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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see a (robotic) sample return mission, pick up some of the piles of specimens from one of the rovers.

Sounds potentially horrific to test with humans:

> able to communicate home by radio, but forced by unalterable cycles of nature to wait months or years for a rescue ship.

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Eh, we've done it before. Read up on Magellan's circumnavigation, the colonization of Australia or the Shackleton era of Antarctic exploration.

Of course, the difference is that compared to the conditions that await on Mars, a roaring blizzard on Antarctica is a balmy spring day. The air may be cold but at least it's breathable.

I'm not sure that comparison is as obvious as it might seem. Because while the air is unbreathable on Mars, the most violent weather would be pretty much harmless. A roaring blizzard in Antarctica could actually directly damage facilities with force. This was one of the very few things that was intentionally faked in "The Martian." The whole 'violent dust storm' that sets off the crisis of the movie doesn't exist. Low atmospheric pressure means that dust storm would have felt like a slight breeze, at most. I think it's quite noteworthy that a hard sci-fi book ended up having to turn to fiction to create a crisis on Mars!

The reduced air pressure on mars also means keeping warm will be significantly easier than in Antarctica. Convective heat transfer is much slower. Protecting against conduction isn't too challenging. Seeing how a spacesuit is necessary on mars building one that can retain enough heat to be comfortable isn't really a herculean effort. Far easier than a suit for the moon, mars doesn't really have grains of regolith that are consistently sharp and abrasive like earths moon has. On mars there's more a fine powdery substance, it was called "fines" in the red mars novel.

It's irritating to see people claim it's colder than antarctica but never a discussion how the reduced atmospheric pressure makes it easier to keep warm.

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