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Recent Evidence Of Water On Mars Near Equator
mkasei writes "SpaceRef has an early press release with image from Brown University which reports evidence of recent liquid water near the surface of mars. What's important about this find is that it is near the equator making it more readily accessable for a mission, be it robotic or manned." Update: 07/25 09:49 PM by M : There's also a BBC story about water on Mars as well, and a brief Nature article about the possibility of water on Callisto.
If you jump over to the BBC there reporting something like enough water to cover the planet upto 25 centimeters. It's all trapped in ice just a few meters below the surface. I guess we really won't know until Odyssey reaches the planet to scan it with THEMIS
In related news, NASA has also released an offer to bargain with commercial entitities who may wish to deal in the MARS TLD. ICANN, logically, has contested this.
You haven't been paying much attention to the latest on in-situ propellent production that has been pushed by Zubrin. Basicly you only carry the fuel required to get you to the destination and when you are there you start a small chemical plant that creates the required return propellant out of chemicals present in the martian atmosphere. It is a proven process however its the kind simple and elegant solutions that don't seem to sit to well with today's NASA.
Even I have seen traces of water flows in Mars in places much more near the equator:
http://cydonia.ksu.ru
And I am one among many... And not only in water. Take a trip to NW Hellas and look at the traces left by the "wind devils". No the problem is not on these atmospheric phenomena but on what they denude and how this soil seems to "recover".
Yeah, you'd be able to see the system call. You could probably make it more insidious using exec or something embedded in the print statement. But since they'd know where the damage came from, it's not a good idea be malicious in a .sig (not that it's a good idea to be malicious anyway, but you get the point... :-)
About the h38 instead fo h36. My email used to be wrhodes1@san.rr.com. I was too lazy to change it all the way (and it works just as well -- h5000 would work fine). Run 'perldoc -f pack' to see some helpful info as well.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
After all, ice doesn't necessarily have to be water.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What about the space beer? As others pointed out, there's simply evidence of fluid due to erosion... I say it's space beer! ;-)
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
It is FAR FAR more likely that China will be our new competition in the Space Race. They are prepared to send a manned mission to the moon within the next few years, and I doubt they will stop there simply because they have the whole Fascist government Pride thing going for them and a whole lot of cheap labor.
My guess is that unless we step up our space program China will get up there, find a way to start mining some asteroids (or hell, the moon...) and get extremely rich extremely quickly, possibly even begin to export part of its population into space within the next 100 years. Maybe sooner if they beg/borrow/steal a lot of US/Japanese technology.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
It's not just budget problems that hold NASA back... its a lack of the enthusiasm we once had for the space program. We once had a president who directly challenged the space program to reach new heights (like the MOON), and we once had a sense of competition with the USSR challenging our space ego. Since then, the last man to set foot on the moon is a senior citizen and our rate of progress has GREATLY diminished. The budget isn't to blame. If a mass, genuine interest were shown (not just by us techies, but by our elected officials, and the general public as a whole) in reaching new goals in space, the budget would be there and it would get done. Hopefully with the talk of Russia re-entering the race, something of merit will get done... something more than just crashing a robot into a nearby planet.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
IANAG, but I imagine water is the most probable liquid to be found for the non-extreme kinds of temperatures that Mars has. What other liquid could be flowing in large amounts enough to erode the ground? I'm sure it's not oil, or we'd already be there digging it out. Maybe it was Pepsi? :)
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
IANA Astronomer/Geologist/whatever, but why, when evidence of erosion patterns is found, do they always assume it was water that made them?
Why couldn't it have been some other fluid? Why don't they say it's evidence of some sort of luquid or fluid?
Can any knowledgable geologists help me out?
Some posts are talking about using the water for drinking...
Well I don't know.
I've been warned about just drinking the water in a foreign country and now you're talking about drinking water from another planet?
I sure would hate to be spending my time on mars on the can.
Recent satellite images of Mars reveal rust colored spots which scientists believe are Amelia Earhart's crashed airplane. "We believe Mrs Earhart was abducted by martians," said one scientist, "we think she had quite a life on mars and finally decided to try to fly her airplane around the planet. However she was unable to make it all the way around and crashed somewhere near the equator."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, and it's kinda shaped like the hand-print switch-thingy that Arnie used to set off all the air in Total Recall. It's clearly some huge and unnecessarily complicated conspiracy.
Well perhaps we should spend the money on education to teach people like you how to spell!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
With budgets being slashed and Nasa having trouble getting robots to land, what does everyone think the reality of a manned mission in our lifetime is?
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. -
-53C is the global average, rather than the equatorial average. Mars gets as warm as 27 C. The pressure is also dependent on the altitude, just as it is on Earth, and Valles Marinaris is 7 km deep. The highest pressure is up to about 9 millibars, well above the 6 millibars of the triple point of water. (See the nine planets for a handy reference).
In low-lying equatorial regions, you can temporarily get conditions that support liquid water.
Of Course, being the fringe, they have alot of other weird things as well.
The way I look at it, when you turn up the sensitivity on the radar, you tend to get more noise along with extra advanced warning.
It comes with the territory.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Earth's atmospheric pressure is 1 atm or converting to kPa, 100 kPa. Martian atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth's or about 1 kPa (10^3 Pa on the chart). Average Martian surface temperatures at the equator are -53C or 220K. Now looking at our chart again, we see that at this point, water cannot exist as a liquid, but only as a solid (ice). As day/night termperatures shift, water will alternate between solid and gas only, never even passing through the liquid state, and once a gas, not likely to collect on the ground, but remain suspended as ice crystals high in the air. So for now, the collecting frozen water from near the poles, storing it in canisters , and transporting those to any camps remains the only realistic wat of getting water on Mars.
Not quite.
Liquid "water" is possible on Mars, in the form of brines - essentially, salts dissolved in water. Mix a bunch of table salt into a glass of water and put in in the freezer - some may freeze, but as it does, it concentrates the salt in the liquid portion until equilibrium is reached. Remember that pure water is rare, it is much more likely to have salt in it (Earth's oceans).
So, instead of looking only at the phase diagram of water, take a look at the binary or ternary phases diagram of water and various salts - some brines are liquids at -53C.
And there are other ways of making water on Mars - the atmosphere contains a few parts per million of water vapor. Yes, vapor, not ice. Run that past a zeolite bed, an extreme dessicant, and the level drops to a few parts per billion. Eventually, the zeolite absorbs about 20% of its mass in water. You then close the container, heat it up, and the water vapor is driven off to be collected and liquified. We don't have to go to the poles for water. The energy balance on this scheme works out to around 10 kWh per kilogram of water produced, quite doable with a few radioisotope thermal generators.
I recommend to every one Robert Zubrin's excellent book, The Case for Mars. You can buy it from the Mars Society, linked below.
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Vpered na Mars!
Agreed. The BBC article is much more reasonable. It doesn't however provide any details with respect to the theorising of the existance of ice crystals binding together dust on the surface of mars - a much more reasonable hypothesys.
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I smell an economic bottleneck.
We live on a water based planet and have a water based economy.. this was not necessarily clear when water was plentiful enuf to be free, but now as it becomes scarce we see how much of our society is undergirded by it.
Hence we are going to Mars with water technology.. water as the base for hydrogen fuel and oxygen for a manned mission. And we wish to terraform Mars, taking hundreds of years and quadrillions of dollars to conform a planet to our needs.
Why don't we do the quicker thing and conform ourselves to the planet's needs?
Consider that we have broken through cloning technology, genetic engineering, etc. before having solved the long distance space transport problem to the degree that would suit the human biology. In other words, it's historically and technologically easier to adapt *ourselves* to Mars, rather than vice versa.
We should engineer carbon-breathing people, able to breathe rarefied Mars air and survive under cold and heat and low gravity..although this would necessitate a fundamental revision of the ATP cycle and other biological processes, in generational terms it may be easier than basing everything on water, which is very rare in the universe. We may benefit here on Earth by reformatting our biology, as we have been steadily destroying the ecology that created us.
Goat sex free since 2001
This is a complete fantasy. The "small chemical plant" would be far to big and heavy to send - even if such a thing were practical, which is highly speculative to put it politely.
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CNN.com is running running basically the same story -Theed
From the article:
I realize that's a very short time in geologic time, but that's an awfully long time to consider there's still useful amounts of water anywhere near the equator:
Astronaut 1: Where's the water?
Astronaut 2: Water?
Astronaut 1: You know...for drinking, creating fuel for the trip home...that sort of thing.
Astronaut 2: Oh, that! I dunno...it was here a 100,000 years ago!
Still, it's interesting data about the changes on Mars.
Now, in addition to the face of Cydonia, we have a giant claw (just look at the bottom of the picture): four fingers with opposable thumb. It looks like it was trying to reach up to the cliff and slipped. What other body parts are we going to find???
The issue is not water per se -- although as one poster pointed out, existence of water could make a manned mission much cheaper. The issue is that liquid water and an energy source are the only two things that life on Earth seems to require. Thus, wherever liquid water is, there would likely be life. The implications of discovering life on another planet would be profound, and well worth the expense.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I, for one, am sick of stories related to how humans could, one day, occupy or travel to another planet or moon. As well all know, since the walk on the moon during the cold war, no nation or community of nations has taken a substantive step to occupy or physically visit another planet or moon.
/. will see it. Generally, humankind does not prepare for such a monumential undertaking unless it is threatened or if a catastrophe has occurred/is about to occur. In other words, unless a meteor hits earth or some other horrible event occurs, I doubt humankind will be motivated to do nothing more than talk the talk. By then, it would probably be too late to save mankind by moving/finding a new planet.
If such an event has yet to occur, then I doubt to see it during my lifetime and I doubt any user at
Moreover, the initiative to travel or occupy another planet or moon would likely not ever be based on intelligent astronomical or planetary curiousities but, rather, it would likely be based on human's animal instincts to survive. If this was not true, then does mankind not currently possess such intelligent curiousities and the technology for a substantive developments?
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
...to sell the broadcast rights to Fox to finance the mission.
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Uh, I suppose that's why the article used the word "ice" as in the hard, decidedly non-liquid form of H2O.
As one of the authors of the Nature article, I'd like to respond and say that it is not about liquid water, but rather about water ice. The ice collects in the dusty surface during certain climate conditions, then sublimates (solid->vapor) under warmer conditions. However, there are many situations that others have touched on that allow liquid water to exist on the surface of Mars under current conditions, at least temporarily. The phase diagram only tells us that it is not thermodynamically stable, not whether it may exist unstably (i.e. boiling away). This is a kinetic problem. Imagine that water exists in liquid form underneath the surface (i.e. the added pressure of the rock above moves you into a stable zone in the phase diagram). Then if some of this water is moved to the surface , it will take some time for it to freeze or evaporate. Again, though, this isn't the case for our terrain that we reported on in Nature.