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Lots of Ice On Mars
Total Recall writes: "The Mars Odyssey spacecraft is finding large
amounts of hydrogen in the southern hemisphere of
Mars. This strongly indicates the presence of
water ice (since H2O is both common and very stable). The data samples about the upper meter or so of the Martian surface. This apparently extends from the south polar cap up to about 60 south latitude. It suggests a permafrost of mixed ice and dirt."
If life DOES exist on mars, and it metabolizes Fe (thus all the rust everywhere)... It would make for a great Sci-Fi story at least.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
If there's a lot of water, it's 1000 times easier to colonize.
unfinished: (adj.)
The availability of ICE may be nice, but what is really needed is H3.
With current technology, it will take at least 2 years of space flight to go from Earth to Mars, and 2 more years for the flight back. The thing is, if you have to carry all the fuel for the to-and-flo flights, the spacecraft will be too heavy to be of any other use.
If there's H3 on Mars, however, the spacecraft only has to carry enough fuel to go TO Mars, and then get refuel there to come home.
One more thought - if there's plenty of ice leftover, then Mars could be used as a "refueling station" for space flight further away than Mars.
Just a thought.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Water is what a colony will need most. If one can get it on-site, it can make huge mass savings on what one must bring in from Earth. That, and the atmosphere (meteor protection, possibility to aerobrake when arriving) might make it easier to have a colony on Mars than on the Moon, even though it's much farther.
great, now we're planning on depleting the resources of yet another planet
--rock me like a huricane? NO rock you
Astronauts are probably pleased to hear that they'll be able to flush mars toilets instead of having to use vacuum toilets.
Be let down here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here...
Have they tested these instruments from a satellite orbiting Earth (or any other place we are absolutely sure it has water) to see how reliable it is in detecting water?
I'm looking forward to the day we can actually dig to some depth and see if some liquid water remains. DNA from a primitive lifeform might provide more info on how life emerged in the primordial soup. I know mars was geologicaly active (whats the name of that big 15km volcanoe...), so there's a chance that some heat is left inside. Was there a study done on this?
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
The water on Mars COULD be different than the water on earth. It might be H2O, but what's floating around in it? Just because there is water on Mars doesn't mean there is life. There could be, but maybe not. Might not be a good idea to drink the water until we find out for sure.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
We have quite a bit of He3 right here on the Moon. However if I were on a space ship to Mars and back, I would feel a lot better if there were 2 or more engine types. For example, nuclear and ion; H - O and He3; etc... That way if one fails, you won't be stranded. That would suck.
There are actually a few ideas in progress to melt the ice and Terriform Mars so that the climate is sufficient to support human life.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
ew, no. that's kinda creepy. i'm not giving my phone number (6262746426) out to a bunch of rapists on slashdot
Remember in that movie, apparently you can melt the ice to produce oxygen or something?
If I remember correctly back from high school, electrolysis breaks it into oxygen and hydrogen.
I wonder if that's gonna be useful at all?
I watched a special on the Discovery channel abut meteors, it had some insightful information on meteors and some near-misses in the past, if you get a topographical map of the earth and remove all the trees, water, and man made stuff, what's left makes the moon look like glass. The Earth has been hit my multiple meteors and even since the presence of the human race we have had some near devastating close calls, we don't currently have enough centers/people to monitor the entire sky for meteors, but it is a likely case that a one could cause the destruction of the human race unless we populate another planet as well to ensure the survival of the species.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Ooops -- they thought the red one was called Europa.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
(For those that don't get the Niven reference, water is deadly to the Martians in the Known Space series, and one of the characters in Protector used this to good advantage).
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Who would have thought? Well, half right, at least. Or, should I say, half-assed right?
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same
distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures
where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that
means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
One neat thing about the info released today is that it supports what Richard Hoagland has been saying for months. See pictures here and here.
At his website you can find out how this validates the theory that Mars was once the satellite of the planet that formed the asteroid belt when it broke up for unknown reasons. (The pattern of water is indicative of tidal action.)
Oil of Wormwood: because absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
A few years ago after NASA first concluded there may be water on Mars (from the patterns in the hillsides), I put this up, with toungue half in cheek: http://www.marshydro.com. I wonder how much people would pay to drink the stuff? If people will pay $100,000 (on eBay) for a Segway, what will they pay for bottled Mars water bought back from missions?
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Damn I am glad about this discovery. Actually I am almost feeling good enough to get off Prozac.
That means that our couragous space explorers are able to drink a decent whiskey on the rocks after travelling to mars for years, fleeing the problems of Planet Earth. After a ride like this, they will need one, that is for sure.
Gotta love science.
+++ath0
To do the weeks instead of months thing, you need something more exotic again, like an Orion (push the craft along by exploding nuclear weapons behind it), a fusion drive, or maybe a laser-powered light sail (though presumably you need a laser on Mars to slow it down again . . . ).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
When you are growing plants, you need to have nitrogen all around in the soil and air or not much will get produced. Where are we going to be getting this vital chemical for life on other planets? Importing huge tanks of nitrogen from Earth limits the size of our hermetic domes, and greatly increases maintenance costs.
Is there enough nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere or soil, or will we have to import it?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Did you know the the US Government and President Eisenhower believed. that the Martian moon Phobos was actually a hollow artificial moon created by an alien species, yet they hid this news from the American people. What else are they hiding?
What's really interesting is to compare the neutron maps with photo maps of the Martian ice cap on the south pole here. You've got to be careful about the scale and orientation of these two images, since they are totally different (90 degrees is at three-o-clock on the neutron map, nine-o-clock on the photo map) but what's really facinating is that the visible ice pack is not circular-symmetrical around the pole and the neutron data IS.
i'll get my spacecraft ready, i bet they are bad bad aliens there, let's whoooop some green alien ass !!!
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Finding water in it's solid form taking up percentages of the soil instead of topping out at maybe one percent is amazing. This puts a whole new perspective on the whole hydrosphere of Mars. If they also find ice in the northern hemisphere it would be even better. (for humans the northern hemisphere is much more practical, less storms, lower overall elevation [radiation] more evidence of recent liquid water)
Now all we need is geothermal water, greenhouse gasses, a spacecraft that can accellerate continuously at 1 g for half the ride and brake at 1 g for the other half (creating a 40 hour journey to Mars) and the planet is ours..moahhh ha ha ha.... oops sorry about the last part.
found on earth in every place from near boiling geysers
to the extreme lightless
pressure depths of the ocean to deep caves to
arid deserts.
in a sense,
liquid water is the main requirement of
'life' as far as people can tell....
ok so 'life' does not mean pumpkins
and tomatoes and corn, but it is a step.
They are:
- Red Mars
- Green Mars
- Blue Mars
By Kim Stanley Robinson.These are some of the best science fiction books I've ever read, and if you're into Mars, I bet you'll really enjoy these.
-Corren
For everyone else, in cowboy bebop, martian cities are essentially built like large bowls with atmosphere generator-equipped walls on the outer edge. These generators produce a heavy, moist mix of earth-like atmosphere which then floods into the bowl, since it's heavier than mars's atmosphere. These generators have to stay online all the time, constantly replacing the gases that escape into space.
Actually, to me, it seems that the Cowboy Bebop solution is more feasible, and cheaper. There is no evidence currently that you could set up any global greenhouse gas sytem that wouldn't simply dissipate into space because of mars' low gravity, let alone one with earth's water content and density. However, if you concentrate your resources on generating atmosphere for a few dozen (hundred?) square miles, scattered across the planet, you can sustain the process for a long time. At least, for longer than if you try to cover the entire surface at once.
In any case, I think something like cowboy bebop would be more likely to happen as a preliminary stage of terraforming, simply because of the drastically reduced logistical requirements.
Even MORE interesting is THIS image from the press kit that shows not only lots of water at the south pole but a significant concentration around the north pole and best of all - three or four EQUATORIAL (read warm) spots that seem fairly wet. Oaises, anyone? We just found our landing sites...
This is a wonderful discovery, however, I thought we've suspected for some time that there's polar ice-caps though. And so those clouds that the rover saw sometime ago could in fact have been water clouds(I think they thought it was some other toxic substance)? So the fact that there's water and that we seem to be heading towards a future of profitable martian water companies. So what's missing is a greenhouse effect to make the temperature go up. I believe that this could solved by declaring Mars to be a smoking zone. The dwindling smoking areas on earth should produce the kind of tourism that would make martian exploration possible. Imagine the kind of funding that would be given by philip morris. We'd additionally eliminate the health threats of second hand smoking on earth by shipping them all out there and raise the temperature on mars by several degrees (Something on the order of Buffalo in February). It'll also make a nice dump site for our nuclear waste. Mars, the landfill of the solar system.
The really interesting part of this report is in the beginning: "The process continues generating a cascade of protons and neutrons in the upper few meters (yards) of the martian soil." What do they mean by the upper few meters? I would tend to think no more than a dozen, but that's the problem with language like "few". At any rate, this does not preclude the existence of water in the more central latitudes, it only rules out water 'close' to the surface. It's still possible that there are underground aquifers buried beyond the range of the method they used to detect hydrogen. Their own map even supports my theory; there are slightly bluish regions in figure three as far north as the equator (the limit of the map). Since the signal strength is dependent on both the depth and size of the hydrogen sample, this interpretation is highly probable, I think.
This also has interesting consequences on the search for life on Mars: if they want the best odds of finding life, they will need to go to the edge of the region that has the water signals, and dig down until they hit the upper edge of the permafrost. Things like Viking and Sojourner (if it looked for life) only looked at the surface, and didn't have a good idea of where on the surface of the planet to land to look (I'm not sure where they landed, but I'm betting it wasn't outside of the 120 degree belt where the water signals are scarce [assuming the North and South poles are approximately the same]).
I wonder why they didn't publish data for the North polar region? I find it hard to imagine that there was an asymmetry on the planet, or that the probe switched it's instruments off because they were only interested in one pole. I'm not implying that NASA is trying to hide anything, perhaps the data was symmetrical enough that they didn't want to waste their time publishing it on a preliminary report like this one. They may also not be finished crunching the data from the North, which would make this a very preliminary report. I'd still like to see the results for the whole of Mars, though.
The last interesting possibility is that some of their data doesn't point at water at all. They have detected the presence of hydrogen, and water is only the most abundant hydrogen containing compound on Earth. Other chemicals that contain hydrogen that may (this is a big may) be present are: methane (CH4), lipids (too many to list), oil (again, many), ammonia (NH3), carbohydrates (name literally means that it contains carbon and hydrogen, e.g. C6H12O6) etc. What I'm saying is that there may be oil deposits on Mars (very slim chance, but not nonexistent). More likely it's just water and/or ammonia, but all this means is that I'm even more eager to at least send another probe that can test a sample for life and run a spectral analysis on a small core sample (assuming they can get the sample to the surface before it evaporates).
I'd still like to go back to the Moon and get stations established there first (availability year round and shorter distance being two of the main reasons), but I am suddenly a lot more interested in going to Mars, too.
BlackGriffen
I wonder if it was summer in the North when this was taken? If it was, I'd like to see more data half a Marian year from now, to see just how permanent this permafrost is. If you look at the picture, there is a concentration of hydrogen in the North, but it is not nearly as large as in the South. This raises some very interesting possibilities. What this means is that there is condensation on mars (of one form or another), and thus it may be possible to make (inefficient compared to on Earth) stills on Mars! Visions of Dune are flying through my head right now. I wonder if there are sandworms there (bow before Shai Hulud)? ;)
BlackGriffen
Haven't we screwed up our planet enough? Why would we even want to go to Mars without even figuring out how to provide a decent, respectable life for people here? It's not like we need to just keep spreading expodentially over the entire damn universe.
Isn't this "water on mars" thing old news yet? Talk about micro-updates making the front page.
Since this started as a Kim Stanley Robinson thread, I steal one of his ideas and twist it. How about a giant sunshade (parasol, umbrella, what-have-you) blocking light to Venus?
Of course, it is far beyond our current capability, but what about a satellite in Venus orbit that occasionally seeds the Venusian atmosphere with the designer bacteria described above? (Reminds me of to facilitate plankton growth and remove environmental CO2.)
You are confusing issues here. Yes to get abundant life (crops, forests, plankton, etc) you need lots of nitrogen. But to get some form of life wouldn't need that much.
I agree, water DOESN'T, necessarily, mean life. But the converse seems to hold true ("Life means water.") Finding evidence of life somewhere else in the universe is pretty darn important. Why not look where there is water?
I could be wrong (and please feel free to correct me!) but there is a pretty big difference between the northern and southern hemispheres on Mars.
The northern hemisphere is much lower. A hypothetical ocean on Mars would cover much of the northern hemisphere while leaving the south high and dry.
Also the polls themselves have different amounts CO2 ("dry") ice.
Please see this great NASA site with pictures showing that it's not a face.
Of course, I fully expect a reply that this is all just a government sponsored cover-up/conspiracy.