Thread: phobos and deimos the stepping stones to mars ?

read this article : Mars's tiny moons – one small step for mankind? and it occurred to me that these moons may be an easier place to set up base from where you can start exploring mars

do you agree or not ?

You have ready made caves and caverns, plus the ability to take off from them more easily due to lower gravity. And, being there puts you right by Mars, so if we could set up a permanent base, we'd basically be on Mars too.

The only problem is that it's not much different to land on one of them than to just drift in space. The gravity is so low as to be ignored, and the small size means we won't be able to harvest much in the way of resources from them directly.

maybe one could take a moon with. lets say it has an iorn core. a 6.9km block of iorn is wroth trillions. A flight for ~1200 billion and bringing back a trillion dollars worth of iorn would be great.

Originally Posted by marnixR

read this article : Mars's tiny moons – one small step for mankind? and it occurred to me that these moons may be an easier place to set up base from where you can start exploring mars
do you agree or not ?

With my background in geology I just don't feel you can do real exploratory work at the end of a spectrometer. Until you can get out and kick it you just haven't been there - you don't get to wear the T-shirt. Healthy and Safety paranoia may have changed things, but we used to be encouraged to taste our rock samples. Difficult to do from orbit.
(As a keen traveller I am almost ill at the thought of spending six months or more to get within sniffing distance of the Red Planet and then not being able to set foot on it. Shades of Michael Collins. The beauty of this plan is that it is achievable with far less hardware than for a landing mission, since the delta V is less than required for a lunar landing and return.)

As orbital laboratories, affording excellent observation points for the lower latitiudes on Mars they would ideal. As way stations en route to the surface I suspect they might just be an unecessary interruption. That said, there is one concept that might blend with this quite well. It has been proposed to place vehicles in orbits that loop continuously out from the Earth to Mars and back in again. (For those with an interest in orbital mechanics, I think these are modified Hohmann trajectories.) Supplies and crews would be transferred to the empty craft at one end and offloaded at the other. The Terrible Twins could provide the in-orbit logistical support needed for the Mars end of the operation.
Against that, I have doubts related to the short orbital period of the moons.