A few weeks ago I wrote an introductory post on Martian settlement issues (https://wordpress.com/post/ianmillerblog.wordpress.com/716 ). I am now going to ask, where should such a settlement be? Obviously, this is a matter of opinion, but there are some facts to consider. The first is seasons. The northern hemisphere spring and summer is about 75 Martian days longer than the autumn and winter (and opposite for the southern hemisphere. This is a consequence of the elliptical orbit, but it also means that the longer seasons mean the planet is further from the sun (which is why it is going slower) and because of the axial tilt that generates the seasons as well as the elliptical orbit, most likely places can get up to 40% less sunlight in winter than in summer. Add to that that by being so much further from the sun, Mars never gets more than about half the Earth’s solar energy. So the southern hemisphere has a shorter but warmer pair of seasons, and a longer colder other pair. Temperatures in summer can get up to 20 degrees C in the day and in winter, fall to minus 120 degrees C during the night. No plant can survive that, so besides providing air, heat is also required.
There is a reasonably easy way to get around the heat problem. Assuming you have a nearby power plant, and as I shall show in other posts, if a settlement is to be viable, it will have a heavy demand for high quality energy, then there will inevitably be waste heat. Space mirrors can also supplement the heat and light. Heating the planet is not on (you would need mirrors of area greater than the Martian cross-sectional area) but heating a settlement is plausible.
The location could be decided on the basis of nearness to raw materials, but that leaves open the question of which ones? The obvious one is metal ores, but here we do not know where they are, of even if they are. Again this can be left for another post.
The next question is air. Air pressure depends on altitude, and much of the exploration so far has been around the zero of altitude, where we get pressures of around 6 -8 millibar, depending on the season. In the southern hemisphere summer, the pole shrinks and vaporizes a lot of carbon dioxide, thus increasing atmospheric pressure. In my novel Red Gold I put the initial settlement at the bottom of Hellas Planitia. That is in the southern hemisphere, and is a giant impact crater, the bottom of which is about nine kilometres deep. That gives more atmospheric pressure, but at the cost of a cold winter. The important point of Hellas Planitia is that at the bottom of the impact crater the pressure, is high enough to be the only place on Mars for liquid water to exist, particularly in summer. The reason this was important, at least in my novel, is that unless you find water, you will probably have to pump it from the atmosphere and condense it. Also, while you are pumping up domes, you will want to get the dust out of the air. The dust is extremely fine. That means very fine filters, which easily clog; electrostatic dust precipitators, which may be too slow for many uses; or a form of water filtration. In Red Gold, I opted for a water-ring type pump. Of course here you need a certain amount of water to get started, and that will not be a small amount. The water will still evaporate fairly quickly, hence the need to have plenty of water, but the evaporite will go into the dome, so it is recoverable or usable. It could also be frozen out before going in; whatever else is in short supply on Mars, cold is not one of them, although with the low atmospheric pressure, the heat capacity of air is fairly low.
So strictly speaking, based on heat and air, both have to be heavily supplemented, it does not matter where you go. However, I think there is another good reason for selecting Hellas Planitia as the site. It is generally considered that water, or at least a fluid, flowed on Mars. The lower parts of Hellas have signs that there was water there once, and to the east two great channels, the Dao and the Harmarkis, seemingly emptied themselves into the Hellas basin. Water will flow downhill, so a lot of it would have resided in depressions, and either evaporated, or solidified, or both. So, there is a good chance that there is water there, or anything that got dissolved in the water. The higher air pressure will also help reduce sublimation by a little bit, so perhaps there will be more there than most places.
The next issue is, you wish to grow food and have plants make oxygen. Obviously you will need some fairly sophisticated equipment to get the oxygen from the plants to wherever you are going to live, assuming you don’t live with the plants, but the plants have to grow first. For that you need soil, water and fertilizer. The soil is the first problem. It is highly oxidised, and chlorides have been oxidised to perchlorates. That is fine for making a little oxygen, but it has to be treated or it will kill plants. Apparently it is something as good as bleaching powder. Again, you will have to take the treatment chemicals with you; forget something critical or do not bring enough, and you will be dead. Mars is not a forgiving place.
That leaves fertilizer. Most rock has some potassium and phosphate in it, and if these have been washed out, their residues will be where the water ended, so that should be no problem if you go to the right place. Nitrogen is slightly different. The atmosphere has very little nitrogen. On Earth, plants get their nitrogen from nitrates washed down in rain, from decayed biomass, and from farmers applying it. None of that works there immediately. Legumes can “fix” nitrogen from the air, but there isn’t much there to fix and partial pressure is important. You can, of course, pump it up and get rid of carbon dioxide. A lot of these issues were in the background of my ebook novel Red Gold, ad there, I proposed that Mars originally had somewhat more nitrogen, but it ended up underground. The reason is for another post, but the reason I had then ended up as being the start of my theory regarding planetary formation. However, the possibility of what was leached out or condensed out being at the bottom of the crater is why I think Hellas Planitia is as good a place as any to start a settlement.
Quick Commercial: Red Gold will be discounted to 99 c for six days starting the 13th. It is basically about fraud, late 1980s style, but much of the details of settling Mars are there.
