Unlocking Mars' Secret Power: Harnessing Wind Energy for Survival

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The US, Russian and Chinese government space agencies have all stated plans to send humans to Mars in the future, and there are several companies making plans too, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and a few startups like Relativity Space and Impulse Space.

Would you live on Mars if you had the chance? If you did, you’d probably want to be sure that you had enough energy to power a comfortable lifestyle, given that the natural conditions on Mars are not that accommodating.

A question that I get asked surprisingly often is whether the energy for that could come from wind power. This got me thinking about what a wind turbine on Mars would look like, compared to Earth wind turbines. So in this video, I’m going to show you what changes we’d need to make to an Earth wind turbine to get it to work with Martian wind. And we’ll talk about what the other options are to power a human settlement on Mars, and whether wind is likely one of the better options.

The Engineering with Rosie team is:
Rosemary Barnes: presenter, producer, writer
Kevin Irman: research, calculations, assistant editor
Javi Diez: editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierdie...

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Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
00:56 Why on Earth are we going to Mars anyway?
02:11 Conditions on Mars vs Earth
03:29 Thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video!
04:25 Power generation options for space missions
06:12 Wind power in space
08:06 Calculations for modifying an Earth turbine to work on Mars
09:09 Problems with sending over a wind turbine to Mars
10:07 Building a turbine from Martian materials
11:09 Airborne wind on Mars
12:44 Rosie’s final thoughts on wind power on Mars
13:03 Outro

Sources:
AWESOM - DSE Group 23 TU Delft
https://repository.tudelft.nl/islando...

ARES - DSE Group 23 TU Delft
https://repository.tudelft.nl/islando...

This video was sponsored by Brilliant