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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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
Having two identical rovers on Mars rules out these theories. Whatever is happening is specific to one rover and not the other - so it can't be atmospheric, and it probably isn't dust related - since the dust is virtually identical (and equally opaque) at both sites.
On top of that - the rover did have decreasing power output over the past year - so something changed to reverse that trend...
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.
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...
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!
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
You only use 2% of your DNA
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.
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!
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.
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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.
Plus its got those Oxygen Generators underground!!! Kuato knows where they are...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
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.
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