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.

Comments

nasa selling *.mars tld

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why is it always water?

[stevens]

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?

In Other News...

[Greyfox]

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."

Re:Um, liquid H20 impossible at martian temp/press

[Viadd]

Wrong.

-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.

Um, liquid H20 impossible at martian temp/pressure

[SlushDot]

Anyone who has seen a phase transition diagram of water and is familiar with Martian surface temperature and pressure, will tell you that this article is pure sensationalist tripe. Liquid water cannot exist on Mars. Period. Ye canna change the laws ah physics, kiptain!

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.

Re:Um, liquid H20 impossible at martian temp/press

[Fenris2001]

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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Re:Manned mission a pipe dream?

[Eryq]

1 in 1, if:

• ...you tell George Bush that they discovered oil up there.
• ...you tell Bill Gates that none of the Martians are running Windows 2000 yet.

Re:Manned mission a pipe dream?

[s20451]

what does everyone think the reality of a manned mission in our lifetime is?

It depends on a couple of things:

• Cost. This is probably the big one. Estimates for the cost of a manned Mars mission range from $20 billion to over $100 billion; bearing in mind that estimates for the cost of the Apollo project drastically undershot the actual cost, the mission would probably cost $200 billion or more with existing technology. Meanwhile, NASA is working on single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) technology, as well as "living off the land" technology - producing propellant from Martian gases, etc., which if successful will cut the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. With a price tag of hundreds of billions, there probably won't be a mission for 30 years or more. However, if the cost goes down to around $10 billion, a mission could happen within a decade. If a dramatic increase in technology reduced it to around $1 billion, I can imagine private investors funding the mission -- imagine Larry Ellison or Bill Gates as the first man on Mars!
• Reason to Go. Right now the reasons to go include "because it's there" and "because we might find evidence of life". The Apollo missions happened as quickly as they did due to political competition; that's unlikely to be repeated. However, if compelling evidence of Martian life is ever found, along with the region of Mars in which it is most likely to be located, I expect that will dramatically increase interest in a manned mission.

Re:Manned mission a pipe dream?

[s20451]

I think the biggest hurdle facing a manned mission to mars is how to coop-up 5-10 people for 2 years in a tin can with the living space of an apartment without them going bonkers and killing each other.

Aren't they doing something like that on Fox this season?