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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."
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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.
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.
I'm curious what this type of imagery would return on say... ancient structures partially buried on earth for example.
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.