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Geothermal Activity on Mars?
An anonymous reader writes "This article on the New Scientist site reports that Mars Odyssey has detected warm spots (20-40 degrees
warmer irrespective of sunlight, day or night) in the Hellas basin."
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Where do they get the names for the 'geography' of Mars? Sounds like something out of a "gangsta's dictionary".
I'd be willing to bet that's where the martians have mass hot tubs and huge wild parties. If you listen closely, you can hear the cheap 70's porn music wafting up through the thin mars atmosphere...
;)
This post was brought to you by an extreme lack of sleep
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
For those who 1) don't read the article and 2) don't know much about science, this is why this article is "important":
Unusual warm spots on Mars might represent "ice towers" similar to those seen in Antarctica, say researchers. They could even harbour life, Nick Hoffman of Melbourne University told a conference on Thursday.
Then the article talks about how some guy discovered this and what the further implications can be.
Or.... ;^)
It could be methane emmissions from all those cows/rednecks that them pesky martians keep abducting
help! can't they just map our earth on mars and say found hot-spot equivalent to say south africa on mars. i wouldn't have to go waste 0.5 hours searching the web for, what was it?, hellas basin ...
maybe now i'll be able to visit mars to get some Hot Springs action!
it'll be business (and tourism) that fuels the race to mars. once someone can make money by sending people there, there will be people on mars 6 months later.
Martians somewhere need to go somewhere to sunbathe and get drunk. How else do you think they get that nice green tan?
Of course it heats up on Mars! Why do you think it's red? Duh!
And Uranus* is blue cos it's so cold.
Hot things get red, cold things get blue - doesn't every kid know this?
(*All those fans of Uranus/your anus jokes this is your cue. Go get 'em tiger.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
These spots are probably warmer because the temperature is higher relative to other spots.
Slashdot Headline 26/12/2003 - Beagle confirms it has found a few isolated areas on Mars where it is possible to make a decent cup of tea. As yet, no evidence of rain.
Even on Earth, there are a number of places with cold and volcanic vents, but ice towers form in only one place (the most extreme, granted). Obviously the conditions have to be just right. Other than being cold, Antarctica really isn't that much like Mars.
The ice tower story sounds like either Hoffman was either playing to the media, or they were playing him.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Is that international units or imperial?
/. is in the US, so it might not be.
Its a science article, so it should be international units, but
Not important, right? Its not like we ever lost a probe over such issues...
Sigh, its like some kind of conspiracy to force me to RTFA!
You can't take the sky from me...
If the ice tower theory is true, what will this tell us? I think it answers more questions about the current but evolving state of our own planet than it tells us about the history of Mars.
maybe they are vapour trails from invisible martian UFO's ?? or vents for underground works ???
Mars Odyssey has detected warm spots in the Hellas basin.
*ahem*
Wow, it's Hellas hot around here.
Thank you for your patience in this matter
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I think there is life there and the U.S. government thinks we can't handle the truth, so hence we don't go.
I suspect there is life, too. Of course I'm just an armchair scientist and this is just my humble opinion based on what I've read. Further, I suspect that "the government" (people, mostly) reads the same articles as you and is privy to the same data as you. That is what is great about living in an open society.
I don't think there is any conspiracy keeping us from "handling" the truth. Why, you ask? Clinton couldn't keep things mum about getting blow jobs on the floor of the oval office. Nixon couldn't keep things mum about having broken into his political opponents' headquarters. Reagan couldn't keep things mum about having sold weapons to the Iranians to fund a terrorist army in Central America. Bush is having a problem keeping a lid on using forged documentation as a pretext for war (and WHO, pray tell, would forge such a thing anyway?) THESE are secrets that people would certainly have given anything to keep. And still they got out. Because "the government" isn't "the government" -- it is a bunch of people, all with agendas, all using what they know to their advantage when they can. Welcome to the wonderfully messy world of democracy.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, the above wasn't my point -- but I had to debunk the tinfoil hat wearers in this crowd at least a little...
I live in Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes. Most of those lakes are becoming unswimmable because of something called Eurasian Milfoil. Milfoil is a weed grows in lakes. It grows fast. Several feet a day. It was accidentally introduced to America in the early 1900s. It wasn't native but there isn't anything in the lakes on THIS side of the pond that like to eat it so it quickly clogs the entire lake.
And it spreads. From lake-to-lake. Boaters. Fish. Whatever. It finds a way to find a new lake that it can call home and it does. And once it does: Game over everyone else. Not instantly. And there is still a lake there. There is still water. And fish. But now there is a stinky gross weed clogging the entire lake for most of the summer, too. Not really enjoyable. A lot of nose holding and "I remember when we could swim in the lakes without all these weeds here" going on.
Hold on... I'm still building here. And I'm almost to the good stuff. (wait for it...)
My point is this: Let's say there is life on Mars. There won't be cows or zebra or fish or anything like that. No, there will be microbes. Tiny little red life forms that live with almost no oxygen and no water in the freezing cold, bombarded by radiation. Hmmmm... I'm not sure about the rest of you, but the prospect of bringing something that battle-hardened back to Earth to study does not inspire confidence in me. Chernobyl, Enron, Challenger, Columbia, Africanized Killer Bees, cross-pollinated genetically engineered corn... bad things happen unexpectedly. Stuff LEAKS. Again, no conspiracy needed, just the good old second law of thermodynamics coupled with that one law discovered by Murphy making a real world demonstration.
As I said in the subject of my post: I, for one, am glad we aren't going to Mars. We don't need any more milfoil, at least for now. Frankly, I'd be happy to see us wait a few thousand years. For real. Red mold everywhere? Yuck.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Schiaperelli is also accidentally responsible for a lot of postulating about the existence of intelligent life on Mars. He observed dark "channels" possibly caused by natural water flow. In Italian, they are called, "Canali" and were mistranslated into English as "canals" which would tilt most folks' thinking in the direction of intelligence on Mars.
OK, is New Scientist more of a scientific rag, meaning it's Celsius (and 30-40 is quite a lot!) or more of an American 'zine, meaning its Fahrenheit?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Theogermal activity would be a lot more interesting to everyone but the geologists.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Someone remind me what geo- means . . .
-Peter
typical science reporting
"sceintists say that this break though could eventually lead to X"
often with now logical path from A to X.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
it's now called Urectum
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's an argument to not come back.
/ASS(ES)|CARAPASE|SPINNERETTES|MANTLE|RING GANGLION|FLAGELLA|TAPROOT|HYPHAE|HOLDFAST|POSTERIO -VENTRAL REGIONS|Other appropriate target!/Hmmm... I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I am confident that my kind are battlehardened enough to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations, and fondue them. With appropriate technlogy they'd be able to live on not much more than dirt, water and sunlight.
Imagine if we sent everyone we didn't like, just like in the colonial days of sail.
Send them out into the worlds of ten thousand stars. They'll breed fast. Several children a decade. After all, we were accidentially introduced into america a long time ago, and we turned out ok. We weren't native but there wasn't anything on THIS side of the pond that like to eat us quick enough so now we're everywhere.
We can spread. From planet to planet. Solar sails. Nuclear rockets. Whatever. We'll find a way to a new planet to call home. Once we do, we'll make it our business to ensure it's game over for everything else that metabolises. Not instantly, of course. There'll still be a planet there. Some natural parks. and little red microbes. But we'll terraform the place until it looks the way we like it to look.
Hold on... I'm still building here. And I'm almost to the good stuff. (wait for it...)
My point is this: Lets say there is life on mars. WE'LL KICK ITS
WE ARE THE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN UNEXPECTEDLY. We leak. Again, no conspiracy needed, just the good old second law of thermodynamics coupled with that one law discovered by Murphy making a real world demonstration that it applies to everyone in the universe, not just homo sapiens.
As I said in the subject of my post: The inevitable spread of one lifeform over the corpses of another is not a reason to not to go to mars. It is a reason to go and never come back. The Brothers W made Agent Smith say that humanity spreads like a virus. I say that's not a bad idea. Imagine where we'll be in a few thousand years. For real. A human empire spanning most of the known universe with breakaway colonies running social experiments in government and morality? I'm packed. Bring it on!
And yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil,
For I am the evilest sonofabitch in the valley. -- Anonymous, 1967
Similarly I wish I knew the term used to describe phenomenon we would use the adjective "solar" for with our own sun. Other stars don't really have "solar" flares, right.
I don't know, I wouldn't mind drawing Aphrodite's features.
I don't know about lithothermal science (although it sounds like a cool name, but all stars can have flares and coronal mass ejections. We just our flares solar flares.
See the Nasa Space Weather Page
The Pan Am ad from the 70s showed America picked out in bright city lights, all through from coast to coast, while canada and mexico were just dark, as if they had forgotten to pay their power bill.
Does our world really look like that all over? With brighly lit highways from one city to another and visible jet trails from space? or do we look like random luminescent features and warm spots dotted around the surface? (of course it would be hard to miss that spacejunk though, on your final approach it would probably put a hole through you, unless you had it mapped.)
...check out the action on Uranus after a 7-layer burrito.
It would be one thing if amateur astronomers with good telescopes, good observing sights, and lots of patience saw these canals all the time. It would be like the Face on Mars -- the darned thing does look like a face at low res, and at higher res it breaks up into a bunch of mountains. But I don't think anyone since Lowell has seen any canals, and if it were an optical illusion, they should not be hard to see at all.
You also have to figure on the scientific authority effect. In the public mind, Lowell was a professional astronomer out West someplace with a powerful telescope and dry weather, and if he reported canals, who was to say it ain't so? Nowadays you have all kinds of amateurs with access to all kinds of big telescopes, and if there were anything to it, there would be Sky and Telescope articles on how to observe "the canals of Mars."
I suspect that all of the things other postulate about Mars are true... ie. geothermal activity, microbial life, underground water. We now just need to send people there to prove it.
Who's up for the trip?
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
The technology does NOT exist (nor is on the drawing board) to get a human crew to Mars and back. There is no aspect of a mission to Mars that has been realistically worked out, the human race is 50yrs to centuries away from a mission that complex.
Be funny if they went there expecting life, and all they found was an old alien thermoelectric generator someone forgot to turn off before they left the planet.
Should someone intentionally introduce Martian microbes to similar extreme environments here on Earth, we might see something similar, but contained within those extreme environments, and having little impact on that portion of the biosphere we usually experience. Sure it would have some environmental impact, but likely not disastrous. Most likely it would integrate with the local ecology, though perhaps not in way we would like. Esthetically you feel your lakes have suffered by introduction of a weed that wasn't native to the environment 100 years ago, but it's not the end of the world. Only evolution in action. The contamination of these lakes could have happened naturally, and a similar adaptation cycle would have occurred. I suspect introduction of alien species has little true long term impact on the biosphere. Which is not to say such disruptions are desirable, or don't have severe local impacts, aesthetically and economically.
I would say it is likely we can bring back samples and contain them.
If we have an accident, it is unlikely the microbes will spread because they are not adapted to the immediate environment.
Should they somehow gain a toehold in an environment favorable to them, they will likely integrate with the ecology in some way, not totally displace it.
All and all, I think these points argue well for taking the risk of sample return missions, the reward being unknown insights into biological processes.
One final aside, I would use the International Space Station as a first containment stop for a sample return mission, and have written to NASA on this point. Not because is greatly enhances safety (and it probably adds to cost), but because it gives psychological reassurance to the general populace that NASA is doing everything to ensure safety, and it gives the ISS a true mission.
Letter To Iran
Celsius is so twentieth century
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"Okay Guys, that Earth craft is just about to pass over us again. Get ready to make the traditional 'Hello' fart."
Table-ized A.I.
Uh don't forget that Oxygen is pretty toxic/caustic. If something has spent it's whole life in a relatively oxygen free low low pressure environment, then the sudden change will be horrible for that life form. Kinda like we humans trying to live on the surface of Venus - not going to happen.
..........FULL STOP.
NASA just launched 2 rovers toward Mars. I wonder whether it is too late to change the target landing zones if more evidence turns up that these are ice-producing vents. They changed Viking's landing sites after arrival, so I expect they can do the same now. Except that because of lower relative budgets, newer probes sometimes don't have some of the luxuries of earlier ones.
Further, I have read that the landing accuracy is not sufficient enough to pick specific spots. They generally shoot for "zones", not specific spots, and the range of the rovers is generally not far enough to compensate.
There are a lot of weird features in the orbiter photos that it would be nice to see up close. Some look like translucent ice tunnels, others like dark trees that cast odd shadows. Unfortunately they usually have to pick rather flat boring spots for safe landings.
Some ideas are to have a bunch of cheap "landing balls" that can be sent to various spots to do rudimental photos and sampling. It is sort of the shot-gun approach to landing instead of the rifle approach used now (one expensive bullet). This could allow us to look at some of the rougher terrain with less risk (or lower cost of loss). The Mars Polar Lander had some small penatrating probes (non-camera) with it to spread out, but the whole package failed to deploy properly near landing time for some reason.
Table-ized A.I.
On the one hand, it's a British magazine, so we can eliminate the more of an American 'zine option. On the other hand, it's New Scientist, so we can also eliminate the scientific option.
Fantastic! Amazing! Wonderful!
Arethermic events and possibly ice towers!
Too bad we're never going to go there to look them over. Manned missions are dead. What's the point of further exploration?
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
with his next big plan to blow up the Earth!
The warm spot is antipodal to the Great Stone Face of Mars.
Zapp: "The great stone face of Mars. Hmm, the only known entrance to the Martian Reservation."
Leela: "What about the Great Stone Ass of Mars?"
Zapp: "Well, yeah. But it's way on the other side of the planet."
-- futurama
"Tiny little red life forms that live with almost no oxygen and no water in the freezing cold, bombarded by radiation. Hmmmm... I'm not sure about the rest of you, but the prospect of bringing something that battle-hardened back to Earth to study does not inspire confidence in me."
What you fail to realize is that there are such "hardened microbes here already. They've been here for nearly four thousand million years (since about when life began), and guess what? They haven't exactly taken over the planet, and they pose no threat to us.
The organisms that I am refering to, and the hypothetical Martian equivenants of which you speak, are adapted to their particular environments, and not well suited to others like ours (read Human friendly).
Kinda like what Bob Zubrin said about Humans not catching dutch elm disease, and trees not cathing colds. Not the right environments for the organisms that cause the disease.
About the only threat these hypothetical Martain microbes could pose is if they produced some sort of toxin, and that would be absolutely no different from the countless species of bacteria right here on Earth that do the same, and as Botox shows us, this might not be a bad thing either.
Just some thoughts for you to ponder.
Here's a photo of Mars, the elliptical bright feature at lower-center in the image is the Hellas Basin, the largest unequivocal impact basin (formed by an asteroid or comet) on the planet. Hellas is approximately 2200 km (1,370 mi) across. Really amazing detail, photo was taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, check out many more of its pics here.
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