robots to harness the energy of
Martian winds. These are, on average, faster than Earth’s, though the atmosphere isn’t as dense.
“The higher windspeeds and lower density to some degree balance out, but not fully, so we also need to increase the surface area of the kite quite drastically,” says Schmehl. “We have seen something similar with the Ingenuity helicopter that is now flying on Mars – this helicopter has much bigger rotor blades than the small drones that you see here on Earth.”
Read more: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has made its fourth and furthest flight
The kite that he and his team proposed is similar to some that are under development to capture wind power on Earth, but bigger, with a surface area of 50 square metres. As it climbs higher through the sky, more of the cable with which it is tethered to the ground spools out from a large bobbin-like drum, and energy can be harnessed through the rotation of this drum. Eventually the kite’s height must be reduced and it is reeled in again. This uses power – but not as much as was generated as the kite climbed higher, say the researchers, so the end result is an energy generating system.
To provide enough power to sustain a Mars base, this system would be supplemented with 70 square metres of
solar cells. The researchers propose that the energy produced by those two methods could be stored so that the astronauts could have steady power at night and in different seasons. A short-term energy storage solution would be offered by lithium-sulphur batteries, and a longer term storage system would be achieved by compressing carbon dioxide gas from Mars’s atmosphere in underground caverns – this gas could later by decompressed to reclaim the stored energy.
This whole system could provide about 127 megawatt-hours of energy per year – equivalent to the power produced by about 75 barrels of oil. “If we relate it to Earth, it would power about 20 households here in the Netherlands or about five households in the US,” says Schmehl. “[A Mars base camp] is basically one household, four to five astronauts with a small lab.”
I've not had chance to dissect it, but found this an interesting personal opinion by someone...
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-want-to-colonise-Mars-before-we-colonise-the-moon
Thomas Jolly
, M.S. Astronautical Engineering, West Coast University (1993)
Updated 1 year ago · Author has 530 answers and 357.5K answer views
Originally Answered:
Why is there a greater emphasis to colonize Mars instead of the Moon?
It's amusing how much controversy this subject creates, and how vehement each side is that they are correct. There seem to be plenty of responders lauding the benefits of moon exploration, so I'll present a bit of the other side: Why is the emphasis on Mars?
1. Most important, Mars might have supported life in the past. Putting humans on Mars to look for evidence, if they found it, would be the most important thing humans have ever done; if life was there at one point in time, then life is very likely everywhere in the universe. The odds of two life-creating planets in one solar system being a fluke is about zero.
2. Mars has roughly a 25 hour day, similar to Earth's. The moon rotates once every 29.5 days, meaning the night is about 14.75 days long. This is a long time to be in the extreme cold and dark, and the energy you use is going to have to be nuclear, unless you have some awesome storage batteries, or hydrolysis-split fuel that you accumulate during the 14.75 day-long "day". On Mars, you can use solar panels to collect energy for nighttime use, perhaps supplemented by RTGs for periods of low light (dust storms), and a variety of chemical heaters (see below) using stuff from your local environment. But if you want to colonize a planet, it's great to have one with the same day-length as your home.
3. The temperature of Mars at the equator varies from about 20C to -73C (obviously much colder at the poles, where the CO2 freezes out of the air). And 20C is, of course, room temperature. On the moon, the surface temperature varies from 123C to -153C. It's much harder to regulate your temperature.
4. The moon has very, very little water, and only at the poles in continuously shadowed craters. There appears to be quite a lot of trapped water on Mars (though folks still argue about this - Curiosity seems to have discovered quite a bit of water in the soil, like 2 pints per cubic foot of dirt (from a 2013 article)). Ref;
Mars soil contains a huge amount of water, reports NASA’s Curiosity rover | ExtremeTech
5. Despite the tenuous atmosphere on Mars, there IS a CO2 atmosphere that you can use to pressurize your crop buildings. Also, if you read about the Mars Direct plan that Zubrin has laid out, you can use that CO2, along with hydrogen, to produce methane and oxygen for rocket fuel to return home, or to run heaters if you find yourself freezing to death. If you try to do this on the moon, you have to bring all your fuel with you, and be perpetually resupplied from Earth. Fusion reactors may change this one day, but not yet.
6. Once again, despite the fact that the atmosphere is tenuous and the magnetic field of Mars is zilch, it still does offer some reasonable protection against the solar wind. The moon doesn't.
7. With CO2 and H2O, you can make a variety of plastics to support you. The moon won't help you there.
8. Zero-G is very very bad for you. 1/6G (the moon) is also very bad for you. 1/3G (Mars) is still bad for you, but not nearly as bad as the moon. If we have to choose one to colonize, Mars would be healthier in that respect.
9. You can use aerobraking to slow down your space vehicle when you get to Mars. On the moon, you have to use fuel to slow down for your landing (although it's much easier, fuel-wise, to take off). As others have pointed out, this may not be a good thing as it can complicate the mission profile, but it does reduce the amount of fuel you need to take along with you.
10. You can make methane on Mars (as I mentioned) using the atmosphere and water (or just hydrogen). Methane is an awesome greenhouse gas for heating up Mars. The machinery to do this already exists. Mars can retain (for awhile) an atmosphere, especially if you're using a gas that's heavy enough that it won't dissipate easily. The moon can't. Obviously it would take a long, long time to terraform Mars, but if it's colonization we're talking about, you might take the thousand years to do it.
11. This is a bit silly, but if our Sun does something weird, like a massive solar eruption that fries Earth, or a slow change that heats up the Earth, being on the moon won't help, but being on Mars might since it's much further away, and the extra heat might help Mars. This assumes that you have self-sustaining colonies in both locations (though, in truth, both Mars and the moon have lava tubes that might provide protection from such excursions).
12. If you succeed in heating up Mars using any of the many terraforming techniques people have discussed in other places (feel free to wikipedia this subject), you will probably have oceans and potentially an inhabitable planet. There are no terraforming techniques for the moon, unless you count living underground.
13. And if you're still curious about this, read Robert Zubrin's excellent "The Case for Mars". He knows a heck of a lot more about this than I do. Just the apparently availability of water and CO2 make the choice of "where to colonize" pretty obvious to me.
