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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.
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.
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