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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.
Then again, if you were to use life on Earth as an example, you could argue that life can always persevere in the presence of water (from thermal vent-driven ecosystems devoid of energy from the sun, to environments that have been trapped under ice near the artic circle for a hundred years).
All we need to do now is send Schwarzenegger up there to turn on that ice melting machine.
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
However, this hydrogen is something that the next generation will get to use, not mine. We need to figure out if we still have what it takes to get to the Moon, when the Chinese try next year.
Why slashdot? Why not?
Oh...kay. Call me strange, I've never really considered a "big pocket of trapped hydrogen gas on Mars" much of a turn-on, but to each his own.
...
so when does the mad rush to build your own hydrogen farm on mars start? selling tickets on my spaceship! but seriously, now we have the possibility of being able to send a manned mission there, and then they can gather their own fuel for the way back! well, once we figure out that whole hydrogen fuel cell engine. . . or something. . .
This confirms my belief that Santa Claus could indeed be living on Mars.
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.
We have plenty of water here, I read somewhere that like 60% of the earth's surface is water. Why do we need to get water from other planets? Looks like a waste of time to me.
We can also hypothesize that they discovered slushies millions of years before us, and that they would've given us a run for our money at the Winter Olympics.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
If they want to prove the voracity of their claim that copious amounts of hydrogen must be water, why don't they try this experiment on Earth. NASA did this with the Galileo space probe. It was equipped with some kind of spectrometer that was supposed to detect particular elements. When it was far enough away, they tested it on Earth to see if they'd get the readings they were expecting from other planets.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
But honestly, who cares? To have life, you
need earth, fire, and sky, too. They
obviously don't have earth, as we are on Earth,
and that is Mars. They can't have fire, as their
minimal sky doesn't have enough oxygen.
So they don't have the four elements necessary
for life. I'm just going to stay here and figure
out the first two digits of pi on my abacus.
Astronauts have again found ice on mars which scientists speculate could be evidence of life, just as they have on previous missions.
Dj
I think I has to be pure hydrogen.
We all know that it is a very light gas and would rise to the north pole... duh!
So now we have purified water, mineral water, distilled water, rain water, tap water, spring water, and now martian water. It's a Bobby Boucher dream come true.
I find it somewhat unlikely that a huge pocket of hydrogen might be underneath the surface, but there's a simple way to check. Just crash a probe into the planet. If Mars ruptures and starts lurching around the solar system like an untied balloon, the theory might have some merit.
This avenue of research should be explored as soon as possible. This is in keeping with my conviction that our scientific dollars should be spent in the most entertaining ways possible.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
They could pack Strom Thurmond in it until they're ready to bring him back from the dead!! /me watches karma wither away.
...although I kind of like the idea of Mars' pole covering a huge pocket of hydrogen gas.
You need three things for combustion. Fuel, got that. Ignition source, sure. Oxygen, don't got that. Maybe you could process it with the CO2 in the atmosphere to make hydrocarbons, oxygen, or even alcohol, (for the astronauts of course) but that would require energy to produce and there wouldn't be enough oxygen to fully combust any of those products. Hydrogen alone isn't good for much. Maybe if you sent a factory over used solar power to generate stuff (which was part of somebody's plan to get to Mars...) it could be useful, but just hydrogen has limited usefulness. I doubt it would be worth shipping back to earth to fuel the hydrogen economy either unless we're looking for hydrogen prices like $100 per cubic meter, cubic foot, mole, or whatever. Yeah, that'll work...
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Ice = Oxygen/Hydrogen
Oxygen/Hydrogen = rocket fuel
Rocket Fuel = launching point for further operations from the Martian surface... Also, it would make it unneccessary to haul water to and from mars (saves a lot of cost if we ever decide to inhabit the planet)
If we ever decide to go to mars, i hope to see some permanent settlement.. no use in going and coming back in 3 days
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
An adaptation of the best scene in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe to explain exactly what's going on here. Enjoy.
The telescope aperture opened.
"Hello?" said the man.
"Do you run the observatory?" said the planet Mars.
The man smiled at it.
"I try not to," he said. "Are you wet?"
The planet Mars looked at him in astonishment.
"Wet?" it cried. "Does it look as if I'm wet?"
"That's how it looks to me," said the man, "but how you feel about it might be an altogether different matter. If you feel a giant hydrogen pocket under each pole makes you dry, you'd better get some."
Hang on a sec while I go get my dart gun, with which I plan to resolve the issue that Mars is just another Hindenburg waiting to happen.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
Could it be the original Russian water substitute that they are detecting, Vodka?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
HOCKEY!
And Canada will be happy to represent Earth in the Solar Cup Hockey championships.
I wonder if Don Cherry will whine as much about the Martian way to play as he tends to do about Europe?
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
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.
Isn't it funny that you are saying that you need evidence to back up a principle? I could make up a whole bunch of "principles", and then call everyone else "doubters" and, heck, I could publish a public education textbook.
Martian scientists have just found definite proof of solid ice on the poles of earth, now bringing up the possibility of life. A scientists was quoted as saying "This is exciting news, if earth has solid ice, then it is possible that ice burrowing intellegent lifeforms such as ourself. We always new earth had liquid water but everyone knows it is impossible to life in melted ice, or even in a gas atmosphere."
They found the ice I planted...soon they'll find the lost civilization, then the obilesk on europa, and then unlock the mysteries of artificial intelligence. Creating a new super race of robots that will wage war on them and enclose them in a reality emulating matrix to power their metal bodies. Yes...it's all coming together nicely...muhah hah hah
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.
It is through electrodynamism and these pockets of gas that the Martians would hurl their cylinders toward our Earth! We should be steadfast in our study of Mars, for surely they are studying us just as intently; Perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
- I am made of meat.
You choose to believe creationism until proven wrong. The only problem with that is it is, and will always be, impossible to prove creationism wrong. I could say I choose to believe Japanese speaking kangaroo's with badass superpowers live in black holes and I will continue to believe this until proven wrong. It's a pretty safe statement considering it's impossible to prove wrong. I am not saying creationism *is* wrong or you and others should not believe it, but I think the statement "until proven wrong" is illogical. I am not an athiest like many evolutionists, and I am also not monotheistic like most creationists. I like to think of the universe and "god" in monistic terms, that is existence as a whole is "god", not some guy on a cloud. From this point of view, IMHO, evolution is a form of creation, and in my simple mind, makes the evolution and creation debate kind of silly. To come back on track though, belief in something that cannot be proven wrong because it hasn't been proven wrong yet is not a method of choosing beliefs I would recommend to you or anyone unfortunate enough to read what I have to say.
Beware blue cats moving at
If life simular to that on Earth were found on Mars, it wouldn't prove anything, but would be strong evidence that one of two things happend: 1. Life started somewhere, and moved between planets (metiors or viking spacecraft); or 2. As you suggest, life in both places came to be for the same reason. Either multi-celled organisms "adapted" to life on Mars, or God created multi-celled organisms on Mars -- I don't think your theoretical discovery would favor either of those theories over the other.
I'm curious why you suppose that a creationist (like myself) would have a problem with creation happening in more than one place? If God created Mars and Earth (and every thing else that is not "formless and void") and God created life on Earth, then why would it be hard for Him to create life on Mars? (or anywhere else?)
If you begin with the assumption that you can explain the universe without any supernatual intervention, then evolutionary theory fits most of the data pretty well (better than anything else.) If you don't begin with that assumption, and also have "evidence of things unseen" (which, by neccesity, is unscientific) then the origins question becomes a theological question, rather than a scientific one. If you want to know the truth, I think you need to consider both, and that is going to make the question harder.
The last I read, one of the reasons Mars is in its present state is because it lacks sufficient mass to retain an atmosphere that will allow greenhouse warming.
Why then is the idea of terraforming Mars even considered? If we could generate a significant volume of CO2 into the atmosphere, won't alot of it either escape to space, or freeze? Mars is not a balmy place, given that it is about 1.5 times further from the sun than the earth. Given that is also almost half the radius of earth and an order of magnitude less in mass, is it really practical to attempt to terraform the place.
If a warming atmosphere were created, how warm would it get? There would certainly be far less sunlight than an arctic spring, with the suns energy significantly lessened from the increased distance. Would we not merely have a chilly, mostly lifeless planet? I doubt that a terraformed Mars could support much more than hardy steppe grasses, it would almost certainly be too cold for most animals and aquatic life.
Someone please educate me.
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
Water Water Everywhere But Not A Drop To Drink.
Anyone besides me getting sick of these "There's water on Mars!" Oh wait "There's no water on Mars!" stories?
I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars day before yesterday, and the first thing that came to mind when I read this news is that it's just SO obvious -- EVERYONE knows there's tons of water on Mars!
Talk about getting caught up in the story...
/Nanoox