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Ice Detected Underneath Mars' North Pole
TheSync writes "A Reuters/Yahoo story says University of Arizona and Russian scientists have detected water ice uniformly distributed in the soil of Mars' north polar regions. The amount of hydrogen detected indicates ice of 80% to 90% of soil volume. Data was used from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey." It's worth noting that their study only detected large amounts of hydrogen; so much hydrogen that ice is figured to be the only form it could be in, although I kind of like the idea of Mars' pole covering a huge pocket of hydrogen gas.
Considering that Mars has permanent polar ice caps (the permanent part is water ice, there's a CO2 ice part that expands in the winter), this is hardly a surprise.
-- Alastair
Yup, we have known that the Martian poles freeze over seasonally. The dispute has been over whether or not the ice was composed of all CO2, largely of CO2 (like the Martian ice we have found elsewhere), or of the hydrogen variety.
The use of spectrometers in discovering hydrogen has long been proven valid (the criteria for proof is all there). This is why astronomers are so confident when claiming that "planet-X", which is a couple hundred thousand light years away, has an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen. Spectrometers were used to determine why planets within our own solar system like Neptune (with have blue hues) had outer atmospheres that contained large amounts of methane. Many submissions to accredited astronomy journals wouldn't be taken seriously otherwise.
Well one thing they know for a fact. There is no free hydrogen on Mars. None. Any gaseous hydrogen would literally just wander off into space.
So if they're detecting hydrogen in any quantity it must be locked up in something on the surface and that something must leave the hydrogen still detectable.
The list is fairly short and water is at the top of it.
Number two on the list, by the way, is organic compounds.
KFG
It can't be hydrogen gas trapped beneath the polar caps. Molecules don't get much smaller or lighter than H2, and it surely would have wormed its way through any polar layer and into the atmosphere by now. And I can't imagine that it would be cold enough for the hydrogen to be in liquid form, so that pretty much leaves water as the most likely candidate.
Note that IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), so no flames please for anything I might have overlooked.
Don't forget the theories about an ecosystem being present in Lake Vostok, several miles below the surface of Antarctica.
As cool as it would be to find out (along with the scientific significance of the data), should we really contaminate that ecosystem if it exists? As much as we try not to, any intervention would upset a potentially fragile system.
Something most people don't know is that Vostok is not one of a kind. It is merely the largest of approximately 70 lakes under the primary Antarctic ice sheet, identified by radar imaging. Because it is so large, it is likely that it has been liquid for a large portion of the 40+ million years that Antarctica has been glaciated, thus giving plenty of time for evolution and the development of a novel ecosystem. Whether that ecosystem is "fragile" is anybody's guess, but whatever bacteria live down there do so in a very large (one the largest lakes on Earth) and unfriendly swimming pool.
Incidently there will be no fish in Lake Vostok. Subglacial lakes of this kind form under mature ice sheets. When an ice sheet grows to around 3 or 4 km, it becomes so thick that it can no longer effectively dissipate the slow outflow of heat from the Earth's interior. The result is that the ice sheet actually melts from the bottom. This water, combined with melt from friction as the ice sheet overruns rock, provides the source of the water that accumulates in low spots and forms subglacial lakes. The lubrication such water provides greatly enhances ice flow rates and limits the maximum thickness of glaciation.
Anyway, this means that any life that is present in Vostok today must have survived in the soil underneath a growing glacier for millions of years until the ice sheet was large enough to trap sufficient geothermal heat that liquid water could occur and pool into the form we see today. Hence it is very unlikely that we would find anything more advanced than bacteria down there, though it certainly would be interesting if there was more advanced life down there.
While going into space on top of a roman candle is a horrible inefficent way of doing things, it's the technology we master today. What technology we master when we are setting up a launchfacility on Mars we can only speculate about, but lets assume that the elsewheredrive isn't yet avilable and we have to make do with LH and LOX (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen).
However, it'll cost far less, energywise, to launch something from Mars than from the earth. Mars has a escape velocity of just 5.03 km/s^2, compared to earths 11.19 km/s^2. And as we all know that Ek = m*v^2, the energy needed to deliver something into interplanitary space from Mars will be roughtly 1/5th of what it'll cost us to launch it from the surface of the earth (launching from the moon will cost under 1/20th of launching from the earth - but there is no readily avilable supply of water on the moon as far as I know).
Having seen that there is indeed some sence in building and launching oldfashion chemical rockets from the surface of the red planet, lets consider just how to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen, before we compress/freeze it. This takes, as pointed out, a whole lot of energy. Fortunatly however, bang smack in the middle of our solar system we got a gigantic nuclear furnace pumping out more energy than even the western civilisation can waste. True, Mars is somewhat farther from the earth, and the Solar irradiance is just 589.2 W/m^2 (or about 43.1% of earths), but Mars contains large open deserts and has less problems with clouds than earth do. Large solar farms should solve the problem, and I'm fairly sure that Mars itself can provide the necesary materials to construct them.
All information about Mars in this reply is taken from Nasa's Mars Fact Sheet.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Mars and Earth exchange material all the time from impacts on their surfaces. There are several instances of rocks that came from Mars having been found on Earth and the reverse is most likely true also, that Earth rocks have traveled to Mars. So if there is life on Mars, there is a chance that it came from Earth - or maybe even life on Earth even originated on Mars.
Take a look at this NASA site for more information about Mars-Earth meteorites. Here's a space.com article that describes just how Earth is hit by a Mars meteor about once a month.
Sapere aude!
While the majority of people are now convinced of evolution, there still remain pockets of faithful that follow creationist theory. A discover of a developed life form on another planet, however insignificant, would give undisputable proof of the ability of life to develop and adapt to the circumstances it finds. Bacteria found in this region, however, would prove very little, as bacteria can be found everywhere,
About the easiest organisms to demonstrate evolution are bacteria. Specifically antibiotic resistance amongst disease causing bacteria. In the natural scheme of things both the bacteria and the antibiotic producing organisms would be evolving.
Sorry why? Bacteria evolve just like other organisms, in fact their rapid reproduction ensures that they are much faster at evolving into new niches.
Bacteria didn't spontaneously appear from inorganic molecules, they are orders of magnitude more complicated than the simple organic molecules from which the Solar System was formed and are the result of evolution.
To claim that multicellular life is clear evidence of evolution is a false paradigm, multicellular life evolved from pre-existing life which had in turn evolved.
And a single-cell organism can be complicated. As a trivial example, any eukaryotic cell containing mitochondria clearly shows that it is the distant descendant of two ancestral cell lines. The mitochondria carry their own DNA, separate from that of the nucleus.
Any life on Mars will be the product of evolution.
The Creationist will discount any evidence of evolution. If multicellular life was found on Mars, they would immediately raise the threshold once again.
But you are right, evidence for any life on Mars would be astounding.
Best wishes,
Mike.
This Wired article points out the fact that, even during the middle ages, Christian scholars found that extraterrestrial life would not seriously challenge their faith. You can bet these guys weren't big advocates of evolution, either.
There was no concept of Scientific Evolution before the 19th Century.
I'll also mention that the Pope is an evolutionist, also noted in the article, although he almost certainly believes in creationism, as well.
You'd be quite wrong.
I don't know why people confuse the bizarre anti-rational, anti-evolutionary beliefs of a few nutty Fundamentalists from the US Bible Belt with the beliefs of Christians around the world.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
True, but remember relatavistic effects. Assuming that c is absolute, and theres no way around it, we can still send colonists to far away galaxies, assuming we do it at close enough to c that shipboard, it will only appear to take a few years/decades. The speed of light is like a time machine, it halts time for all those on board the ship. So if we sent a ship 2 million light years to andromeda, it will take to million years, but those on the ship wont notice the difference. This prevents evolution and extinction of the human race, while allowing it to essentially spread to all the galaxies of the universe, even if life on earth goes extinct.
Evolution is not a model, it is a fact. The Evolution Theory is a model that explains in details how evolution works.
It is the same as confusing gravity and Theory of Gravity. The former is an observable fact, the latter is a theory that explains it.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
[I had to remind her these people are called archaeologists].
Actually, those people are called paleontologists. Archaeologists dig up buildings and pots and things of that sort.