Re: Mars peroxide

There are significant problems with the "mars peroxide" story:
a) it improperly assumes that a wetter, warmer, early Mars exhibited
the same dust devil phenomena as well as the same UV levels at ground
level as today. Logically, a warmer wetter denser atmosphere is going
to filter out more UV, and have markedly different weather and
climatological conditions as there exists today.
b) wrt current day H2O2 production, if the sort of electrostatic
phenomena exist around dust devils as is claimed by the theories, then
the Mars Rovers, which have interacted with several dust devils, would
have experienced significant electrical disturbances at the time of
those encounters. Since they did not, then logically it means there is
no such electrostatic phenomena that would create H2O2 in the current
day.
c) also, if such H2O2 existed in Mars dust, we would have seen
significantly greater levels of corrosion of Rover components,
particularly due to carbonic acid byproducts of H2O2 production from
CO2 and H20. Since we haven't seen such corrosion, then it logically
follows that there isn't any such phenomenon.


--- Bill Clawson <[email protected]> wrote:

> Tell me if I'm wrong here, but if the Martian soil is
> anything like Mojave dirt, then wouldn't it stand to
> reason that the Martian soil would be catalytic to
> H202 and reduce the peroxide in the soil to about nil?
>  Wouldn't all that rust act as a catalyst?  
> 
> --- william jaeger <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > The availability of hydrogen peroxide in Martian
> > soil won't be high 
> > enough to mine it. If the hypothetical production is
> > dependent on water 
> > vapor, it will be extremely scarce. The amount that
> > accumulates will 
> > level off at some minute contamination percent as
> > (wind driven) motion 
> > of upper dust layers exposes the peroxide to solar
> > UV and it breaks 
> > down. If the accumulation is large enough to produce
> > the results seen in 
> > Viking experiments, we can set a lower limit to
> > peroxide percent. 1% was 
> > mentioned. At that level how much soil would we have
> > to turn over to 
> > accumulate a USABLE  quantity say 10 tonnes?  Too
> > much I would guess. 
> > the man to ask would be Prof. John S lewis at U of A
> > Tucson.
> > Regards
> > Bill Jaeger
> > 
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> > 
> 
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Mike Lorrey
President, Lorrey Aerospace
http://www.lorrey.biz
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com