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Mars Express Begins Search for Water on Mars
H_Fisher writes "The BBC reports that the Mars Express spacecraft team is ready to deploy a radar antenna to search for traces of water and ice beneath the Martian surface. The deployment has been delayed for a year due to concerns that the unfurled antenna might damage the spaceship. Mission controllers are optimistic; perhaps the ESA will be the next to make an important discovery about the red planet?"
The Long John Silver Restaurant chain will be willing to offer free shrimp for a second time if this finds any fresh water. Of a man's appetite can dream.
Viking saw dry ice frost (CO2), not water frost. And the water seen at the poles is not a small amount, it is thought to be HUGE amounts.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Just to clue you in, it's fairly standard practice to thoroughly sterilize landers and probes before they get sent up to avoid that possibility... not to mention, even if something did get by, it would take a competent biologist probably 2 minutes to figure out it was of Earth origin... "move along, nothing to see here".
Well not to be argumentative, but:
a ge /vl2_22e169.html>
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_p
among many others.
Brett
That's weird, I ate a lot of Mars bars for a week and I couldn't shit at all for a couple days.
I mean, take hydrogen, oxygen, two very abundant elements in the solar system, and bam!, you have water.
Please take a chemistry course. Oxygen and hydrogen don't just spontaneously form water. You have to nudge the solution over it's activation barrier before the two will react. Of course the activation barrier depends on many variables.
Just because something can happen doesn't necessarily mean that it will happen.
Well. maybe. But note:
p 98_1.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast01se
recounting the discovery of common strep (Streptococcus mitis) that was left in the camera on Surveyor 3 and returned 3 years later on Apollo 12, surviving the equally difficult environment on the moon.
This really tells you two things - first, that it's possible for bacteria with at least some protection to take the raw space environment for a while, and second, that although there are at least some consideration for preventing contaimination on most if not all landers (including Surveyor) that stuff slips through the cracks. They didn't pay nearly the attention to it on Surveryor that they had on others before and since (some of the early Ranger missions had failures suspected to have been caused by the sterilization procedures damaging the equipment) but they didn't just sneeze in it and shoot it off, either.
Brett
(and yes, space is sort of my personal hobby horse (not to mention my primary source of income), so please forgive my multiple posts!)
The images are not recoloured. It is simply a product of swapping the red channel for an infra-red channel as NASA often does.
This graph shows the reflectance of each of the colours on the calibration target. Notice how the blue target relects infra-red light in the region of 400-500mm.
When taking most science photos, more often than not they use the infra-red filter. When putting together pictures for the press they use the infra-red channel rather than red. The upshot of this is that particular blues reflect strongly in infra-red and come out in the final picture as red.
You can see a wonderful example in this picture which shows the blue insulation tape as pink, and the usually blue NASA logo as red.
They're not modifying the images, just using the filters most useful for science applications.