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based on the immediacy and threat to life on Earth presented in the Asteroid scenario, which mission should be pursued? Explain the reasoning behind your choice.

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based on the immediacy and threat to life on Earth presented in the Asteroid scenario, which mission should be pursued? Explain the reasoning behind your choice.

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I think that my mission (Mission lll) should be the one pursued due to the asteroid scenario because in this mission not only it has unlimited budget but it would be the quickest to accomplish. This mission also takes into account many important factors that the other 2 missions don't have. One of the factors that would be crucial to colonize mars would be have water for human use. (step 6, Establish an efficient process to get underground water and store it in an artificially warmed and pressurized environment, but where the Sun’s rays can reach. This water will be used for human consumption and irrigation.) The asteroid scenario is a matter of time so as soon we arrive to Mars clean water for human consumption is crucial so this factor is one of the most important. Another great factor that mission lll has is growing crops (step 8, Greenhouses will be constructed for the purpose of engineering plants suitable for growth on the Martian surface.  Crops for human consumption.) This would help for human consumption and making the red planet a little more greener. It has been found that volcanic soil in Hawaii is very similar to the soil in Mars and plants can grow in it. This would help because in the asteroid scenario we need to leave earth as quick as possible nad have crops there. Building mining sites is also essential because to make civilization and for that we need materials and bringing material from earth it would be very expensive so we need to become friendly with the materials Mars provide. One material that could be key in the civilization for mars would be ore and there are many information about ore in Mars. As said before we need to leave Earth the fastest way and start to make civilization there and having knowledge of the materials in Mars it would help humanity a lot. This mission in particular tends to look forward to us humans to move to Mars quicker that the other 2 missions. With the most specific factors this should be the mission to do because of the unlimited budget and the time compared to the other 2. All of this could happen but if the steps before that are also really important are successful.

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NASA scientists just discovered a vast region of Mars where water ice sits just an inch below the surface.

It could be the perfect place for astronauts to land, since any crew that touches down on the red planet would have to mine resources there, and water is the most important one. Mars astronauts will need to dig up ice to make drinking water and to create rocket fuel for the journey back to Earth - when you break down water into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter can be used to make fuel.

"Bringing your own water from Earth would be incredibly expensive," Sylvain Piqueux, the NASA planetary scientist who led the research, told Business Insider. "Everything that you don't have to bring with you leaves more room for a science experiment or additional engineering capabilities."

'If you bring a rake or a shovel, you could access it'

Piqueux and his team discovered the ice field when they examined data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey orbiter.

To their surprise, this ice appears to be as little as an inch below the planet's surface.

"If you bring a rake or a shovel, you could access it. You wouldn't need to bring heavy equipment to access it," Piqueux said. "In this case, the surprise was that ice was right there, so shallow."

Planning for a serious digging operation as part of any space mission requires heavy equipment, which means additional fuel would be needed for a launch. Plus, digging on Mars isn't easy, as the InSight lander's heat probe discovered when it started trying to do that in February. The so-called "mole" instrument is supposed to dig 16 feet down, but it only made a few inches of progress before getting stuck.

Then the mole mysteriously popped out of its hole in October. It's been unable to dig deeper ever since.

NASA found water ice in an unexpected place

Mars has lots of surface water ice at its poles. But those poles aren't a great place to send astronauts, since they're freezing cold and shrouded in darkness for half the year.

NASA doesn't want to land astronauts at a spot near the planet's equator, either, because it's too warm for ice to exist. Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have a thick enough atmosphere to host liquid water. When ice gets too warm, the water skips the liquid stage altogether and simply evaporates.

But the subsurface ice that Piqueux discovered is in a temperate area that's just right for astronauts to land.

"Part of the excitement of this work is that we found ice in mid-latitudes," Piqueux said. "We knew that there was ice potentially at those latitudes from other instruments, but we also thought that it would be located much deeper."

Piqueux thinks this ice may have come from an ancient snowfall that was followed by a dust storm, which quickly blanketed the snow. That thin layer of dust could have preserved the frozen water for billions of years.

Now that NASA researchers have pinpointed this area with plentiful water resources, they can start investigating potential landing sites there. They'll search for a more specific place that's safe for humans to land and also offers new opportunities for studying Mars' surface and potential to host alien life.

"It's the beginning of putting together those parts of the puzzle for Mars," Piqueux said.

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NASA has pinpointed an area where astronauts could land on Mars. Ice is so accessible there that they could dig it up with a shovel.

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NASA scientists just discovered a vast region of Mars where water ice sits just an inch below the surface. It could be the perfect place for astronauts to land, since any crew that touches down on the red planet would have to mine resources there, and water is the most important one.

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Research suggests Martian soil has some of the nutrients plants need to grow and survive (see "Plants' Nutrients," right). But because of Mars's extremely cold conditions, plants such as Watney's potatoes would need to grow inside a controlled environment, such as his Hab. Also, just like on Earth, nutrients in Martian soil may vary from place to place. So, people stranded on Mars should be prepared to turn to ingenious ways for making the soil more suitable for plant growth-even if the only option is using their own feces, as Watney did.

When soils are rich in nutrients-such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium-crops grow well. But when the soils are not as rich-with even just one of the needed nutrients in low supply-plants would not grow as well. Fertilizers help farmers to double or triple their crop yields and contain 5% or more of primary plant nutrients. These fertilizers also supply nutrients to the crops that some soils do not have.

Here on Earth, experts encourage using organic waste, or manure, to fertilize soil, although U.S. environmental agencies regulate the use of manure to avoid transmission of viruses and bacteria that could contaminate harvests. Other sources of nutrients, such as organic food waste, are also useful. That is why, for example, some people mix banana peels or coffee grounds into soil in their gardens.

On Mars, Watney did not have any man-made fertilizers available to him. He was not planning to stay there for a long time, let alone having to farm there, so his feces acted as organic waste that contained nutrients. In fact, in earlier times, when technology was less advanced, farmers used their own sewage to provide important nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, to their land.

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Growing Green on the Red Planet - American Chemical Society

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Research suggests Martian soil has some of the nutrients plants need to grow and survive (see "Plants' Nutrients," right). But because of Mars's extremely cold conditions, plants such as Watney's potatoes would need to grow inside a controlled environment, such as his Hab.

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Mars may contain ores that would be very useful to potential colonists. The abundance of volcanic features together with widespread cratering are strong evidence for a variety of ores. While nothing may be found on Mars that would justify the high cost of transport to Earth, the more ores that future colonists can obtain from Mars, the easier it would be to build colonies there.

Ore deposits are produced with the help of large amounts of heat. On Mars, heat can come from molten rock moving under the ground and from crater impacts. Liquid rock under the ground is called magma. When magma sits in underground chambers, slowly cooling over thousands of years, heavier elements sink. These elements, including copper, chromium, iron, and nickel become concentrated at the bottom. When magma is hot, many elements are free to move. As cooling proceeds, the elements bind with each other to form chemical compounds or minerals. Because some elements do not bond easily to form minerals, they exist freely after nearly all the other elements have bonded into compounds or minerals. The remaining elements are called incompatible elements. Some of them are quite useful to humans. Some examples include niobium, a metal used in producing superconductors and specialty steels, lanthanum and neodymium, and europium for television monitors and energy-efficient LED light bulbs. After the mass of magma has cooled and has mostly frozen or crystallized into a solid, a small amount of liquid rock remains. This liquid bears important substances such as lead, silver, tin, bismuth, and antimony. Sometimes minerals in the magma chamber are so hot that they occupy a gaseous state. Others are mixed with water and sulfur in aqueous solutions. The gases and mineral-rich solutions eventually work their way into cracks and become useful mineral veins. Ore minerals, including the incompatible elements, remain dissolved in the hot solution, then crystallize out when the solution cools. Deposits created by means of these hot solutions are called hydrothermal deposits. Some of the world's most significant deposits of gold, silver, lead, mercury, zinc, and tungsten started out this way. Nearly all the mines in the northern Black Hills of South Dakota came to be because of hot water deposits of minerals. Cracks often form when a mass of magma cools because magma contracts and hardens when it cools. Cracks occur both in the frozen magma mass and in the surrounding rocks, so ore is deposited in any kind of the rock that happens to be nearby, but the ore minerals first had to be concentrated by way of a molten mass of magma.

Research carried out at Louisiana State University found different types of volcanic materials around volcanoes in Elysium Mons. This showed that Mars can have a magma evolution. This leads to the possibility of finding useful minerals for a future human population on Mars."

The presence of many huge volcanoes on Mars shows that large areas were very hot in the past. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system; Ceraunius Tholus, one of its smaller volcanoes, nears the height of Earth's Mt. Everest.

There is strong evidence for much more widespread sources of heat in the form of dikes, which indicate that magma traveled under the ground. Dikes take the shape of walls and cut across rock layers. In some cases, dikes on Mars have become exposed by erosion.

Straight ridges may be dikes in which liquid rock once flowed. The image is of Huo Hsing Vallis in Syrtis Major, as seen by THEMIS.

Large areas of Mars contain troughs, called fossa, which are classified as grabens by geologists. They stretch thousands of miles out from volcanoes. It is believed that dikes helped with the formation of grabens. Many, maybe most, of the grabens had dikes under them. One would expect dikes and other igneous intrusions on Mars because geologists believe that the amount of liquid rock that moved under the ground is more than what we see on the top in the form of volcanoes and lava flows.

On Earth, vast volcanic landscapes are called large igneous provinces (LIPs); such places are sources of nickel, copper, titanium, iron, platinum, palladium, and chromium. Mars's Tharsis region, which contains a group of giant volcanoes, is considered to be a LIP.

Besides heat generated by molten rock, Mars has had much heat produced when asteroids impacted its surface making giant craters. The area around a large impact may take hundreds of thousands of years to cool.

During that time, ice in the ground will melt, heat, dissolve minerals, then deposit them in cracks or faults that were produced with the impact. Studies on the earth have documented that cracks are produced and that secondary minerals veins are filled in the cracks. Images from satellites orbiting Mars have detected cracks near impact craters. Areas of aqueous and low-grade thermal alteration have been found by the Opportunity Rover on the rim of Endeavour crater. These are found near joints and fractures that allowed deep fluid circulation which caused chemical and thermal alteration of the rocks. So, the area around martian craters may contain a variety of minerals that were produced as an indirect result of an impact.

Heat from impacts results from several processes. Immediately after an impact, there is a rebound off the floor which causes hotter rocks to be uplifted to the surface. However, most of the heat comes from the kinetic energy that is produced during the impact. This enormous heat creates several useful products that may start forming early and then continue for some time. These are called "epigenetic deposits." Circulation of hot mineral-rich fluids in the fractures from the impact cause hydrothermalism. Important examples are the Cu-Ni sulfides at the Sudbury Igneous Complex in Canada. For a number of years, these ores from the Sudbury area had a value of $2 billion each year. The Sudbury formation has provided us with ores of zinc, copper, gold, and lead.

Strong evidence for hydrothermalism was reported by a team of researchers studying Auki Crater. This crater contains ridges that may have been produced after fractures formed with an impact. Using instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter they found the minerals Smectite, Silica, Zeolite, Serpentine, Carbonate, and Chlorite that are common in impact-induced hydrothermal systems on Earth. There is other evidence of post-impact hydrothermal systems on Mars from other scientists who studied other Martian craters.

The surface of Mars contains abundant evidence of a wetter climate in the past along with ice frozen in the ground today; therefore it is quite possible that hydrothermal systems could be set up from impact heat. NASA's Mars Odyssey actually measured the distribution of ice from orbit with a gamma ray spectrometer. So, in the past, much water could have been available to circulate in cracks and deposit new minerals. This process, called hydrothermal alteration has been found in a meteorite from Mars. Research, published in February 2011, detailed the discovery of clay minerals, serpentine, and carbonate in the veins of a Nakhlite martian meteorite. The Phoenix lander, whose rocket engine blast actually exposed a layer of ice, watched ice melt (the ice disappeared by sublimation).

Because 30% of the roughly 180 impact craters on Earth contain minerals or oil and gas, it seems that the cratering promotes the development of natural resources Some of the ores produced from impact-related effects on Earth include ores of iron, uranium, gold, copper, and nickel. It is estimated that the value of materials mined from impact structures is 5 billion dollars/year just for North America.

It has for some time been accepted by the scientific community that a group of meteorites came from Mars. As such, they represent actual samples of the planet and have been analyzed on Earth by the best equipment available. In these meteorites, called SNCs, many important elements have been detected. Magnesium, Aluminium, Titanium, Iron, and Chromium are relatively common in them. In addition, lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, lanthanum, europium, tungsten, and gold have been found in trace amounts. It is quite possible that in some places these materials may be concentrated enough to be mined economically.

The Mars landers Viking I, Viking II, Pathfinder, Opportunity Rover, and Spirit Rover identified aluminium, iron, magnesium, and titanium in the Martian soil. Opportunity found small structures, named "blueberries" which were found to be rich in hematite, a major ore of iron. These blueberries could easily be gathered up and reduced to metallic iron that could be used to make steel.

In addition, both Spirit and Opportunity Rovers found nickel-iron meteorites sitting on the surface of Mars. These could also be used to produce steel.

In December 2011, Opportunity Rover discovered a vein of gypsum sticking out of the soil. Tests confirmed that it contained calcium, sulfur, and water. The mineral gypsum is the best match for the data. It likely formed from mineral-rich water moving through a crack in the rock. The vein, called "Homestake," is in Mars' Meridiani plain. Homestake is in a zone where the sulfate-rich sedimentary bedrock of the plains meets older, volcanic bedrock exposed at the rim of Endeavour crater.

Dark sand dunes are common on the surface of Mars. Their dark tone is due to the volcanic rock called basalt. The basalt dunes are believed to contain the minerals chromite, magnetite, and ilmenite. Since the wind has gathered them together, they do not even have to be mined, merely scooped up. These minerals could supply future colonists with chromium, iron, and titanium.

Theoretically, ore resources exist on Mars. Moreover, sensitive equipment can predict where to look for them, such as around craters and near volcanic regions. As more images are gathered, more information will be gathered which will help to better map the locations of smaller structures, such as dikes, that indicate intrusive (under the surface) igneous activity. Later, flying unmanned craft with gravity and magnetic measuring devices will be able to determine the exact locations of mineral deposits. These devices were employed in Afghanistan by American scientists to discover deposits of iron, copper, niobium, lithium and gold.

1. ^ Larry O'Hanlon (February 22, 2010). "Mining Mars? Where's Ore?". Discovery News.

2. ^ Laimin, Zhu (1998). "A study on the relations between Ultrabasic Dikes and fine disseminated gold deposits in southwestern Guizhou Province as exemplified by Zimudang large-sized gold deposit". Chinese Journal of Geochemistry. 17 (4): 362-371. doi:10.1007/bf02837988.

3. David Susko, Suniti Karunatillake, Gayantha Kodikara, J. R. Skok, James Wray, Jennifer Heldmann, Agnes Cousin, Taylor Judice. "A record of igneous evolution in Elysium, a major martian volcanic province. ^ Scientific Reports, 2017; 7: 43177 doi:10.1038/srep43177

4. ^ Grieve, Richard; Masaitis, V. L. (1994). "The Economic Potential of Terrestrial Impact Craters". International Geology Review. 36 (2): 105-151. doi:10.1080/00206819409465452.

5. ^ Grieve, R., V. Masaitis. 1994. The Economic Potential of Terrestrial Impact Craters. International Geology Review: 36, 105-151.

6. H. G. Changela and J. C. Bridges. Alteration assemblages in the nakhlites: Variation with depth on Mars. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 2011 45(12):1847-1867 ^ doi:10.1111/j.1945-5100.2010.01123.x

7. ^ Rayl, A. J. S. (2008-06-21). "Phoenix Scientists Confirm Water-Ice on Mars". The Planetary Society. Planetary Society. Archived from the original on June 27, 2008.

8. ^ West, M. and J. Clarke. 2010. Potential martian mineral resources: Mechanisms and terrestrial analogs. Planetary and Space Science: 58. 574-582.

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Mars may contain ores that would be very useful to potential colonists. The abundance of volcanic features together with widespread cratering are strong evidence for a variety of ores. While nothing may be found on Mars that would justify the high cost of transport to Earth, the more ores that future colonists can obtain from Mars, the easier it would be to build colonies there.