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New Mars Discoveries
sighted writes "The fleet of five active spacecraft examining Mars (in addition to the recently-missing Mars Global Surveyor) have been working overtime. On the heels of last week's finding of possible flows of liquid water, the ESA has announced that an entire hidden landscape exists just beneath the surface of the Red Planet, and NASA has released some really amazing images of layered topography that will yield many clues to the history of this strange world."
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council must give his judgement upon this matter.
liqbase
Old Mars first
Mmmmm...
All the more reasons to spend money on NASA.
We need to spend money on NASA. NASA's pioneering work in the space race give us advances in technology. The exploration of Mars should be taken seriously to the extent of the level of Iraq war spending.
NASA is a legendary organization during the space race. We need to make NASA a legendary level government organization again.
We have very good reason to go to Mars. Discovering lifeform on another planet is very improtant. Even if it is bacteria life, it will be a still very important step to answering mankind's question "Are we alone?". Even if we don't discover life, we will advance the technological level of mankind by doing so.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-RMS
Didn't one of those new pictures show a space marine waving a soul cube on the surface?
...be the first to mention the idea of space creatures living under the surface of Mars. We need to dump money into NASA and send some people out there to hail them.
Sig: I stole this sig.
No/Text
"have been working overtime" Hmm....so do they like power off the satellites for 16 hours a day normally? What exactly do they mean by "overtime"
-EL
Hidden underground tunnels on mars eh? We need chainsaws, posthaste!
And the "hidden tunnel" link in the article didn't point to doom 3 screenshots, slashdot impresses yet again.
Why do so many /.'ers find it necessary to pick apart every post to the point of idiocy?
No. Not really. They're gone forever, starved to death and poisoned by pollution.
But maybe someday after Mars is terraformed* we'll have genetically engineered recreations that have the manufacturer's logo blazed on their flanks who swim along boats and squeak helpful shopping tips at the tourists.
Stefan
* By Halliburton, so bring a respirator.
The idea that the northern hemisphere craters were simply buried is actually a fairly old idea, even though the article makes this sound like a major breakthrough. We've had some radar images suggesting this for some time, I guess it's just now they're starting to get some press. The layered deposits are also well documented, but I do have to admit those are the prettiest pictures I've ever seen of them.
I tossed off that phrase maybe a little too casually as a figure of speech, but certainly the people on the project have been working overtime. Some background here.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
Smal print: Please bring your own O2, water etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
how mind blowing it would have been if the sub-surface radar showed roads or infrastructure of a previous existance... It would have turned the way funding is for space all around, as well as change text books all over the world.
Really impressive technology being used here. Kudos to those who make it happen.
Those underground cave-dwellings are obvious signs of life. But that mountain that is shaped like Colonel Sanders head, was probably part of KFC's early satellite marketing campaign.
Lots of satellites and probes work overtime. Consider Spirit and Opportunity. They are still running and returning data, even though they are around 950 sols past their expected operational lifetime. The Mars Global Surveyor was supposed to finish it's mission in 2001. Nasa extended the mission four times since then.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Netcraft confirms.
Want me some Red Princess ah do! (mild NSFW)
I drank what? -- Socrates
"working overtime?" gimme a break. spacecraft and robotic devices and test instruments do not have a workday, and are not limited by human weaknesses like the need for sleep, food, and bowel movements. if they work "beyond their expected life", that's a testament to good engineering. but please don't grant these manufactured goods human qualities.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
the alien home base?
jks =P
Everyone knows Martian tunnels lead to releasing the trapped oxygen there. Didn't you see Total Recall?
bleep frizzle snurg shurfffle
Neat - It makes me wonder how it could have been covered up so well. Letting my imagination run wild... what if Olympus Mons let loose a cataclysmic eruption so powerful that it:
1) put enough sediment into the atmosphere to cover the entire surface,
2) put larger rocks into orbit which eventually decayed and came back down to form the rock-strewn surface we are accustomed to seeing, possibly forming some of the ounger crater impact sites, and
3) blocked out sunlight, killing off any shred of life on the planet at the time of the event
"How" this could come to pass is the first thing that pops into my mind - no speculation in the article though which I always enjoy hearing from NASA.
Hahah... there is absolutely zero possibility that we are alone in the universe. The entire purpose of a solar system is to have giant gas planets on the outter rings to protect the inner few rings from debris entering into the solar system so that they planets most likely to harbour life have an even greater chance at this. Solar systems were built around creating life in the inner orbits - end of story. Now mulitply the potential of life in any given solar system by about a few billion trillion trillion and tell me it's an unanswered question.
We don't need to prove anything just confirm.
Corporations are permitted by Law ONLY to earn profit. Nothing more, nothing less.
A private corp that does charity is illegal in eyes of law and hence would be disbanded.
If the law is stupid enough to enforce profit-making as the ONLY permitted activity of a private corporation, then we can't blame the corporations for their predatory instincts because they are exactly doing what the law charteted them to do.
Doing anything beyond this which does NOT make a profit, is illegal in eyes of law and makes the managers and directors liable for criminal charges by shareholders.
Take the other extreme example of Social Security: That is a chartered corporation whose sole purpose is NOT profit as per the law. Today Social Sec. is the MOST brutally efficient govt. organisation whose trustees perform exactly as the law requires to maximise returns for their shareholders by wealth management. (which is exactly why private corp are demanding Social Security be disbanded so that they can make a killing in stock market).
Change the law to make private corporations fulfill BOTH society obligations and profit, and you will see a sea change in organisations behavior.
Until then don't crib about private corporates and their sole motive for profit, as that is what they are permitted by law to do.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Mars has "dirtosphere"?
Now, there's where all the action may take place: on the rock bottom, under the ocean of dust.
What's next: we'll dig out live macroscopic, big, crawling and wiggling animals that live in the Martian soil near geo...thermal heat sources?
We need sensitive geo...phones sent up there ASAP to detect if there is any characteristic sounds of moving.
OK, I need a help here: when word has prefix "geo", should it be substituted if it is applied to other planets?
hidden underground land? possible life forms? possibly dangerous?
sounds like a job for master chief.
Scientific American is running an article about how it now looks almost certain that there were large standing bodies of water on Mars in its early history. However it goes on to say that this probably only lasted for a billion years or so before the water froze/evaporated and mars slowly turned into the dusty desert we know today.
My own belief is that Mars slowly lost its atmosphere due to its low gravity and poor magnetic field and as the air pressure went down it was easier and easier for water to evaporate until at some point the pressure got to the point where the boiling point of water had dropped to below the ambient temperature of the planet and that was the end of the lakes/seas if there were any still around by then. Once in the atmosphere the water was dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen, the H2 escaped and the O2 reacted with whatever was around producing the rusty landscape we see today.
No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of martian danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most martian men fancied there might be other men upon Earth, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this planet with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
As much as Hoagland is a loon, he has been predicting all the recent discoveries for like 10 years. And with the recent solar flare activity I am nervously believing in Dames's Killshot. If we committed to a man-on-mars program, I've heard that every dollar spent would add 23 dollars to the economy. The problem is, we went to Iraq instead. (I say we, but I am a proud Canadian)
Indeed.
And the other thing that the article seems to suggest is novel but certainly isn't is the presence of "hidden landscapes". Every planet in the universe (including our own) would be expected to have different structures at different depths, and surface contours of those structures will always yield a "hidden landscape".
What's new and useful is of course the data itself about the buried structures at those particular depths on Mars, it's terrific that we're obtaining that info now. But the presence of subsurface structure is not unexpected, anywhere.
Indeed, what would be quite remarkable is if we found a planet that was just an undifferentiated homogenous ball without internal structure. That would be utterly curious.
>I don't mean to belittle NASA's achievements, but to simply
...).
>say "The US won the space race" is disingenuous.
Well, come on now. We did it with a free society and a decent
respect for life. And you have to admit, our stuff worked better
(at least back then
The Soviets built freakin Titanium submarines too. Could go
deeper (reportedly) than any of ours. That's more of a testament
to a completely government-owned economy that didn't have to worry
about cost and democratic politics than to fine engineering.
hidden landscape
Of course, to get to the hidden landscape you have to go to the fake water stream, and travel forward one step, then backwards one step, while holding down the acceleration pedal, and jump towards the center of the hole.
Have you read my journal today?
Bullish Machine Tzar
The galaxy is only 100,000 light years wide, and has existed for billions of years. We've only been listening for 100 years, but where are they? Why haven't we been found? Why haven't we found them?
Deep down, I also believe there are other intelligent lifeforms in the universe. But if they're really so prevalent in the billions of stars that make up the Milky Way, why don't we have any proof?
Does anyone else find it really disturbing that Total Recall might have had it right all along ?!?!?!!?
Now we just need to Rovers to find the alien control room and start melting the ice.
The universe is over 13 billion light years wide. The milky way is but one galaxy among countless others.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?
The galaxy is only 100,000 light years wide, and has existed for billions of years. We've only been listening for 100 years, but where are they?
If we've really been listening for 100 years (we haven't -- unintentionally broadcasting that long maybe, but only listening for about 40) then the size of the galaxy is irrelevant, we've only "listened to" a sphere 200 light years in diameter, 0.2% the size of the galaxy (actually, 80 ly and 0.08% at best, in reality much less).
Start worrying if we haven't heard from them in another, say, 50,000 years.
-- Alastair
It's a fairly old _idea_, but there have been all kinds of ideas. I follow the Mars news fairly closely, not super-closely, and this is the first time I've seen what amounts to proof of buried craters. That's why people are excited, I think. Not because nobody ever had the idea before.
Likewise with the layered deposits. Yes, those have been found before, but they were on a much smaller scale. These vast, flat, deposits really suggest ocean sedimentation over millions of years. (Suggest. Far from prove.) Coupled with the fact that the northern craters are buried under something, it's starting to look very probable that there was a long term ocean there. That means the current favorite theory of water on Mars--that it only existed for a few hundred million years--may need reworking.
And long(er) term water is significant because it makes life that much more likely. On Earth, there are bacteria everywhere with even the occasional molecule of water. But we've had liquid water for billions of years. If Mars only had it briefly, and we did not find life, we wouldn't know if life was rare in the universe, or if there just wasn't enough time on Mars. On the other hand, if Mars had long term water, and we did find life, we'll suddenly have actual data about how likely life is in the rest of the Universe. And in that case, it would be very likely. Maybe life is the rule, not the exception! That's what bacteria on Mars could tell us. Like the commenter said earlier: AWESOME.
That's exactly the point. If life is so relatively prevalent, where is it and why haven't we gained any evidence?
The wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox is an interesting read, and talks exactly about what I can't as elequently put.
There are some other great, related pages on space exploration and some possibilities that apparently should have arisen in the time that the Milky Way and complex elements existed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_probe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization
the size of the galaxy is irrelevant, we've only "listened to" a sphere 200 light years in diameter
Actually, we've only been transmitting a sphere 200 light years in diameter, but we've been receiving a sphere that is, as-the-photon-flies, 13.7-times-two light years in diameter, at various points in the history of the universe. (This page about the Observable Universe talks about some values for the diameter of the universe, but it is irrelevant whether my use of 200 light years and the size of the universe are exactly correct.)
I know about the Fermi Paradox, and the Drake Equation, and so on.
The thing is, all of that is based on assumptions that we have no bloody clue about.
From so-far-observed evidence, we're the only technological species in the universe. This would seem to indicate that either something is wrong with the assumptions Fermi makes, or we're very unobservant. I seriously doubt that Earth contains the only life in the universe, even the only intelligent life (loosely defining intelligence to cover the numerous non-human species that are tool-using and/or seem to have some kind of learned language).
It's possible, though, that developing post-.paleolithic technology is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. I hope not, but going by so-far-observed evidence, it has about a one in several tens of thousands chance of arising (lifespan of neolithic-and-later civilization to date divided by how long higher vertebrates have been around -- not that vertabrate anatomy is a prerequisite, some cephalopods are pretty smart).
Also, the original Drake Equation contains a number of simplifying assumptions that we now know (or are pretty sure) are bogus. Radiation from the galactic core defines a "habitable zone" around the galaxy, so we have to reduce the number of possible stars where life (as we more or less know it) can arise. Life (and habitable planets) needs certain abundances of metals (anything heavier than helium, in astrophysical terms) that will only be found in second or third generation stars (formed from supernovae remnants), which weeds out all stars more than about a third the age of the galaxy, and so on.
We could actually be the first technological species in this galaxy, or perhaps the first visited us over 65 or 200 million years ago and the evidence has been obliterated. (Dates picked for major impact events with significant geologic and ecologic consequences).
Of course all of the above has been raised before to answer Fermi's question ("given assumptions x, y and z, where are they?"). We just don't know which (if any) is the right answer.
-- Alastair
Well, we've actually only been listening on and off since 1960. But I think we haven't heard anything because we're still primitive enough to think that broadcast radio is a decent means of communication.
I know it's a sci-fi cliche that aliens can pick up our TV and radio broadcast, but it's not true. The signals are just too weak. The only things we've sent out powerful enough to reach other stars at levels detectable by our current tech, are the Arecibo message (really of a publicity stunt than anything else) and two or three similar transmissions, and high-powered radar beams (which don't carry information, and from what I understand would probably look something like the "Wow!" signal to ET).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
While 100,000 years of delay seems like lot, billions of years of delay means that a planet on Earth's schedule wouldn't have any complex life, if it even existed at all.
Then there's the issue of gain. Our civilization's transmissions currently reach only about 50 LY (give or take an order of magnitude depending on what sort of technology you allow for to strip the wheat from the chaff). And they're decreasing, not increasing, as we move from "broadcasts" to more focused, higher bandwidth methods (satellites, cable, fiber, etc). Really, the only alien signals we'd stand a hope of finding are those that were *deliberate beacons*. Except in our region of the milky way, these beacons would have to have the power of stars. Let alone transmissions from other galaxies.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?