Why does it need to be windowless? You could have windows looking out at arid landscapes of Mars. You'd see sunsets, sunrises, highnoon, etc. You could even see the local "weather".
Because there is no possibility of sending windows to Mars for a hypothetical first base there. It would be far too expensive, and given the already extreme difficulty of such a mission, it would be a huge luxury.
That's not exactly how that works. The light from galaxies and other Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) are too faint for the human eye. Only with much more sensitive electronic chips or the longer accumulation of photons from long exposures do we get to see these DSOs. Also, a lot of these DSOs are hidden out of the visible light spectrum.
So if the earth was to suddenly lose its atmosphere today, we wouldn't be seeing DSOs tonight. However, the stars and stuff we can see would suddenly stop twinkling.
On a night with good conditions I can recognize for instance Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, and the hazy stuff around the Plejades with my bare eyes, though faint, and not colored like with astrophotography. Are you telling me I couldn't see them better without atmosphere? Do I have owl eyes, or what?
Okay, now you're going to make me qualify it based on the object's magnitude. Let's try this. If the earth lost its atmosphere today, you would not suddenly see things tonight that you wouldn't normally have seen before.*
*If you live some place with so much humidity/heat that the air was always working against to you seeing things clearly that now are suddenly clear, maybe you'll see more. However, other places on the planet still saw them. Kind of like living in a large city with horrible light pollution. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not visible elsewhere.
You know? A long time ago I bicycled far through the forest with a self-built trailer for transporting my 'lil' Newton' in the late evening, especially during winter. Breathing in trough the nose, and exhaling through a few meters of garden hose to avoid condensation. Somewhere near there:
Though that was about 1980, not as light-polluted as it is now. I don't do things like that anymore, but I'm still thinking I'm not talking non-sense when it comes to that stuff (magnitudes, etc.)
I don't know, but this reminds me of a saying they had in the army, something along the lines of "training must be so hard as to make the real thing feel like a break". Not having windows seems harder than the real thing. If you can go through that, you'll likely be ok during the real thing.
If the real thing goes wrong, it better not be worst than what you trained for.
On Mars you have to deal with radiation because there is no magnetic field. The most realistic way to do that in early missions is by putting rock between the habitation module and the sky, either by burying it in regolith or by putting it in natural lava tubes. Either option makes windows difficult.
If this experiment shows that windows are vital, I'm sure there are ways to make it work. But otherwise windows are an unnecessary complication that we can figure out once we have experience with the more essential problems of living on Mars.
Walter you might be interested to know that London City airport's Air traffic controllers do actually use this technology. There isn't enough space for a full tower so they have a redundant camera system on site and the controllers are nearby elsewhere - this allows them to use tricks like overlaying data about aircraft onto their view, and they actually compress the whole viewing area directly onto their panels.
Interesting link. One issue I have with this is the binocular replacement system of PTZ camera system can only look in one direction at a time vs multiple people scanning in multiple places at once.
Otherwise, I like the idea. Hopefully, nobody with a backhoe starts digging into their dedicated fiber lines.
If you're Jeff Bezos, you brag about how large your windows are. Windows are very necessary as a selling point for Blue Origin, but since their ship can barely get out of atmo, they're still benefiting Earth's shield. We'll see how Bezos feels about those windows when/if he gets a judge to tell NASA to fund BO to build a moon mission (bwahaahahaa)
I can only guess because I haven't read much into it. I think that they're trying to simulate the feeling of isolation one might experience on Mars. From an article it also seems like they will severely limit your contact with friends / family as well, presumably for the same purpose.
Yeah, I think total cut off is weird. Maybe allow for it most of the time, but do "tests" where the signal is lost due to high winds damaging an antenna. Then the people have to don space suits to put it back together, etc. Otherwise, a compress collection of text only messages wouldn't be that big of a deal to send back and forth would it? Maybe a couple of images each day? Hell, we receive images from Mars daily now.
Sometimes, these "tests" are unnecessarily obtuse. I understand, test the most extreme, but sometimes that unlikely extreme is enough to cause people to not care.
That's why we're going to need to build a portable mini magnetic shield. It might not be planet sized, but imagine having the auroras just out of reach. Plus, being able to say "Raise the shields" and it not be just a line in a movie would be cool on its own accord.
