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NASA Probes Reveal Vast Stores of Martian Ice
John Faughnan writes: "The BBC reports that a British newspaper has leaked stunning news from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Vast amounts of water ice are present on mars, "[if it] were to melt it could cover the planet in an ocean at least 500 metres deep." Researchers thought it would take a year to detect any water ice below the martian surface, but the huge quantity meant that weeks of observation were sufficient. The BBC notes that "The Mars Polar Lander was to touch down in exactly the right spot in 1999 and would have undoubtedly detected the ice had it not malfunctioned on the way down." This discovery will change plans for upcoming probes and may lead to a manned mission within the next two decades. The official announcement was scheduled for this Thursday prior to several publications."
This is a serious step ahead for the feasibility of a terraforming project. I'm reading the Mars series from Kim stanley Robinson at the moment, this article is spot on!
They don't have to take water with them. It costs $10,000/pound to put something in orbit. One gallon of water will cost about $80k to put up there. So, there's a weight and cost savings using local water. Plus, they should be able to use the water to generate hydrogen and oxygen, for fuel and survival.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I don't quite understand how the discovery of ice on mars would make manned missions any more possible. Don't they take water with them on missions anyway?
If its already there, it means that you don't have to bring it with you (or at least not as much).
Water can be used in the production of oxygen, and also fuel (after you break down into Hydrogen and Oxygen). These things require a LOT of water... much more than we could possibly hope to bring with us.
Discovery of water also means that the chances of finding life (or at least sign of primative life that once existed there) are much, much greater.
Having ice on mars solves two major problems with shipping human beings to mars, and even creating a settlement there.
First, now we only need to ship enough water to keep them alive for the trip there, thus saving an incredible amount of energy.
Second, which is not so obvious. We only need to send enough oxygen for the trip there. Why? Well, ice is water, water is H2O
2 parts Hydrogen, 1 part Oxygen.
You can chemically seperate the oxygen from the hydrogen using electricity, which is easily generated by either solar collectors and/or a nuclear powerplant. Thus, they can not only drink, but breathe when they get to Mars.
This is an absolutely amazing finding (if it is true), since now it will become considerably cheaper to send people to Mars. Also, it might even become more feasible to leave them there with a colony then to send them back.
~ kjrose
The care needs to be taken in the other direction. Water means that Earth life can live there--for instance, bacteria of the Antarctic sort. If we want to know about Martian indigenous life, we need to not inadvertently release several hundred species of microbes on the planet, some of which might take hold and crowd out any existing forms.
Even if they didn't adapt and live, sorting out their chemical components from those of native forms would complicate research.
Sterilizing an entire spacecraft is no easy job in the first place, and it gets much more difficult when the contents include live human beings.
Has anyone actually looked at a Mars map? I'm running the latest version of the Mars Simulation Project, looking at the planet in topography mode.
This planet has altitudes ranging from approximately -8000 meters to +22000 meters, with two very distinctive zones: around -100 W, mostly on the southern hemisphere, there is a huge, +5000 meters continent; the northern hemisphere is between -5000 and 0 meters; and there is a very impressive hole centered at 70 E and 40 S, between -7000 and -5000 meters, sourrounded by a 0 to 5000 meters zone - what happened there? A huge spacial hit?
Anyway, saying Mars would be covered by 500 meters of water is completely meaningless. I guess they took the quantity of water and divided it by the surface of Mars. They mostly want to impress people, I guess, but I for one would be more impressed if someone came with a new Mars map showing the areas where the "sea" would be once the ice was melted. There is an illustration there, but of course it doesn't take into account the "real" quantity of ice/water.
This is great news if there is water on Mars but i believe one of the major stumbling blocks on a manned mission to Mars and sustaining him isn't so much water
but getting people there alive.
Astronauts just on the journey (180 days each way + 550 days for return journey planetary alignment) would be exposed to lethal doses of radiation meaning when they got to Mars they would already be too ill and poisoned to be of any use to science let alone come home, i don't really feel that comfortable in sending (volunteers) to die a horrible slow death from radiation sickness under the guise of "research"
NASA have did do some research in 1998 on using dirt for shielding on any base but this doesnt answer the journey time radiation exposure problem
I think we forget in our own insignificance that the ISS and the shuttle fly close enough to the Earth's magnetic field and our atmostphere to be protected from the worst effects of our Sun (radiation,flares,magnetic bursts,uv, etc) but once we leave for Mars we will be exposed to the Suns full destructivness and we still havent developed protective materials/shields (short of 6ft thick lead) that will protect us long enough not to kill us in the 915 day exposure of such a mission.
I am still suprised that we think we can send people there after water when so far all we have sent is a glorified "remote control car" instead of an advanced humanoid type robots like this into space
As explained here, earth bacteria survived on the moon for 2 years.
IIRC, they sterilize some space probes by blasting them with radiation before launch.
Many people are neglecting the fact that Mars does not have the gravitational strength to hold oxygen in it's atmosphere. Melt the ice, it will eventually vaporize and then escape the planet.
I was happy ina kind of boyish school kid kind of way about reading this. I don't really think it makes that much difference in reality to the actual *need* or feasability for a permanent manned Mars base, because the Mars northern polar cap always had water ice (or was it the southern one? in any case one did) and a manned base would have had to melt the stuff anyway.
The long term effect of this is that perhaps our descendants will be able to terraform the planet as envisaged by Kim Stanley Robinson and this is the kind of news piece that NASA needs to get public support for a Martian base, although, as I said above, in reality it doesn't change things that much.
To the guy who warned about Radiation poisoning from solar storms on the trip to Mars. Ship designers have been thinking about that one for a long time and this is where the concept of a storm cell on board a ship comes from - a thick walled cell whose walls are basically water tanks to absorb the radiation i.e. ionised particles.
One other thing that should be noted is that if the water is ever leaked to the surface, along with an increase in heat via CO2 being pumped into the atmosphee, then there will probably be a reduction in the amount of dust in the atmosphere, as the iron binds to water droplets. This would modify the atmospheric conditions and probably reduce the number of violent storms. Also, a humid atmosphere would probably also make it more favourable to life, if there isn't any already there.
Without water it would be much more difficult to teraform the planet.
This is unresearched, but I believe that it is a probable scenario, based on the knowledge I have.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Arranging the tanks and compartments that carry such stuff to provide a solar storm safety shelter in the center of your "tin can" is a trivial design exercise. A meter or two of water between you and the radiation is pretty much all you need. The ambient radiation is a problem, although only in percentage terms (it slightly increases your chance of getting cancer sometime later in your life). The point has been made that you could recruit the crew from smokers; they couldn't smoke on the mission; and you would actually decrease their chance of getting cancer during their lives by sending them to Mars!
Many, many design studies have been done utilising exactly the design I mentioned above, and it works. Read about it in this book or at this website.
I agree. We should demonstrate that we can really melt the Antartic ice cap, before we arrogantly assume we can do the same thing on Mars where it's even colder.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You do have a point, but a valid counterpoint would be that the research required to attempt to terraform Mars may have a significant positive impact in our ability to modify our own atmosphere.
We've only been terraforming one planet (albeit for the worse) for a few hundred years. We need more data so we can understand exactly how we're damaging our own world. CO2, O3 are only two variables in a larger and likely mostly unknown equation...
Then we could terraform Mars and Earth at the same time.
I understand you're talking more generally, and this goes back to the "invest at home, not pie in the sky" debate. I'll leave that for another thread...
It absolutely DOES have the gravitational strength to hold oxygen in the atmosphere. The red planet has a gravitational force of 0.32, which is more than strong enough to hold light gases near itself. The problem is that it will take much *more* oxygen and nitrogen to create a breatheable atmosphere, as the lower gravity means the atmosphere will be much taller, or higher above the surface.
" We still haven't figured out how to live on this planet. Why go wreck more?"
Ah the mating cry of the neo-Luddites.
What would the haters of achivement be claiming if they didn't have Hippy Dippy Pop Eco Bullshit from the 1960s?
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
For every person that decides to relocate to Mars, that's one less person putting pressure on Earth.
...until the next baby is born (in less than a second).
Sorry, but it really doesn't seem that colonization is an efficient way to reduce population pressure -- if we've got too many people, it seems far better for everyone if you try to reduce birth rates and eliminate the things associated with high birth rates (poverty, lack of education, lack of women's rights).
That's not to say colonization is worthless -- it probably lets us have a much bigger total population in the long run, it guards against catastrophe, and seems to put everybody in a good mood, what with the whole manifest destiny feeling and all.
Let us, suppose, however, that the Earth is, at a population of 6 billion, overpopulated, that we've stablilized our population growth rates (so that shipping people offworld won't be futile), that we need to get rid of only 1 billion people (a reasonable low-end figure, since many would say that we're already putting a lot of "pressure on Earth," and I doubt 100 million would make much of a difference out of 6 billion), and that there are no inefficiencies introduced by politics (we have an impossibly well-loved, benevolent, and omnipresent dictator).
Can you imagine the amount of resources it would cost to move that many people to Mars and to provide for them there a livable environment? Even if one could mobilize the entire adult population of the Earth to work on this project, one would only have a few people working on it per person you wanted to ship offworld. How many people does it take to get one person into LEO now?
Sure, in a while, maybe it won't be so hard to get into space, but if you're willing to wait that long on a gamble, why not concentrate on reducing birth rates and just wait for the excess population to die off? One might also, in a slightly less macabre vision, want to work on ways to get 6 billion people to have the environmental impact of 5 billion, instead of looking for ways to dispose of 1 billion.
Mars has the highest mountain of the solar system .... and the known extrasolar systems also :-)
:-)
Mons Olympus, 24km.
Mars has the deepest depressions, far deeper than Death Valley or the Death See(Israel). About 3km IIRC.
Mars has the longest and deepest cannyons, about 10km deep and thousend killometers long.
The grand cannyon is a little boy against that.
If the Mars had an atmosphere like earth, on the bottom of the cannyons the pressure would be twice as high, because they are that deep.
If the Mars had an atmosphere, similar/like the Earth, the Mons Olympus would stick out of it.
Its a nice test environment to build a railgun launch facility
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So... there is no indication we have to worry about massive melting. Icebergs breaking off the ice shelfs is natural and not an indication of global warming. Those parts of Antartica that the gloom-and-doom environmentalists expect to warm up, melt, and flood our coast are actually getting colder.