Is there a possibility that Russia can land on Mars before USA?

I know this is a far fetched since the russian space research and industry is  far cry from what it was  during the soviet times and cant possibly compete with NASA and ESA  for now is there still a small possibility that it might land on mars first(as sort of payback for the moon landings)?

More importantly is there motivation still existing in hope for russia to return to what it was during the USSR and start a new space race?

Since the US mars mission is planned around 2040 the russian space industrial complex should better hurry.

The bigger possibility is neither lands on Mars within our lifetimes.

IMO.

Sure it could do it if it puts enough funding and resources into it (so far other countries have been hedging their bets).
But why?

No use going to MARS IMO its better to explore moon in the coming decades

All I can say is its stupid to go to mars for both US and Russia there is nothing much out there , Moon is more useful but such trips bolsters National Ego and Pride

I'm afraid the only major resource mars has is rusted metal

However that isnt an excuse for not needing to land a manned spacecraft on it.

We already have the technologies for a spacecraft for mars and almost all that is needed for prolonged habitation. If people can live for 2+ years on the ISS why cant they on mars. Infact their health levels might be better than the ISS when they return to earth because there's actually gravity on mars. In fact the mental health of the cosmonauts may be more of an issue. I personally cant imagine how I will not go crazy of pure bordom from living for 2 months in a few space capsules and 2 years in a portable research facility.

The US will land on MARS before any other country as we have send far more unmanned vehicles to MARS and therefore have access to more information than any other country.

USSR sent more robots to the Moon before the US did, and yet the US got there first.


By the time we are sending anything with a crew to Mars, the current political landscape will be totally different.
One thing I will bank on is the US not being as per-eminent as it has been in the post cold-war world.

Stealthflanker wrote:

KomissarBojanchev wrote:I new my thread would slowly become a nationalistic wankfest

And for me it's a pitiful sight. Seeing that a filthy savage beast called "Fanboy" messed it.

For Mars however... well i think Russia should concentrate on the Moon first.. to gain experience on how space radiation beyond the Van Allen belt affect the space-man in long term because to get to mars.. a spacecraft may need a year..far longer flight time than Apollo.

With all that nuclear engine technology spacecraft might only need to get to mars in a few months

KomissarBojanchev wrote:

Stealthflanker wrote:

KomissarBojanchev wrote:I new my thread would slowly become a nationalistic wankfest

And for me it's a pitiful sight. Seeing that a filthy savage beast called "Fanboy" messed it.

For Mars however... well i think Russia should concentrate on the Moon first.. to gain experience on how space radiation beyond the Van Allen belt affect the space-man in long term because to get to mars.. a spacecraft may need a year..far longer flight time than Apollo.

With all that nuclear engine technology spacecraft might only need to get to mars in a few months

I thought the whole upside of (theoretical) nuclear space propulsion was endurance, not speed.

I watched a science show on discovery channel I think and it said that some kind plasma propulsion technology will significantly fasten space travel. Was this show BSing me?

KomissarBojanchev wrote:I watched a science show on discovery channel I think and it said that some kind plasma propulsion technology will significantly fasten space travel. Was this show BSing me?

Discovery Channel, is like watching FOX News.
Keep the television off and you won't get smarter but also not dumber.

But the show wasnt about russia or military so it was only about future space technology so it wouldnt be biaed I presume?

Discovery channel used to be great- I would watch those multi-hour orca, lion, bear, whatever, documentaries non stop.

Now its 'Watch rednecks build motorcyles!' or "Stupid myths debunked!".

It seems like the space station atleast was working out in the 40's and 60's but now it seems like the talk of the day has moved from the moon to space exploration and planet discovery. Space exploration is underway, there have been many imaging and many have been going on inlcuding the russian (NOT AMERICAN) Hubble telescope. All this talk about the Red planet has got you mistaken. There has not been a race to the red planet, it has been NASA primarily that has been sending the space rovers to the moon, and unfortunately not the Russians or Chinese. I just wanted to outline a project I was involved with.



asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/mars/apxs.asp



Canadian research plays role in Mars exploration
By QMI Agency

A device developed in Ontario helped NASA scientists carry out the first full analysis of Martian soil.

The Mars Curiosity rover found water, sulphur and chlorine within scoops of soil this week — a discovery University of Guelph physics professor Ian Campbell calls "a significant technological and analytical achievement."

And it would not have been possible without an analytical device called the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS), built at the University of Guelph and mounted on the rover's arm.

The APXS measures the chemical elements within rock or soil.

It was built by an international group of scientists headed by U of G 's Ralf Gellert, and its daily operations and analysis are run by a U of G team right on campus.

Curiosity is the first Mars rover that can scoop up soil samples for internal analysis.




Guelph Physicists Ready for New Mars Rover Expedition

APXS operations centre to open on campus this fall

By Andrew Vowles
Friday, July 22, 2011

A new Mars rover, complete with a U of G-tested instrument, is orbiting closer to the red planet this summer. To follow some of the action and learn more about Guelph’s ongoing connection to interplanetary exploration, check an eye-catching display in the MacNaughton Building lobby.

The display is just around the corner from a new U of G operations centre that will help lead the rover’s search for signs of past or present life on Mars. The Guelph facility will be the only Canadian operations centre – and one of only a few outside the United States – for the Curiosity rover mission set to begin on Mars in 2012.

“We are the ‘keepers’ of the APXS,” says Nick Boyd, research associate in the Department of Physics. That’s the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, an instrument mounted on the rover’s robotic arm to examine rocks and soil.

In 2008, that soup-can-sized device spent about three weeks at Guelph for testing by a team led by physics professor Ralf Gellert. It was then assembled on the rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Earlier this summer, the rover was flown to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. It will be launched in late November or early December, and will land on Mars in August 2012.

The vehicle, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), will spend about two years exploring Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. During the mission, Guelph’s operations centre will serve as a conduit between the rover, the JPL and numerous scientists worldwide, helping to guide the rover’s APXS explorations.

Says Boyd: “We will participate in defining the science objectives for any given day on Mars. If scientists require measurements by the instrument, that request will come to our team. We’ll assemble the command sequence to perform that measurement and send that to JPL to be integrated into the rover plan for the day. We will take part in web conferences and teleconferences and work with scientists at JPL.”

Boyd completed a physics degree at Guelph and is now a part-time master’s student in the School of Engineering.

Gellert is principal investigator for an international group of scientists who developed the instrument for the MSL mission. He was the lead scientist for APXS systems used on twin NASA rovers launched in 2003. Those earlier instruments detected evidence that water had been on Mars and that bound water still exists there.

Gellert’s lab still houses a clean room built to test the Curiosity-borne device in 2008. His team will keep a copy of the APXS there for testing and calibration during the actual mission.

Besides Boyd and Gellert, the operations centre group includes:

Mike Curry, major projects manager in the physics department and a former aerospace scientist, who has worked on instrumentation systems for the International Space Station;
Will Klumpenhouwer, a third-year physics student who assembled the MacNaughton display and is completing a departmental website about the rover and its instrument;
Glynis Perrett, a physics PhD student who helped to calibrate the APXS. She will study elements in Martian rock and soil, working with Iain Campbell, University professor emeritus.

Funding for the operations centre came from the Canadian Space Agency. An official opening will take place this fall.

Guelph’s connection to the pending mission is discussed in the MacNaughton display, which includes a slide show about Mars science and a rover’s-eye animation of the red planet.

About the size of a small car, Curiosity is about twice as long and five times as heavy as the earlier Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. It can roll over thigh-high obstacles and travel about the length of two football fields in a day.





So in conclusion, the Mars Rover built by the USA NASA department was a copy of the APXS rover built with the project I was involved with.

Our results were : pixe.physics.uoguelph.ca/mars/

PIXE and XRF on Mars


Each of the Mars Exploration Rovers which attracted worldwide attention for their exploits and discoveries in 2004/9 carries an Alpha-particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS).

The APXS contains a 244Cm source which excites X-ray emission in situ from Martian rock and soil samples, together with a small silicon drift detector which produces the X-ray spectra. There are two modes of excitation: the alpha particles from the 244Cm decay cause a variant of PIXE: and the L X-rays from the plutonium daughter cause X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Fortunately, this variant of PIXE has its greatest sensitivity for the lightest elements (Na - Ca) whereas XRF is best for the heavier elements (Ca - Zr). As a result, the APXS has excellent sensitivity all the way across the range of elements that occur in most minerals and rocks.



The Martian spectra have up till now been analyzed by Dr. Ralf Gellert (co-developer of the APXS) with fitting software developed at the Max Planck Institut in Mainz. We have now developed a variant of GUPIX to do this task, taking full advantage of the databases and procedures that have been tested and refined over many years. This new code GUAPX is now complete, and it has been used to re-calibrate the MER laboratory APXS, using a suite of spectra from simple chemical standards and from geological standard reference materials recorded much earlier by Dr. Gellert. Our results show excellent consistency for those standards that are perfectly homogeneous, and prove our assertion that the APXS can be described by a single instrumental constant (H-value). But they also reveal interesting new issues such as a dependence of the calibration on the actual rock type; for igneous rocks - basalts, andesites and rhyolites, we observe (Campbell et al., 2008) an influence of the mineral assemblage within the rock upon the calibration.

The most exciting outcome of the MER mission was perhaps the observation of large amounts of Cl, Br and S in the APXS spectra. These are thought to be from salts that were the residue of evaporation of large bodies of water in the past. This raises the question of whether the APXS spectra can provide any indication of bound water within the actual rocks being analyzed. Obviously the x-rays of hydrogen and oxygen cannot be detected, and so any approach has to be an indirect one. We have developed an approach as follows:

from the observed elemental x-rays, deduce the element concentrations
convert these to oxide concentrations and normalize to 100% total;
deduce from a Monte Carlo simulation the expected elastic/inelastic scatter ratio for the Pu L-alpha X-ray in a rock of this composition;
compare the measured and simulated scatter ratios: if invisible matter such as water is present in the rock, they will disagree.

Such an approach has been used in the past to determine the presence or absence of light elements (although not on Mars!). A rigorous Monte Carlo simulation of elastic and inelastic scattering intensities has been developed by C.L. Mallett, J.M. O'Meara and J.L. Campbell to predict the R/C ratio, which is then compared to the value obtained by fitting the spectrum with GUAPX. This approach has been calibrated using measurements on recognized geochemical reference standards (see publications below). We find that Martian basaltic soils and rocks give results that agree very closely with our calibration, thus providing support for the method. However the bright high-sulfate subsurface "Paso Robles" soils churned up in several places by the Spirit rover's tires are in strong disagreement, and from this deviation we are able to derive their water content. This is the first in-situ measurement of mineralogically bound water on the Martian surface, and the results fit well with the reconstructed mineralogy.

In further development of GUAPX, we have used the fundamental parameters calibration described above to analyse the data from individual geo-standards, some of which were measured by Gellert but not included in his own calibration. We regard these individual geostandards as unknowns, and we have to use a fully iterative approach with GUAPX, in which all elements are converted to oxides and a 100% oxide total is enforced (the "closure rule") . By "tailoring" our calibration, i.e. by developing sub-calibrations for basalts, andesites and rhyolites, we are able to get excellent results for element concentrations in individual examples of these rock types, including, for example, the Zagami martian meteorite. In cases where the oxides do not sum to 100%, we are able to measure the bound water content: here the phyllo-silicate standard UB-N is a good example; our determination of 14% agrees well with the actual (CO2 +H2O) content of 11%. we have thus developed a second approach for measuring bound water, but it only works if the measurements of standards and unknowns are all done within a fixed geometry. On the MER mission, the geometry varied from sample to sample, and unfortunately there was no instrument attached to the APXS to provide the sample-detector distance; if that had been the case, this method could have given a direct measurement of water content.

We are now applying GUAPX to the calibration of the laboratory APXS for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.





So the big news that confirms the whole mars conspiracy is

"The observation of large amounts of Cl, Br and S in the APXS spectra. These are thought to be from salts that were the residue of evaporation of large bodies of water in the past."

"From the observed elemental x-rays, deduce the element concentrations
Convert these to oxide concentrations and normalize to 100% total;
Deduce from a Monte Carlo simulation the expected elastic/inelastic scatter ratio for the Pu L-alpha X-ray in a rock of this composition;
Compare the measured and simulated scatter ratios: if invisible matter such as water is present in the rock, they will disagree."

"By "tailoring" our calibration, i.e. by developing sub-calibrations for basalts, andesites and rhyolites, we are able to get excellent results for element concentrations in individual examples of these rock types, including, for example, the Zagami martian meteorite. In cases where the oxides do not sum to 100%, we are able to measure the bound water content: here the phyllo-silicate standard UB-N is a good example; our determination of 14% agrees well with the actual (CO2 +H2O) content of 11%."



So the Whole Conspiracy About Life On Mars On The News Is...


"Canadas current MSL mission is assessing whether the Gale Crater offered a habitable environment for microbes. A critical part of the mission, the pop can-sized APXS measures which chemical elements — and how much of each type — are in rock or soil. The device has told us about changes in Martian geology and provided clues confirming, Mars, Epoch J2000, the planet’s suitability for life."

IMO Mars is definitelly much more resourceful than the Moon considering just their mass. Mars is also more like Earth than the Moon (and any other object in the solar system). Scientists talking about water possession under the surface of the Red planet insist the possibility that some basic lifeforms like bacterias might exist on Mars. If that would turn out to be true then Mars could become partially habitable in next hundreds years spantime. It is no way that a object of such mass like Mars could consist of just 'rusted metal' like someone wrote. Even asteroids have complicated structure, including frozen water!

Personally I think that in order to make trips to Mars more safely there should be a base on it's surface with it's own means of emergency return to the Earth. Scientists and rest of the crew should be self-sufficient on water and food supply. To thicken the atmosphere, increasing temperature on the Mars so the water supplies could flow out the surface - but that would be definitelly long term program. Short term program would preferably just consist of resourcing the planet off the rare materials. For the goods of the country's economics.

Personally I hope that Russia will come up with something more than just Nuclear Powered Rocket, but rather full-fledged Nuclear Powered Spaceship-Vessel that could be reused for 10-15 years. Making fleet of 3-4 of these they will definitelly be a leading-edge in the space industry. These ships just need to have enought capacity to transport big structures too.