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."

Comments

Most of this isn't new...

[CorSci81]

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.

Re:I didn't know satellites had a schedual

[sighted]

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.

Re:I didn't know satellites had a schedual

[camperdave]

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.

Re:Awesome!

[Nasarius]

Uh, no.

Re:disingenuous

[Rei]

No, I don't have to admit that, because it's not a generalizable statement. Early US rocketry attempts were one disaster after another, while the Soviets got success after success. It wasn't until the Soviets bungled the heck out of the N1 rocket while the US was redoubling its efforts that the US can claim a clear victory on the "stuff working well" front.

The Soviets had to worry about cost just as much as the Americans did. Just because it was a planned economy doesn't mean that you have an unlimited labor pool, which is really what the concept of "cost" comes down to. As for titanium, the best (cheapest to produce) titanium deposits (ilmenite, rutile) in the world are in the former USSR. Also, the Soviet Union invested in the infrastructure to do large-scale refining, which lowered the marginal cost. The US was stuck in the cycle of "The price is expensive, so nobody wants to use it. Nobody wants to use it, so nobody is building big facilities." Even the titanium for the SR-71 came from the USSR.