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Hellish Vision of Mars Unveiled

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the fire-in-the-sky dept.

mvladivostok writes "Yahoo has an interesting little article in which it is suggested that Mars may not have once been a warm, wet and hospitable planet that somehow lost its atmosphere; instead, it is suggested that the dead planet was occasionally bombarded by melting meteorites that carved out its distinctive craters and valleys. An interesting read."

3 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Still by Thaelon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's got water, that would make future colonization that much easier/more feasible.

    --

    Question everything

  2. A bit contrived, perhaps? by Montreal+Geek · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is certainly not my field (more like a hobby) but it it just me or is this scenario a bit contrived?

    While it's certainly possible that Mars would have been bombarded this way, it doesn't appear likely for two reasons:

    For one, there is no evidence of any other planetary body which would have gotten a significant infusion of water this way and it seems unlikely that Mars would have been the only target.

    But the most important detail seems to be to just be a question of quantity. Regardless of maturity, in order for deep riverbeds such as appear on Mars to form you need a lot of water flowing for a fairly long time (years, not days). To get that water from impacts would mean that a LOT of such impacts need to have taken place over a (cosmologically) short period; which makes the first point above all the more noticable.

    Even if Mars did get significant amounts of water this way (or had enough of it melted out by side effects) the water wouldn't have been around long enough to make geological constructs unless there was an atmosphere allowing it to remain liquid long enough to flow around for years.

    I'm surprised someone at NASA would publish national-enquirer quality science like that. More likely, Yahoo misread the paper to extract the nice sounding bits.

    -- MG

  3. 3.85 billion years ago ... by franimal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The same thing was happening on Earth. Earth gets smacked, life gets crushed, picks itself up, and tries again. Thankfully, life has yet to crush itself.