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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.
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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.
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.