Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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.
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.
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!
And just where do you think Mars is located?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"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.
Everyone knows Martian tunnels lead to releasing the trapped oxygen there. Didn't you see Total Recall?
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.
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.
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.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?
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.
We did it with a free society and a decent respect for life. (Blocking is mine.) I know that Americans are fed this story about how wonderful The United States is from an early age but you could do with a little more skepticism. A free society? Millions of you are prisoners of an economy, nothing more. Decent respect for life? Which country invented the A-Bomb, used it twice and was dropping Napalm and Agent Orange on the Vietnamese by the time Armstrong landed on the moon?