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Vast Subsurface Martian Ice Discovered
The Fun Guy writes to tell us New Scientist is reporting that deep-scan radar results from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft have revealed vast amounts of subsurface ice. From the article: "Intriguingly, the signal reflected from the bottom of the crater is so strong and appears so flat that it may be liquid water. 'If you put water there, that's what the signal might look like,' Johnson told New Scientist. But he cautions the data is based on only one pass over the region and could be caused by another material."
This is a big deal. You don't find raw metal much on Mars; most of it is tied up with oxygen. Raw metal has many implications: if it is common, it can be a great source of base building. If the metals are rare on Earth as well, and they're common on Mars, they could provide a potential export source. If it is a meteor, and they're common, it could affect our models of how often Mars gets struck by meteors. Since the rock isn't buried, it could provide clues as to how long it's been on Mars, how fast Meridiani Planum is eroding, and give us dataon how metals wear over time on Mars.
Any time you find something you've never found before, it's a big deal. Honestly, to people who've been following the mission, it looked like Opportunity was pretty much wrapping things up. It just left a geological treasure trove and there isn't much more "on the map", so to speak. It's neat to see it continue making nice finds.
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
Actual Scientist - If you put water there, that's what the signal might look like.
newscientist.com - Radar reveals ice deep below Martian surface
Slashdot.com - Vast Subsurface Martian Ice Discovered
The headlines gets better and better!
the gravity of Mars is to weak to sustain such an atmosphere, which will leak off over time
Yeah, it will leak of over the time, it will take only several million years for it to leak! Of course, no one stops us from terraforming it again by then.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Also, since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, any bulked-up the atmosphere would be lost even faster. Forget terraforming. We might some day figure out how to live there, but it'll never look like home. Then again, home is what you make it, right?
Just take a step back for a second and try to compare the difficulty and complexity of building spacecraft with that of building a telescope. They're not quite on the same level.
End transmission.
Arschloch
The problem with radar alone is they will never know for sure. And looking that deep, the water is virtually useless for anything but an advanced permenant settlement. Have you seen the rigs it takes to drill for oil that deep? Not to mention we don't even know if its water or a solidified magma flow.
-everphilski-
At risk of repeating myself - NASA's evidence was compelling, but their conclusion cannot be accepted as proven. ESA's evidence adds something because their RADAR-like approach says more about the depth of whatever is there. (And NASA want to conclude not just water, but a significant amount of it.)
For what it's worth, I am personally reasonably convinced, but I'm also a scientist...
"could be deduced"
"have interpreted it as"
"possibly containing"
"could be interpreted as"
"what may be"
"the intriguing possibility"
"prior interpretations"
"scientists were able to draw the likely scenario"
"but the search has only begun"
Ahh yes, science. Where shades of gray run screaming from the cold hard face of objective facts!
This was the first pass over the region, and the data that is causing this news is from that single pass. Its probable that the other instruments were doing something else at the time, and the radar was being used to map the region. Since the data isnt coming back in real time, the only thing you can do is plan a second pass when the orbit allows it, this time with the instruments focused on the area of interest.
Being skeptical is a good thing but head in the sand dogma is hurting not helping the science.
How, exactly? Suppose, for giggles, that the scientists decided to be less skeptical and run shouting in the streets, "There's water on Mars! And two of three Viking tests showed that there's life on Mars! Yay!" And then...
Then what, exactly? We don't really know anything more than we did this morning; we've just decided to reinterpret the data more optimistically.
Maybe you're just suggesting that the public would be more behind additional scientific research if they thought there was something extraordinary like life on other planets to find there. But that's public relations, not science. Science is about knowledge, not opinion.
It is only by building piece of evidence upon other pieces of evidence that science proceeds. That's dogmatic, perhaps, but it's an extremely successful way of looking at the world. When you start to accept speculation and extrapolation as fact, you gradually introduce more and more errors until you don't really know anything any more.
And I wouldn't call water on Europa an accepted fact, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from reading Slashdot, where the best information on Europa seems to come from the movie 2010. Water on Europa is looked at by astrophysicists in exactly the same way as water on Mars: there is tantalizing evidence but no proof, yet. It won't take muddy boots; it'll just take more probes and more analysis of the existing evidence to rule out other possibilities.
Only when there's no other interpretation of the data can you grant something the status of "fact". And the more you want something to be true, the harder you'd better double-check that it's not just wishful thinking. That's brought down more than one good scientist in the past.
Additional work will continue to be done on the most likely hypotheses. Tantalizing evidence for water on Mars allows us to build machines that will be able to look for it in more detail because we know where, what kind, etc. to look for. Our time and money are limited, so we limit ourselves to the most likely hypotheses. That's why announcements like this are celebrated, but cautiously.
Ok so the total recall jokes are funny, but the starwars jokes arent? I'll never understand slashdot.
We sit here, discussing about how to make an alien world suitable for our own needs, as if it belonged to us or something like that. How would we feel if we found out that, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a bunch of hairy little green men, looking at this blue grain of dust traveling around a smallish nondescript star, discussed and moved to "tatooineform" it, ignorant or oblivious to our presence?
I feel very uncomfortable talking about (possibly) someone else's world like this. It seems as if we were talking about taking posession of a seemingly abandoned house.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Or simply put a big enough moon in orbit to cause the core to start sloshing around. Our moon moves more than the water.
Considering the amount of cruelty in human history that has been justified by just about any difference in the victim compared to the perpetrator, I think that splitting human species into several subspecies, adapted to their environment, is a really, really, really bad idea. Especially since the different subspecies would be living in different planets and could therefore nuke each other without fear of radioactive fallout or immeadiate counterstrike.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.