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Ice Lake on Mars
DecoDragon writes "The ESA's Mars Express discovered an ice lake on Mars. The ESA has a number of images and an explanation of what was found. The lake was found in an unnamed crater. The report says it can't be carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide ice had already disappeared from the northern polar cap at the time the image was taken." Coverage from the BBC also available. From the article: "The team has also been able to detect faint traces of water ice along the rim of the crater and on the crater walls. Mars is covered with deep gorges, apparently carved out by rivers and glaciers, although most of the water vanished millions of years ago. "
Water is needed by life. As a result, life implies water. Not the other way around.
Odds are, we could live on Mars right now -- learning to grow crops could take some work, but everything else is actually fairly straightforward. You can make bricks from the soil, make O2 from the atmosphere, mine water out of the soil, etc.
Now, when *will* we live on Mars is something else. The answer is pretty much either "a couple of years after a major government decides it's worthwhile" or, more likely, "a few years after we find some way to make money by doing so".
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Sustainable... no, but you might be able to use this to help a small outpost last a long time.
Of course, motivating a government to pursue this goal results in enormous economic gains over the mid to long term. Look at apollo. The sheer amount of research and manufacturing buildup that had to happen to make it possible gave a huge boost to the US in every corner of the economy as it did so. Big govt money spurs research, factory construction, employment to man those factories etc... and don't forget the societal boost as you give your nation a purpose.
Of course, Senator Joe Doofus just sees that taxes will be raised a few dollars to see this accomplished and strikes it down.
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A couple of very good reasons:
An analogy: European settlement destroyed much of the indigenous human heritage of South America. Catholic missionaries deliberately burned indigenous religious books, and pulled down indigenous temples. European explorers and settlers killed thousands of indigenous peoples with guns, and millions with European germs. We still have only a tenuous understanding of what human life was like before Europeans discovered South America, and that knowledge is slowly and painfully wrung from mall and inaccessible archaeological digs. (The same can be said of Australia and parts of Africa, where Europeans hunted natives for sport and received bounties for native scalps.) How much more would we know if we had an unbroken cultural history to learn from?
The worst setback to our knowledge of Martian life -- and by extension, life anywhere other than Earth -- would be to heedlessly rush in and destroy the uniqueness of what we hope to study.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I think it might be that the ice on the poles is frozen CO2 (like "dry ice"), whereas this is frozen H20. At least that's what I inferred fromt he article.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Trying to skate in low gravity would definatly be an interesting concept! Hiting would be fun too! Booooooing Booooing!
Considering we'd have to, at the very least, carry a lot of hydrogen along with us to do the same things, this is very, very good news.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
They look like CG renders to me. One of the pictures has a comment pointing out that the depth has been exaggerated by a factor of 3 (not the anaglyph). So clearly at least one image is a fake. It's getting annoying just how processed images are these days without a suitable warning. Nowadays it seems acceptable, not just to apply filters or color transforms, but also use image based rendering to render from a new viewpoint.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The heat created by the kinetic energy of an incoming comet being released as it slams into the planet was sufficient to move a LOT of regolith to create a crater. It was certainly enough to evaporate all the ice in the comet. The winds in the atmosphere would have spread the water around the planet rather than allowing it to condense right over the crater. As a first guess the water ice in the crater was thawed from the underlying regolith by the impact and flooded up into the crater.
Without going into length, I think the poster both has little understanding in the amount of progress that can be made in just 10 years, the difficulties and politics involved that have lead to the current state of the space program, and, oh yeah, no understanding of any of the work done regarding getting to Mars.
There's something I've never understood about this quest for water on Mars.
First off, this "ice" thing doesn't seem like a big deal to me. When I was 8 years old I had a picture of Martian ice caps on my wall. (Yeah.. I was like that). So why is this a big deal? Because its at the bottom of a crater in a less than frozen area? How does that make life more likely? Clearly the bottom of that crater's pretty inhospitable too...
Secondly -- I've never understood why we don't look for water in a place I would think is the most obvious: in the periphery of the ice caps. Wouldn't liquid water most likely be in the place where the caps melt? It seems highly likely that Martian ice caps perform similarly to Earth's ice caps -- sloughing off ice into a temperate zone.
Why do Mars' frozen poles not get more attention in this quest for water?
Anyone?
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Very nicely? The damn place went and lost most of its water and atmosphere, has little or no volcanic activity (anymore) and is a desolate chunk of dirt. Remember, it had vast oceans, flowing water, etc. for some lengthy period of time.
How do you know "we aren't supposed to be there" reason or no? If we weren't "supposed" to be there then why can be go there? Of course, you mean that by divine plan we "aren't supposed to be there". If your god makes things that we aren't supposed to do, then why can we do them?