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Evidence of Glaciers on Mars?
cyclop writes "Nature reports that the Mars Express mission has photographed evidence of ancient glaciers on Mars. It seems glaciers have sculpted valleys on the red planet, much like on Earth." Reader macguys writes "Space.com is reporting that the Mars Rover Opportunity has received an unexpected and unexplained power boost of between 2 and 5 percent. The NASA Rover site is so far silent on the boost."
I was under the impression the "unexplained power boost" was due to the fact that the Martian day is longer at this time of year.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
well, at least the martians were kind enough to recharge its batteries for us...
The martians were trying to connect their iPods to the rover so they could get the latest U2 album.
This was posted weeks ago...
Dust Devil Cleaning Services, the last remains of the vast martian civilization
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Maybe the drive wheel that was stuck freed up and and lowered the load. Or, more likely, a lucky gusty of wind cleaned some of the dust off the solar cells.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
NASA announced that the rover's next destination will be the powerup that will give it rocket launchers.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
We will always have the homeless, whether we go to Mars or not.
Proverbs 21:19
Someone should start up a site that everyone can place predictions and bets on the day that Spirit and Opprotunity dies.
It should be like the site that let everyone bet when the next big version of Linux was coming.
It'd be good clean fun for geeks,
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!
Please see this very recent Slashdot article for more about the vast red plains.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
There is Jolt Cola on mars. This can only mean one thing. Martians are a bunch of jumped up caffiene druggies hiding out in their sophisticated cave strongholds and are currently planning to destroy the earth by sending their ancient glaciers here to be melted by global warming and thus submerging our free and democratic planet.
Why yes I have been listening to Donald Rumsfeld a lot lately, why do you ask?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Probably just Marvin messing with them.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Man, it's Friday, isn't it?
--- Ban humanity.
We will always have the homeless, whether we go to Mars or not.
Not if we send them to Mars.
You've got to be joking. Space exploration holds not only the future for our species (Earth isn't always going to be habitiable for us, especially the way we're treating it), but endless possibilities of discovery. Isolation never has done anyone any good, and that counts for staying planetside as well. We could easily fund social programs like you're talking about if everyone actually got up and contributed more to the communities that they live in. When was the last time you were at your local elemenary school dropping off supplies, or handing out food to the homeless?
cleverly disguised as a responsible adult ||
From the site:Seems that perhaps all those Slashdotters who always ask why wipers couldn't have been installed, or claim that dust was immediately going to kill power, can finally be silenced?
One aspect of a particularly long mission like the Mars Rovers is that it acts as a real-world test-bed for the new technologies. Maybe the dust buildup isn't nearly as big an issue as was originally thought, and maybe they've found a good compromise between power consumption and keeping the rover innards warm with the 'deep sleep' capacity. Still, the machinery will fail eventually - here's to hoping that however it does fail, it'll provide them with more information on how to improve things for future missions!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
What does it give us? Theoretically in the future when we have consumed all of this planet's resources we'll be able to move to Mars and get cracking on ruining that planet too. Bet your homeless couldn't get us there.
But in all seriousness, there are better ways of caring for the needy here. Take, for instance, farmers' subsidies. Instead of paying farmers to not plant crops, or buying it then destroying it, why not buy the crops at fair market prices then giving the food to the hungry? How about instead of zoning to attract subdivision developers that build half-million-dollar homes, and homeowners' associations to artifically keep home values high, push to develop affordable and safe housing without skyrocketing property taxes?
Either of these would go much farther in saving the world than stripping NASA of its relative pittance of a budget.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Hope, curiosity and adventure are 'wants' that we strive to satisfy. You're right we will probably always have the homeless. We should work to help our fellow man/woman but does that mean we should give up our pursuit of satisfying curiosity and technological development?
And someone at NASA gets the task of giving this poor kid the difficult message that he is not getting anything, because it was unrequested...
"Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view." - David Hilbert
mmmmmm, i love the smell of uneducated replies in the face of reason in the morning!
cleverly disguised as a responsible adult ||
maybe the ambient light on mars, in the proper spectrum is greater than expected. i.e. a higher number of lumens?
maybe the properties (refractivity/reflectivity?) of the dust have a quality that allows the light to pass through at a greater rate than expected? or is it possible for them to emit a non-visible spectrum which can be used by the solar cells?
maybe the little green men have a vacuum cleaner and were doing some housekeeping
Maybe they used Duracell(tm) , i.e. for once maybe something (batteries) are more efficient than initially thought
are they measuring things like this?...perhaps someone can enlighten us.
wiped the dust off the panels. Now they are waiting irritatedly for their 2 grebnaks.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Contents of most recent data transmission:
That's easy, that was November 2nd 2004.
I'm not saying I don't like what the MERs have sent back, but some of the ESA stuff is pretty sweet looking
ESA's Mars Express
Glaciers before... No Glaciers now...
That means...
Mars was destroyed by global warming!!!
(Yeah it's tongue in cheek... but it's gotta make you think!)
The ability to survive on the moon will require constant importing. It will need water. Nor will it be possible to colonize the moon to any great length.
Mars, OTH, can be truely colonized. It has water, O2, N2, Carbon, etc. It has everything needed, except that it has a thin atmosphere. It is possible that Mars actually has life on it as well.
Finally, how does this impact us (america or even the earth) today? Every time that mankind reaches, it has to develop new ideas and new things. these will always be applied elsewhere. NASA (and I believe the USSR's space program) caused numerous advances for humans, both directly and more indirectly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That is one surreal image. Any particular reason for thinking that?
BTW, whoever modded you down as "overrated" when you hadn't even been modded yet is a cunt of the highest order.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
could it be that a spaceship from the future came back to the past and gave the rover the energy boost required?????
That rover must be on the edge to discover something very important.
I think i watch too much startrek
God is real unless declared as int
Nah, Mom finally ran across the rover. She's a compulsive neat freak, so naturally she dusts it.
She's been trying to get it to come eat dinner and meet the family; she's a bit miffed that it won't respond...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
But if it existed then it was a long time ago. Plenty of time for all the evidence to be hidden beneath the sand. Mars is not exactly known for its non-sand storm nature.
Even if there are fossils to be found the chances of finding them with 2 little carts pottering about are about zero. It would be like driving around your local city and claiming there never been dinosaurs because you didn't find any.
At the moment what everyone is doing is speculating. Worse the speculations are based on very small samples and compared to only 1 planet wich we don't really understand yet either.
I have lived long enough to have gone through several cycles of mars having and not having water. The only thing I know for certain is that nobody knows for certain.
Could an intelligent species have lived on mars and left? We only recently discovered that a small species of humans has existed very recently very close by. Frankly anyone who claims to know the answer to what lived or didn't live on mars in the past is insane. You can guess. You can estimate. But certain we can't be. More fun anyway.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
>is if there was life on mars, could the species
>have used all their possible oxygen(assuming they
>brethed it of course), and having nothing to
>reproduce the oxygen, just kinda bounced off the
>planet?
Uh... no. O2 is a byproduct of photosynthesis (well, more specifically, the electron transport chain in the tylakoid that obtains electrons from water to create reduced NAD(P)H, but that's splitting hairs). Life existed for a long time on Earth without atmospheric oxygen. In fact, the apparition of massive quantities of oxygen in the atmosphere was probably a disaster of cataclysmic proportions for many living cells back then (dead cells being notoriously unaffected by changes in the environment).
The fact that there's so much aerobic life as of today (there're still plenty of O2-less ecosystems out there) is just that organisms adapted to those rude algae and plants making O2 like crazy. It's by no means a requirement for life.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
The locations of martian "canals" as reported by Percival Lowell in the early 20th century (and a few others before him) do not line up with the locations of martian channels and valleys as imaged by orbiting spacecraft. The current thinking is that Percy & company were just squinting really hard at their telescopes and linking fuzzy bright and dark patches of the martian surface in their minds. Incidentally, the polar caps of Mars do have water ice in addition to carbon dioxide ice in the winter.
This is not a new result. It has long been observed that some valley deposits on Mars resemble glacial morains. By far the best evidence for glaciation on Mars is at its north pole and it is well documented.
The increasing power levels of the Mars rovers is explained by the lengthening daylight hours in the Mars northern hemisphere spring. What is surprising is that the solar panels may be being cleaned by wind action.
an ill wind that blows no good
http://www.co2clean.com/snowform.htm Or, in other words, dP/dT=deltaS/deltaV
Project Steve
Very difficult to find-- I had to go to the Opportunity updates page and search for the first occurence of the word "power."
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
If all it takes is to be declared homeless to be able to be sent to Mars, then I declare myself homeless. I would gladly go if there was at least a 50% chance of surviving.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You only use 2% of your DNA
That's very true - but it's another step into space that I believe we have to take before we go even further. One foot in front of the other kind of thing.
cleverly disguised as a responsible adult ||
Glaciers carve rounded "U"-shaped valleys while rivers make pointed "V"-shaped valleys. You can distinguish the two in places like Yosemite and Denali which have valleys of both kinds in the past 15,000 years. The geologists were seeing this in the Mars photographs.
Because finding life somewhere other than here on Earth would conclusively show that we are not unique/along in the universe. Fantastic discovery no doubt.
we will always have
bums, vagrants, and hobos
painted as homeless and pandered to as such
I know good people who have ended up homeless. Through no fault of their own. They have held jobs while being homeless.
It's easy to rip on them from your position of relative comfort. Yes, there are some who are bums, but others are not. The fact is, capitalism always leaves some people in the dust. Which is why it must be combined with an effective welfare state for it to be humane.
inflating the number of homeless only serves to support the agenda of those who would profit from those numbers...
or those who profit by proppagating the idea that all homeless are bums. Those who don't want to give up their ivory backscratchers to pay taxes to actually help other people.
Wait 'til it goes from "Look at what those dopes on Earth sent here" to "Let's start messing with them." Mark my words, it'll happen!
Ah..Ah..AaaaaCHOOOOOooooo! Damned Mars dust. Hey, I feel alert now!
Table-ized A.I.
I just thought that Mars still had full-service stations, thus proving their civilization is far more advanced than ours.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Goddam moderators! Don't moderate these comments anything other than redundant! This discussion comes up every freaking time a story about the rovers is posted.
For the last time, Nasa did consider ways to clean the panels, but it decided wisely that the benefits did not outweigh the costs in doing so both in extra weight and money. It's not just a 5 minute job to bolt on a set of wiper blades.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
It seems like it might be there, water on the moon that is in the form of ice
. html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_moon
The data show a distinctive 4.6 percent signature over the north polar region and a 3.0 percent signature over the south, a strong indication that water is present in both these areas.
It was a reference to the face on mars which, not surprisingly turned out to not look like a face at all.
Of course, I originally read the comment as "...giant feces flowing across..." which kinda ruined my lunch.
Mars, OTH, can be truely colonized. It has water, O2, N2, Carbon, etc. It has everything needed, except that it has a thin atmosphere. It is possible that Mars actually has life on it as well.
Unfortunately, terra-forming Mars is all but impossible due to the lack of a strong magnetosphere, which allowed the solar wind to strip the atmosphere in the first place. Then there is the issue of a surface soil which is radioactive from billions of years of exposure.
IMO, the best use of resources would be towards the continued development of space stations and launch/reentry technologies. At a minimum it is the first step in colonizing space.
That's thylakoid, usually.
Oh, I feel extra specially geeky today!
But seriously, thanks for actually contributing something interesting and useful to the discussion - an awful lot of people don't seem to realize that just because we need O2, that doesn't mean that life does!
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
Well, the amount of water there is minimal and hard to get at. It is mixed in the dirt (well, at least they think so). Worse, the feds want to use it not for living, but propellant. That will burn it up at a fast rate.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'd have had to look up the details, it's been a while. (The "plant physiologist" label on my door is all a terrible mistake!)
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
Plus its got those Oxygen Generators underground!!! Kuato knows where they are...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
If I remember correctly, this exact same story came out in the August issue of National Geographic. That might have been their hunch and now they have confirmed it. Still interesting though.
NASA probably didn't even tip them. Cheap bastards.
The magnetosphere isn't a significant factor, Mars likely just never had much of an atmosphere to start with. As a counterexample, Venus gets about 4.45 times as much solar radiation as Mars, has no significant magnetic field, and has a weaker surface gravity than Earth, yet it has far more atmosphere than Earth.
To the parent:
Mars has rather sparse amounts of nitrogen...you're probably going to bring that from Earth either way. Other than that, the moon has everything Mars has, it's a shorter duration trip, the shorter communications lag makes ground control feasible for more things, and it has less gravity to overcome for launch or landing. (Mars has enough atmosphere to make trouble on reentry, but too little to make soft landings easy.) Also, the atmosphere has combined with any free metals on the surface of Mars...this is not so on the moon.
Mars is interesting as a potential life-supporting body...studying a biology that originated on another planet could give us new insights into that of our own world. However, I don't see it as a useful colonization or industrial target.
By the time we figure out how to get to another planet like Earth, we sure as hell better have figured out how to live on Earth without messing it up.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
They probably could find some bacteria by scraping the underside of the rover. It surely picked up some on Earth. Instead of looking for bacteria on Mars, maybe it would be more useful for us to see if bacteria from Earth could SURVIVE on Mars.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If Mars had oceans and rivers as theorized, then there must have been a significant atmosphere for those liquid bodies to form. As for Venus, while it doesn't have much of a magnetosphere, it has a constant supply of SO2 and CO2 from volcanic activity and enough gravity to keep the heavier atmospheric molecules from being stripped away.
(Score:5, Insightful) ???
Can we please have a scientific, and not political discussion here? (Score:5, Insightful)?? How about off-topic. If you want to complain about the US election, take it over to the politics section and let the few of us that are left talk about the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Geez
Put identity in the browser.
don't remember where but i read/saw that they expected that there where enough water there to both propellant and a steady water supply to a "moonbase". It's all a matter of size isn't it :)
But as you say, the problem is where and how to extract that water.
If we ever get around to establish an moonbase, the propellant side of things will be less important than today since we can launch from the moon, that will require less power and less propellant.
Our mistreatment of the Earth is not sufficient to cause the Earth to become uninhabitable. Nature has checks and balances built in such that the very things which make the Earth sick cause other processes to begin which make the Earth more healthy. Much like our own bodies.
It would appear that someone put a lot of thought into this.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Please define what you mean by sick.
The earth is not a living system.
It doesn't replicate.
Therefore it can't be shaped by any form of natural selection.
Therefore it is not like our own body.
I would rather find a solution that involves less loss of human life. Ultimately taking care of the environment is about ensuring our future, not the Earth's. The Earth will go on, with or without us.
That won't hold true for long. Once our inefficient top-down manufacturing methods give way to advancing bottom-up nanotechnology, it will be very easy to create self-contained biospheres with 100% molecular recyclability.
In comes solar, and out goes infrared; everything else can be perfectly broken down and reused. (Not as sci-fi as you might think).
--
Power to the Peaceful
Where the grandparent goes wrong is in assuming that that optimum necessarily works in our best interests. Extinctions are part of the process. If we mess up the environment badly enough, we may find ourselves extinct. Life on Earth will recover and go on without us.
You may have read it that way, but my intention was not to imply that the Earth evolves in order to sustain human life.
I agree that the Earth evolves in order to support life in general. We may as a species cause great numbers of ourselves to die off due to overpollution or what have you, but ultimately, our survival depends more on random chance and natural selection.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Because apart from it being one more part to test and risk failing (and possibly damaging other components in the process), for the weight of them they could have simply put larger solar panels.
"Now we're getting to Science -- I love this!" -- Dr. Steven Chu, Energy Secretary confirmation hearings.
This is a different power increase from the gradual one reported on in the earlier press releases. The space.com article is dated November 4th, and refers to 2-5% power increase overnight. The best candidate for an explanation seems to be that Opportunity was targeted by a dust devil that blew almost all of the dust off of it - And the rover is now at 82% full power, a condition it hasn't experienced for months. Talk about luck!
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
I'm not convinced there would have to be much more of a Martian atmosphere than you would get by warming up present day Mars and breaking up some of the peroxides and carbonates in the soil. However, much of the atmosphere would be H2O, which would be lost more quickly due to its lower molecular weight. (whether or not it had a significant magnetosphere)
As for volcanic atmosphere...well, there's a lot of volcanos, and some very big ones, as well as evidence of some really huge lava flows. However, everything I've seen so far indicates that Venus is only expected to have fairly Earthlike levels of activity today...it's not an inferno of constant eruptions, it's just a really hot and dry hell.
In any case, I'm not saying that atmospheric loss doesn't happen, only that the charged particles of the solar wind aren't a huge factor in it. Escape velocity and mean particle velocity in the upper atmosphere are the main factors, and charged particles will carry only a tiny fraction of total solar heat energy, and deliver most of it more deeply in the atmosphere. The initial atmosphere, present temperatures, and the lack of recent tectonic or volcanic activity on Mars seem like far more important factors.
AAARRRRGGHH!!!! Thanks, now I am going to have that song stuck in my mind right through the entire f*@$!#g holiday season...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
I'm sorry, but I can not agree with this point of view.
I assume that scientific theory that you are writing about is the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock, which in my point of view totally flawed.
If natural selection optimizes anything it would be the ability to replicate.
The algorithm of evolution is quite simple:
Organisms replicate.
The replication rate of organisms is higher that their habitat can provide (otherwise we would have billions of eliphants etc).
Selection takes place (the sieve that will shift between those organisms that will reproduce and those that won't):
Some die by a stupid accident (e.g. lightning), some don't.
Some die because they are not resistant to some kind of disease, some are and will not die.
Some are better at obtain energy than others.
etc.
Those that don't die before the age propagation will have a chance to replicate.
Some of those were lucky and some were not (it's getting bit binary).
But some where lucky because they happended to be more prepared for their environment they encountered (not because they were not hit by lightning).
They had something that gave them an advatange.
In the long run this something will be selected for.
Of course this something exists of many "things".
So what is the "thing" that is being selected. What is the "thing" that stays. This is what biologist call the unit of selection.
So what is the unit of selection... it is not species, not organisms, it is the replicator: the unit of selection is: the gene!
Those genes that give an organism a higher chance for reproduction will increase in number,
those that give an organism a lower chance will dwindle in numbers.
Natural selection doesn't optimize "loops".
The "whole web of life" doesn't co-evolve towards "optimum survival of each species". It doesn't evolve at all. Genes of species can co-evolve. The "whole web of life" can't. (Or genes IN species co-evolve)
There is nothing "nice" about evolution. If it does happen to be "nice" in our point of view, it isn't "nice". Evolution doesn't know "nice". To be more precice it doesn't "know" anything.
A virus doesn't give a damn about its host it infects. A pathogenic bacterium doesn't either.
A virus that would be so virulent that it would kill its host before it can infect another is simply not viable. It would die.
A virus that would be a little bit nicer would a better chance.
Therefore it would replicate. However a virus that would be too "nice", e.g. one that would take minimal resources of its host, would be replaced be the one that would.
Sorry for this rant, but there is no "collective natural selection".
http://www.enterprisemission.com
Scroll down to see what Dr. Hoagland alleges to be Martian fossils. I'm not entirely convinced, based upon what we've seen so far, that the rovers have spotted fossilized life forms, but these rocks deserve further scrutiny (and additional missions.)
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
I wonder why the rover doesnt have a self-cleaning system?
:]
It's a rover, not an oven. Obviously the engineers realized this and skipped the self-clean mode.
I suspect they ran into a couple of heroin addicted aliens who charged them a dollar to clean the solar-cells.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
No. No one ever thought about this. You, sir, should be a robot designer, or at least a rocket scientist. You should get in your car right now, and drive to Nasa. Tell them about your revelation and demand a job! The future is waiting for you!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I thought even here on earth all life was made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the so-called "chon". (Only called that by nerds and geeks, but look where I am.) It might not be atmospheric but it's bound up in the things they consume, as all living things must do...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just did it on a lark 'cause I'm bored to tears with studying right now.
If you have ever managed to merge together images on one of those wacky posters before, you know the trick.
All I did was select two of the 3D images they have all ready to go (at nasa.jpl.gov), sized them down with photoshop on a black background, played with the placement for a while until they were just right for me to merge in my brain while aabout eight inches away from my monitor.
It was freaking unreal. The silly red/green images don't work at all like the real thing. It's worth it to do the real thing. Use only the plain left and right images designed for this. 90% of the time I had no idea what I was really looking at when looking at the regular 2D lander photos.
Suddenly, it was all so obvious! I was standing on a hill, looking down across a giant valley, with mountains rising off in the distance. Breathtaking, stunning detain and perspective. It was SO MUCH MORE REAL, like really being there and looking out a window!
Nasa should find a way to make the true 3d experience more accessible to everyone, without the funky red/green glasses. Maybe with that "Viewmaster" viewer or something. They'd have a TON more money coming their way if they passed out viewmasters with 3D imagry to all of Congress.
I seen the pix & the raw data--definately fossils there.
Fossil hunting is an old hobby of mine,besides,the pix were comfirmed by quite a few independant sources.
Geek Hillbilly
No, because the off-topic parent is still rated 5, insightful. I would start an entire off-topic thread and waste all 50 of my karma just to shut the politicos up and move them over where they belong.
You and I, however, aren't talking politics, now, are we?
I know: Discussion of the moderation system will be modded off-topic.
Everything else is a free-for-all, especially politics.
Put identity in the browser.
Admittedly, the way some supporters of the Gaia hypothesis have written about it damages their credibility. People tend to make this out to be some sort of mystical thing, when it really isn't. It's not that the Earth or Evolution is intelligent, it's just that it exhibits complex behavior arising from simpler processes.
Well, the terrain is similar, as is the air quality...
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
And we can say that conclusively why?
Can we be certain the every ogrganism on Earth is not just a "gene" of Earth's DNA. Look at how some of those "gene"s are attempting to move forward and populate other planets.
Maybe the Earth is just an electronic circling the nucleus of a giant atom in a humongous organism. Maybe our electron is a planet circling the sun of some miniscule system.
Let's not get stuck thinking that our idea of life is the only possibility. That our scale is the only scale that exists. By doing so, science does to itself what it accuses religion of, believing that man is the entire focus of all that exists.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.