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Martian Sea Discovered
mpesce writes "New Scientist is reporting that a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 m deep) has been discovered by the ESA's Mars Express Probe. Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator. New Scientist also links to a PDF of a paper to be presented next month about the finding." Update: 02/21 15:30 GMT by T : Note: that's 45 meters deep, not 45 kilometers deep.
Woot!
err maybe not, still not enough information but I tell ya all those stories I read growing up seem a little closer now - Edgar Rice Burroughs maybe was a little off in his vision of the planet - but Kim Stanley Robinson or Aurthor C. Clarkes visions may be in reach now. With water on the planet , and it being accessible to us gives any future mission to mars a valuable resource.
I'm 'pumped' so to speak.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
FUCK Roland Piquepaille's blog articles, devoid of content. Copy this sig if you agree!
Yeah! Screw'em
It wasn't too long ago that the guys from the Science magazine compiled their list of the 10 most important breakthroughs of 2004. Ranked 1 were the Mars rovers. For all I remember, Mars Express delivered probably at least as many new insights, if not more, but it was notably missing in that list. Why's that? Just because it doesn't have wheels to drive around, or is it the lack of an american flag on its side? Or what exactly is it that puts the rovers into a league of their own?
It's amazing to me that the submitter could make three errors in the first half of the first sentence of his submission.
It's not between 800 and 900 in size, it is 800 by 900.
It's 45 meters deep, not km.
Frozen ice? Well, duh.
it's powers of observation and recounting as keen as these that make eye witness testimony so compelling.
Only as long as there is no Ice Nine.
Which reminds me RIP Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. And yes I know Vonnegut wrote ice nine... just reminded me. Sad day today.
Of course, I think the distance from the Sun seems like a much bigger barrier to getting Mars to be warm enough to be habitable than the atmosphere. I'd think even with a Venus-like atmosphere it would take a damn long time for enough energy to get trapped to warm it up to an Earthlike temperature. And that's after the amount of time it would take to actually change the atmosphere that much.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Just because we found ice there doesn't mean it's going to be habitable by human lifeforms ;) I mean, do /you/ think we can live off frozen water by the martian equator?
:P
Maybe we could develop another form of intelligent life that would be able to handle Martian environments. Or shove some random small animal there that is not necessarily intelligent but could handle it and see what it evolves into after a few billion years.
I just don't think we'll be moving there too soon
I don't not believe there isn't a God.
Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator.
I have to admit I don't know a lot about this yet... but why is it such a "kicker" that the ice is so near the equator?
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I suppose if u had super small (~ 100 nanometer) particles of ice, you would have a stable suspension in air - so it wd be sort of gaseous ice
about the age of the ice pack. Estimated at 5 million years by crater impact aging. If Mars had water 5 million years ago on the surface then it may had a atmosphere then also. And if it had a atmosphere just as long as earth did until 5 million years ago then there could of been life on the planet and advanced life at that. We've seen microbes on ancient mars rocks so it's entirely possible there was life on mars but to what extent we cant see. Maybe storms or whatever stripped mars of it's atmosphere erased any visible signs from the surface such as vegetation.
Don't worry, it's going - very, very quickly.
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make install -not war
FTA: Images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express show raft-like ground structures - dubbed "plates" - that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles, according to an international team of scientists.
If it is indeed frozen H2O like in Antarctica, there is a possibility that it also contains liquid water within the ice. To the surprise of explorers, that was found in Antarctica.
I tried to find a link to that information but I couldn't find anything good. My source is this Antarctica documentary
I wonder what the temperature variation is on the Mars equator. Theoretically, how would that temperature variation affect a body of water of that size?
the magnetic field doesn't protect us from radiation. Radiation is unaffected by magnetic fields of any kind. In fact.. it doesn't even really protect us from charged particles a la solar wind. It just redirects them to impact closer to the poles. The only thing it protects is low orbit satellites in relatively low inclination orbit. Those of us here on earth are protected from both of those things by 14.7psi of mostly nitrogen on one side and the entire earth from beneath. If this were not the case, no one could live in canada. What do you think the aurora are anyway? Mars' moons are much smaller than our moon (probably captured asteroids), so would have negligable tides.
by definition though, if we terraformed mars, it would be habitable.
850m^2 * pi * 45m is 102,141,031m^3, which is 2.7E10 gallons. Ice is 107.5% the volume of its water mass, 2.5E10 gallons. Which is about 15-20% the size of only one of the NYC upstate reservoirs. Perhaps documenting the process by which this ice collected and buried will explain whether there was any other water, and where it went.
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make install -not war
Now, I'm not sure how the parent got tagged as funny, because I see it more as insightful or interesting. Right now, Mars is in its natural state, and changing it to fit our needs would be destroying that natural state. The same thing has happened here on Earth. The natural state was moved aside to make room for roads, buildings, and other things that did not occur in our natural ennvironment. What's interesting is that these developments are not bad. For the most part they have increased our quality of life. So, terraforming Mars may destroy its natural state, but would that be so bad, especially if it does turn out to be uninhabited?
I thought they had deployed the radar boom and discovered the Ice, but it turns out these are theorized findings from visible light photos. And it appears NASA doesn't agree totally with this. WTF? Why do the Euro's argue with us on every damn Mars thing? I mean how many times have they been to the Red Planet, oh I forgot, this is like their first FREAKING time.
When they deploy the MARSIS boom and verify this stuff, then I will crack the bubbly.
bottle them and send them to mars.
That's a rather expensive solution a bit cheaper would be to
1. make torpedoes out of water ice,
2. pour in the liquid CO2
3. vent the torpedoe to freeze the CO2
4. cap the torpedoe with water
5. drop the torpedoes into the ocean over a deep trench
The torpedoes would of course disolve/melt and the CO2 would stay liquid in the high preasure and cold sea bed and flow into the ocean bottom sediments and react with the minerals there.
This would be much less expensive than lifting the CO2 out of the Earth's gravity well, then again out of the sun's well.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My point is that actual use of units doesn't involve paper--and it doesn't involve unit conversion.
If it doesn't involve unit conversion, then your point about how much easier it is to cut a quart into cups is meaningless. No one unit is any better than any other, so the only way one of our systems can have an advantage over the other is in terms of unit conversion.
If it did, units better amenable to conversion would have been derived a lot earlier.
Decimal units had no advantages before there was agreement on a decimal, positional number system. The old units that were based on 12th, 16th, 24th, and 60th came about long before the Indian/Arabic system became standard in Europe. Yes, they are older, but that doesn't make them better any more than Roman numerals are better than Arab.
It's just another Enlightenment flim-flam.
Right. Like critical investigation, scientific method, human rights, and modern democracy!
I hate to be rude, but bullshit.
Your problem is not rudeness (I don't mind), it's that you're wrong. It's not "impossible" to eyeball a fifth, that's ridiculous. Why would it be? But more importantly, I know aproximately how much a deciliter is, just like you know aproximately how long an inch is, without having to take it out of a foot.