Slashdot Mirror
More on the Mars Ice Cap
bfwebster writes "In a striking example of how a preliminary (but wrong!) scientific conclusion can persist for decades, Space.com has a story about how the south polar ice cap on Mars is mostly water, not mostly carbon dioxide (dry ice), as has been stated since the late 1960s. The new finding is based on analysis of Mars Observer readings that show that the souther polar ice cap is too warm at certain seasons to be dry ice. This finding has negative implications both for those claiming that liquid flow structures on Mars were caused by C02 instead of H20, as well as those who were hoping to use all that CO2 for terraforming."
What?
If we can't Terrorform Mars then....
The Terarrists HAVE WON!
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Why are they using this flimsy temerature evidence that the ice is water and not C02? It seems to me that they could use a spectrometer to determine its exact chemical composition...
When are these so called scientists & astronomers going to give up on this whole "planet called Mars" bit?
Scientists discover that the ice cap is cotton candy, not water. The "beer-foam" scientists are devastated. Life continues exactly as before.
Your paranoia is about as subtle as the alien probe in your neck.
"This finding has negative implications both for those claiming that liquid flow structures on Mars were caused by C02 instead of H20, as well as those who were hoping to use all that CO2 for terraforming." "
On the other hand, it has positive implications for those wanting to make slurpees.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Terraforming Mars amounts to making "gods out of geeks," as one critic put it.
Shotgun not Atlas.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
Terraforming by CO2 looks like it is no longer immediately feasible. However, since most of the minerals are below the surface anyway, it should be possible to create domed structures using the terrain of mars currently in existence to build habitats. Greenhouses could easily be built on the surface to produce food or grown underground by artificial light. Extracting water from the caps could be done and piped into colonies elsewhere. We hoped it would be easy to drop algae or some other organism on mars, release the CO2, and let nature take its course to heat up the planet. Now we just have to work a little harder. I'd still like to vacation on mars before I die, regardless of whether a spacesuit would be necessary.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Now future Mars astronauts can start out their camps right; they can build a brewery to use that water!
Trolling is a art,
Water vapor holds in heat too. Just not as effectively as CO2.
It's pretty damn good mixed with Bourbon, too.
Maybe someone should explain to the scientists we have to worry about not having our probes CRASH ON LANDING before we can worry about actually terraforming a planet.
I'm guessing the north pole is dry ice still. that means if the planet warms a bit we get club soda. I'll drink to that.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Isn't water as important to future development on mars as CO2?
Start the reactorrr!!
Sorry karma, I just couldn't resist.
Okay, we know now that most of the ice cap is actually water. So....
What does that mean? Will that mean a new space initiative aimed at a manned trip to Mars? More satellites hovering over the red planet?
I guess what I'm asking: will we actually do anything productive with the news of water on Mars? If not, are we simply wasting hundreds of millions on Mars, when many other projects exist for NASA?
The Political Programmer
Well, I hope the atmosphere (what little there is) is still CO2, then. I hope they weren't wrong about that. That seems unlikely, though. I worry only because just five minutes ago I left a seminar about mars exploration and how probes with nuclear reactor generators would dissapate heat faster in CO2 than in most other gaseous surroundings.
The Mariner series of spacecraft went to Mars around that time period. I can't find a successful one in 1966, though. Here's the list:
a damn probe down there?
Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't water(drinkable?) on Mars a good thing for those that want a colony? Hell, it could cool help operate a nuclear power plant and mixed with ethynol help colonist morale. Those opposed to this idea can mix methynol with the power planet's old cooling water(the stuff that's been in the inner loop for years.) Or is the camp that believes the caps are CO2(middle school science teachers) to the point of sabatauge!? Better call the probe a "welcoming guesture to aliens" and it'll get through.
BTW Mr. Watson, I did get question #3 right on the "planets quiz." I lied about my dog chewing the DB25 connector off my serial printer, so we can call it even.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
However, IIRC much of the carbon dioxide on Mars is probably in the regolith rather than on the polar cap. It's just a lot harder to get to. It still might be possible to terraform Mars, but the job seems to be harder than first thought.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well, July 14th plus nine months equals 1966. Remember, it takes a while to get to there (unless, of course, those dates are the ddates when they flew by).
The Political Programmer
I think that highest problem with Mars' terraforming is not of "biochemical" nature but astrophysical. Mars doesn't have a huge satelite like Earth (relatively speaking, of course - Moon is one sixth of Earth's mass) to regulate its rotation. As a consequence Mars doesn't really have stable seasons (well, Earth doesn't seem to have them either, but for a completely different reason :)) and I believe that this is a huge impediment in any kind of a terraforming effort
The Raven
..we find out the real story and send a probe to Mars/Europa/Whereever else to settle this indecisiveness. It's not that hard.
I don't quite follow you. While it's true that -3 * -8 2/3 is 26, that's rather meaningless. -60 * -8 2/3 is 520.
Now if you could use your analogy between Earth temperature differences between polar and American regions, then the calculation would be more like this: -3 to 26 is a difference of 29, so instead of -60 at the Martian south pole, we can expect -31 at some American landing site. Of course, if we had picked the average summer temperature in Mecca, that would suggest we could find a better landing site on Mars where it would be warmer.
So all these calculations are bunk, or I'm totally confused.
I'll go ahead and point out some of the flaws you said where there but didn't mention. Earth is a larger planet, so the temperature gradient from equator to pole can be greater. Earth also has a much more pronounced tilt than Mars meaning that our "summers are warmer and winters are colder" relative to those on Mars. These two facts alone would make the rough 8 2/3 factor not too meaningful, but I'm sure there are a lot of other factors making the temperature on Mars a bit more unlivable than you think. Of course, I'm a geneticist and don't have a clue when it comes to astrophysics so I might have ignored something that would work in the opposite direction as well...
Mariner 4 was launched at the end of 1964. 1965 is the date of the actual flyby.
There were no Mars launches in 1966-68. Mariner 5 was originally built as a backup to Mariner 4, launched in 1964. When Mariner 4 completed its mission successfully, the backup was reoutfitted for a flyby of Venus.
Launch: June 14, 1967
Flyby: October 19, 1967
Mass: 245 kilograms (540 pounds)
Science instruments: Ultraviolet photometer, cosmic dust, solar plasma, trapped radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, radio occultation
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
There's plenty of water, so ... when the Martians attack Earth, it's because they want our C02, right?
-kgj
Might I point out that factors between temperatures are meaningless when using a non-zeroed scale? 26C is not eight-odd times warmer than -3 -- you're looking at 299K vs 270K. Thus a more reasonable (but still incorrect due to the differences in the size of planet, etc. mentioned by others) would be to take that -60C (= 213K) and multiply it by 1.107 to get ~236K, or -37C, which is -34F.
Clearly we should extend the "War on Terror" to the planet Mars - they keep shooting down our probes. Time to implement a "No Orbit" zone around the Communist Red Planet Menace!
I mean, really, think about it - their moons (Phobos and Deimos) - those are clearly suspicious names. (translate them for more info)
Is there anybody on /. who is actually OPPOSED to the idea of terraforming another planet? In the article it says some folks are going on about making our own place more livable, yadda yadda yadda, but I don't really see why anybody would be opposed to the idea of expanding humanity's reach. Please don't mod me flamebait, I'm really interested in knowing why anybody would think it's a bad thing...
*ahem*
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore... in the old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long. Seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will only be about a mile and three-quarters long.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such a wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain
^^^ Just about says it all about this bit of reasoning, don't you think?
"When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me"
just put about 1500 coal buring power plants on the surface and in 50 years it will be a tropical island.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Greenhouses could easily be built on the surface
for sufficiently large values of easy
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Ok,
Here is why Terraforming is good. It turns an otherwise dead planet into a living one. Think beyond us mere humans, and thing of life as a whole and what it has done since its beginnings billions of years ago - life expands to fill every available niche. Life has expanded and become the massive and complex biosphere that it is today. Life has also experienced numerous near total extinction on numerous occasions. Life has now finally gained the capability of leaving its womb planet and expanding outwards to other worlds.
Of course we are talking about life expanding onto other worlds as long as there is no pre-existing life, especially complex life there already. As long as Terraforming meets those ethical requirments I have yet to hear a single reason not to terraform. After all we are only talking about the perpetuation of life itself. I almost would be bold enough to say, "that if you are against terraforming, then you are basically against life itself".
Planet P Blog
www.enthea.org
The fact of the matter is that terraforming will take centuries longer than it will take humans to exponentially evolve the technology to not even need a biologically-hospitipal waste-of-matter gravity-well to live on. We'll almost certainly be tearing planets apart for their raw material instead of building human zoos on their surface.
Yeah... I know, talking about the accelerating rate of technological change and about "whacko" trans/posthumanism isn't as sexy as talk'n about terraforming or about meat-popsicles flying around in cool spaceships... so sue me.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Does Mars have an ionosphere protecting it from solar radiation? I was taught in school that that is one of the reasons Earth can sustain life, because most of the radiation from the sun is stopped from hitting the surface by the magnetic field of the Earth. If Mars does not have a sufficient ionosphere, is there any hope? can buildings keep their occupants safe from the radiation?
Wouldn't it be feasible to simply dig onto the crust of Mars and provoking volcanoes? Volcanoes would both heat the surface of the planet and bring gases into the atmosphere. Yeah, we would have to dig for years, but I guess not milleniums :)
-- The first dotcom failure: command.com
Last I heard, water causes a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2.
So the fact that the ice caps consist of water rather than solid CO2 means nothing but GOOD!
Not only do we have something even more useful for trapping heat (if we could melt it), but we have something that Earth-based life requires quite a lot of to survive.
Strange, some of the conclusions people come to when the find that a pet project needs a slight tweak.
IMO, I see it as a much bigger problem that Mars lacks a strong, relatively-stable magnetic field. If we hope one day to live there, we don't *need* to bother making its atmosphere human-friendly, because we'd need to live a few hundred feet underground anyway to survive the constant bombardment of the surface by "hard" radiation.
Now, for a personal oddball idea, one of the science projects from the ex-Columbia inspired me. Insects need only a small fraction of the oxygen of mammals, far less water, and can survive even a hard vaccuum and fairly high levels of background radiation. The experiment with "ants in space", as covered on Slashdot a couple weeks ago, led me to wonder, why don't we just ship a few dozen different insect colonies to Mars and let *them* terraform it? Ants apparently do much better in lower gravity, they "farm" aphids and fungus (of which some strains could conceivably survive on the chemical-energy-bearing soil on mars, thus providing food for the ants), they clean their own microenvironment... Perfect for what we need. Let the little guys build up Mars' biosphere for a few decades, then other introduced organisms would have a much better chance for survival.
Mars also contains CO2 in its soil. This is in two forms: (1) CO2 directly adsorbed onto the (porous) rocks and dirt, and (2) CO2 in ice form mixed into the soil, possibly mixed with water ice as well.
Read here to learn more.
The extent of these soil deposits is almost completely unknown and difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, if the surface temperature were raised then some portion of this trapped CO2 would outgas. (This would be akin to obtaining liquid/vapor water by heating a section of Siberian permafrost.) Because CO2 is such a good greenhouse gas, there might therefore exist a temperature threshold beyond which the outgassing of CO2 and subsequent greenhouse heating would push the planet into a self-sustaining "hot" mode.
Or it may be the case that too much of the CO2 on Mars has either been lost to space, or is chemically locked up in carbonate rocks. This is a numerical question that won't get answered until we have the ability to bore into the surface and measure the free CO2 content.
I'm personally doubtful of these "heat it up and it will automatically fix itself" scenarios. If Mars did sustain a liquid water ocean at some point (an amazingly we still don't know the answer to that for sure), then something dramatic must have happened to make it shift into the cold, dry climate that exists today. My likeliest candidate would be the cooling and freezing of the planet's core, and the subsequent cessation of volcanic activity. Without volcanos, CO2 gets locked up in carbonate rocks and it never cycles back into gaseous CO2. The same thing could happen to the Earth someday, but fortunately the Sun will have long since gone supergiant and vaporized us in our tracks.
I dunno, God sounds pretty geeky to me. And what's wrong with that anyway?
The object of the game should be this:
Send autonomous construction robots to Mars.
Use the native materials to build enourmous castles.
Pressurize the castles for humans.
Terraforming would take too long to be any use.
Hopefully, at one point, we will be able to do this, but by the time we are capable of doing such, I'm almost CERTAIN we'll have a better technology than using the icecaps anyway!
One suggestion has been to make absolutely certain the planet contains no life (which is doubtful it does) and then nuke the entire planet in strategic places causing a nuclear winter and possibly even creating a magnetic atmosphere that will hold in more gases and atmospheric components. To spread algae in a blanket over the planet and other life to evolve and create "semi-artificial" biospheres is probably a good technique.
BUT, again, while it's nice to speculate about terraforming, remember we are at LEAST 15 years away from a manned mission and probably over a century away from a colony, then two centuries from having the ability to take on something like this, and by then, we will most likely be able to snap our fingers and terraform the planet.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I have a serious question.
The people in this forum who deny the 'Greenhouse Effect' (and whenever there's an article about the environment, there are plenty saying things like "We don't have enough data..." or "It's a bit arrogant to think that man can have an effect on the environment..." or "It's bad science...") how come they don't they come out and blast the science of terraforming a planet like Mars?
I don't know how others feel about this, but I for one am GLAD they finally put a cap on Martian Ice... Too much of it would cause all sorts of iceo-economic fluctuations that we just can't deal with right now.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I guess we'll just have to make our green-house effect the old fashioned way. Can we send Texas to Mars?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
We don't need CO2 as much as we need Nitrogen in the atmoshpere and in the ground. Well anywho we need Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Carbon Di-Oxide all together (as well as inert gasses but they're miniscule). In order to get a viable ecosystem of any kind of proportions we need all 3.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
water will "burn off" more quickly in the practically non-existant Martain atmosphere. complex greenhouse gasses like flexocarbomethane (meh?) and wonderful CFC's that don't go into space and can actually withstand the constant hard radiation comign in from the sun without breaking up into smaller lesss useful bits.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Terraforming" is the act of changing a planet to resemble Earth, especially for the purpose of sustaining life from Earth.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
This is beginning to be a bit off topic, so I won't spend too much time here.
I can't speak for all of the anti-Greenhouse Effect folks, but the biggest problem that I have with it is that the whole debate is too politically charged, with scientists doing research with pre-conceived results, questionable sponsors, and a focusing too narrowly one just one or two root causes to the problem. Don't blast me here, because I've spent too much time with real researchers fighting for grants, tenure, publication, conference presentations, and all of the other acedemic BS that almost makes a mockery of science. Despite all of that, there are people who are genuine in their desire to do scientific research, but a real question has to be asked if they are getting lost in the background noise of simple charlitains who are trying to find a way to get a quick buck...by faking science or simply being lazy because they don't care.
I also say that Mars is a good example of what is going to be required to prove the "Greenhouse Effect" on a planetary scale, because it will prove on a planetary scale what kinds of activity is going to be required in order to actually affect the environment. If it is going to be so difficult, then it will be hard on the Earth. The opposite is also going to be true.
In other words, terraforming Mars would be the real final proof that massive industrial activity really has an effect on the whole planet. And if we succeed at warming up Mars by 10-20 degrees, it will be a useful alternative to Earth if we really are screwing it up permanently.
Forgive the nitpick, but the Mars Observer wasn't involved in this. It was a combination of data from Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor. Observer isn't even mentioned in the article...gotta proof-read those submissions, folks. :-)
Contact was lost with Observer shortly before it was to enter orbit around Mars.
See JPL/NASA for more information on the 2001 Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.