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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?"
they already found water on mars!
AFAIK, all the "water" finds on Mars have been indirect - albeit very convincing - evidence of surface water in the past.
But the radars on this puppy might just punch down - maybe only a few feet - and get a hard f*ing ice reflection, which would put paid to all the surmise and deduction. Then we would know its still there.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
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.
A friend of mine is a planetary geologist that has been working with data from this probe since it reached Mars. He's reasonably convinced that Mars has had active hydrology in the recent past geologically-speaking, so from what I gather he'd be really, really surprised if they found no water at all.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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, I don't know if I would mod you arrogantly misleading, but perhaps grossly simplifying.
I mean, take hydrogen, oxygen, two very abundant elements in the solar system, and bam!, you have water.
It's not this easy. As I look around the room, I see gads of oxygen and hydrogen molecules. (Yes, I have very good eyesight!) I have bammed many times tonight, and yet still no water. Okay, some sweat on my Coke can--oh, and in my Coke--but that was water already formed; it doesn't count.
It's not like water just automatically spontaneously forms from hydrogen and oxygen (that whole entropy thing), it only happens under a specific set of circumstances as a specific reaction. Most of the hydrogen and oxygen in, on, and around the Earth is not water, although a lot of it is. It's contained in other molecules such as O2 (what we breathe in), CO2 (what we breathe out, of which there is LOTS on Mars), H2 (potential fuel panacea and, oh, what also blew the Hindenburg up), SiO2 (sand, of which we have plenty), and so on.
And we're not talking about looking for just a few free-floating water molecules. It's generally accepted (okay I admit, only by everyone I've asked, which is a group composed entirely of myself currently) that when one talks about "water on Mars," he or she is referring to a rather large collection of the stuff, such as in a lake, an icecap, or even an ice cube.
So no, I don't think it's so readily apparent that there is water on Mars, otherwise I have a tough time believing that scientists are so gung ho to spend billions of dollars to prove something that everyone knows is so painfully obvious.
"There's ice on the moon you know. Yes. The Moon. The moon was part of the Earth once, so you can be pretty sure that the moon has ice on it. Maybe not a lot, but it's there."
That is rather facile logic. By the same token we should expect life on the moon shouldn't we? After all it was "part of the earth". The Moon was formed in the fiery inferno of a planetoid collision with earth, any water that didn't volatilize off and remained after coalescence couldn't be readily held by the weak gravity and intense solar irradiation at its (relatively) close orbit to the sun. Furthermore, the only place where water has been SUGGESTED to possibly occur on the moon is at the poles in permanently shaded bottoms of craters in the form of hydrated minerals and in fine and sparse ice dust among the dirt. There is nothing absolutely certain and derministic about the presence of water on any solar system body (except earth) without examining that object first. Io (right next to europa!) has no water because its a flaming hell full of superhot volcanoes produced by the tidal flexing of its mantle; an effect from the orbits of Europa and its proximity to Jupiter. This is a completely non-intuitive phenomenon and no one really suspected it was happening until we went there with the Voyagers.
"Same goes for carbon which is why if a planet's not drenched in water, ten to one it's flooded with methane or some other hydrocarbon."
I wouldn't take THAT bet! The only place we know of in the solar system which is "flooded with hydrocarbons" is Titan. An absence of water is absolutely by no means a determinant factor in whether a world has lots of hydrocarbons! (eg. Venus, the Moon, Mercury, Io, Phobos, Neptune, Jupiter...... all have no water and NO huge amounts of hydrocarbons!) The solar system seldom lends itself to easy characterization by the application of overly simple maxims of the sort you seem to have affection toward.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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!)