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Enormous Amount of Frozen Water Found on Mars
schweini writes "Space.com is reporting that the Mars Express probe's MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) experiment has detected and measured an enormous amount of water ice near Mars' south pole, which would be sufficient to submerge the whole planet's surface underneath approximately 10m of water on average."
Facts about the Oceans:
Area: about 140 million square miles (362 million sq km), ore nearly 71% of the Earth's surface.
Average Depth: 12,200 feet (3,720 m).
http://www.mos.org/oceans/planet/features.html
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
This sounds like the idea of terraforming Mars just got a lot closer to doable. Wouldn't evaporating or boiling some of the water via nuclear reactors or orbiting mirrors increase the humidity and heat retention of the atmosphere, and eventually create a climate in which many earth organisms could thrive?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
And then what? Upload to Youtube and get sued by Viacom?
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html
Its always fun saying "Mars has global warming" to a room full of people who consider themselves "educated enough to know that global warming denial is an unscientific crock". You first get a bit of laughter, and then about 15 seconds later the implication dawns on them, and they'll say the satellites were busted, the protocols unscientific, and that whatever boring astronomer produced the result must be a stooge for Big Carbon.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Now, they've found a massive amount and the F article states:
So what gives? My vague memory says in the nineties they were still looking for any signs of water and now it's old news?
Liberty.
Because, in America we don't care about achievement in discovery. The typical attitude is something like why should we spend two billion dollars exploring space when we have real problems in our own country. Yes, that true American spirit that has propelled us since the first foot was stepped on the shores of this country is dead and buried. *sigh*
Seriously, when was the last time you heard a kid cite some social parasite, sports star or rapper as one of their heroes? When was the last time you heard one name an astronaut? In fact, how many people can name even one astronaut that is currently active in the space program?
Unless it involves devising some mechanism of getting us beer, porn or baby jebus in larger quantities and more efficient rates, my fellow Americans largely don't give a damn.
They've been looking for signs of liquid water, primarily in the distant past.
So, do ya think that maybe the massive amounts of marketting and promotion that NASA did in the 60s might have had something to do with them being a lot more popular then than they are now?
How we know is more important than what we know.
So how many Hummers are we talking about here?
Thank god.
But seriously, why would it have to be an astronaut "currently active" in the space program? Surely you could still have Neil Armstrong or John Glenn be your astronaut hero. I'm sure a lot of people still hold up Michael Jordan as their sports hero, even though he's been retired for years.
How many astronauts these days are doing "heroic" things? Heroes are unique; you don't get to be a hero if there are a hundred other people who do what you do. Hops to LEO in a shuttle doesn't make you a hero to many people, no matter how much work it took to get there. Being the first man to land on the Moon, however, can make you a hero for all time.
Hang on, is it enough water to cover the surface of Mars to an average depth of 36 feet, is it forming an ocean in the lowest-lying areas of Mars (Hellas?) with an average depth of 36 feet? (Or even a maximum depth of 36 feet?)
There's orders of magnitude between each of these. Does anyone have a better reference?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Isn't there a lot of water in Uranus
:D
Sorry
I can't wait to surf Mars. With moons that close, there ought to be tidal swells that one could ride forever.
Dude, Earth's moon is millions of times heavier than the moons of Mars. They're going to have to be pretty damn close to get a tidal swell worth riding, even with the reduced gravity.
But seriously, why would it have to be an astronaut "currently active" in the space program? Surely you could still have Neil Armstrong or John Glenn be your astronaut hero. I'm sure a lot of people still hold up Michael Jordan as their sports hero, even though he's been retired for years. That illustrates my point precisely. First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings. Unfortunately, they are not big, bold, earth-shattering things leading to immense progress. Again, that illustrates the entire problem at hand. We don't have any Buzz Aldrins or Neil Armstrongs at the moment, because we are too busy cutting their budgets, reducing the grandness of their adventures and explaining away the loss of our societal fascination with and dedication to advancement.
There's nothing wrong with admiring sports figures, but neither Kobe Bryant nor Paris Hilton are ever going to discover anything great. Lead man to a new world. Or save man from himself by finding "new lands".
I envy that my parents were a live in a time when a president put an impossible challenge in front of a nation and then they watched nervously as it culminated in potentially the greatest achievement in the whole of history. I envy that the memories my parents and generations before them have are not limited to two space shuttles exploding and screwing up a little robot rover launch, because we used imperial instead of metric measurements.
If 10 meters of water on average is an ocean planet, what is Earth? We are covered to two thirds in water, and a lot of it is hundreds of meters deep.
If the water depth would be ten meters on average, those oceans would be puddles compared to ours.
Unless of course this "10 meter" average is some really stupid number in which higher ground is counted as "negatively submerged".
"Where are the true objectivists?" If there was a true objectivist, how would you know? Even Einstein was deeply religious.
C|N>K
To be fair, I do some work with kids for educational outreach for space exploration, and one thing that I've always find amazing is that whenever I get in to the question and answer part (usually preparing for something else fun) there's always a couple of kids who have some amazingly fun and insightful questions like 'What planet would you visit if you could?' or 'When do you think we'll have a Mars base?' To be fair, it's a minority of the kids who seem really interested in space exploration or anything beyond a 'whoa, that was really cool!' type of thing (I do mostly rocketry stuff for that reason,) but I feel that a minority are all you need.
I had a discussion with another student a week or so ago about the politics of space exploration, and who of the upcoming nominees would be the best choice with regards to NASA funding and private exploration legislation (I currently think its Bill Richardson, despite my partisanship,) and one of the main things that stuck out at me in our discussion was that it doesn't matter if the public is really excited about it, it just matters that a small minority are willing to put their effort into it, and the majority are willing to tolerate a very minor part of the budget on it ($15 billion is not that much as far as the national budget is concerned.) Not that I wouldn't be ecstatic if everyone started cheering as loudly for a discovery of a life-developing extra-solar planet, or even the discovery of vast liquid seas on Titan, but what we currently have is better than nothing. A couple more billion to allow for more robots along with 'Moon, Mars and Beyond' would be amazing though.
Anyway, I don't have a problem with the Europeans making this discovery, and I'm as patriotic as anyone, because this kind of thing is a human endeavor, and I'm just happy that my country can make a significant impact.
To sum this little rant up, I'd be very happy if our celebrity obsessed culture got over the obsession, but it really doesn't worry me much. My one real concern for the long term future of the US (long-term meaning hopefully not Iraq, Afghanistan, or even immigration) is our educational system so we can remain competitive (but not necessarily dominant) in the technology and discoveries of the future.
WHOLLY FUCK DUDE!
get on the phone with nasa before its too late!
Martians don't measure water with the metric system, you insensitive clod!
Did you know that if you took all of the sand from the Sahara Desert and spread it out that it would cover all of North Africa...?
Compared to the Earth, as an example, the 10m stat actually says there is very little water. Think about it.
80 meters depth covering just a bit more than 10% of the entire planet. 2/3 ~ 3/4 of Earth is covered in water, with the average depth of all the major oceans sitting at 3800m.
Three-thousand, eight-hundred meters here at home - compared to fifteen meters for Mars. Fifteen??!! Does that sound enormous to you? If it does, I've got an appendage I'd like to show you, in private, of course, you're not going to believe.
a couple bacteria could (accidentally) make it the whole way to mars on one of our probes? Is it possible we could inadvertently populate mars with our Earth-life? How funny would it be to "discover" life on mars when we actually put it there years before on a probe to one of the more life-friendly corners of mars... just a weird though i had while reading this
I say that we terraform Earth first. If you've ever flown over Colorado, Nevada, or Utah, you quickly realize that Those Places Ain't Habitable.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Let's see. By all accounts we're producing too much CO2 on Earth, meanwhile our closest neighbour is just begging for some CO2 to trigger a bit of global warming and make the planet nice and cosy.
OK. A bit simplistic, but you can't help wondering...
So THAT's what that giant white cap on the Martian north pole is!!! Doh!!
There go all my "Martian Cocaine" investments!!
One of the most gorgeous anime series ever made, "Aria" (two seasons, "Aria the Animation" and "Aria the Natural"), was based on exactly this concept: we terraformed Mars and overshot. It's now a water planet, whose name has been changed to Aqua. An ocean planet of island chains, each set of islands was colonized by a different culture. The animation is set in the city of Neo-Venezia, the original having sunk under the ocean of Earth ("Manhome") long before.
This story really startled me, because now it's actually sounding possible.
The year is 2303, and tourists are gliding in gondolas along the canals of Neo-Venezia, in the care of the undines...
Bah
It's one of those statements meant to boggle, like "if you stacked all the books ever printed, they would reach the moon" [that's bunk, just made that up].
Anyway, you asked for a sea level map of Mars, so here ya go.
Damn those pesky terrorists
We need to urgently plan our first colony to Mars... how shall we do it..
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_belts
1 .htm
Due to its lack of a magnetic field, the solar wind pushes gases off Mars, resulting in an atmosphere which is much thinner than it would be otherwise.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Bullshit. The aliens in V thought it was worth shipping water and a few humans (food and cannon fodder) 8.7 light years. Taking water from Mars should be much cheaper.
Oh yeah. Spoiler warning.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I read a lot of critics about the terraformation of Mars like this one: "The conditions that caused the loss of the original atmosphere are still present"
That is far from certain. It seems many people are going with the assumption that the theory that the gravity-field of mars is too puny to hold the watermolecules (and thus the atmosphere dissapeating into space in a copple of thousand years), is a fact. However, this is only one of many theories existing to explain the lack of an (considerable) atmosphere on Mars. Another variant of that theory to explain it is that the atmosphere got largely blown away by meteor-impacts in the first half-billion years of the existence of our solarsystem (there was a period of a large amount of meteor(hits) then, as proven by craters on the moon and other planets).
Now, if that's true, and seen the fact that fase is long since over, then, if we were able to revive a useful atmosphere, it could well be that it could sustain itself, or at least last for millions of years. No more mass amounts of impacts that blow the atmosphere away, after all. (BTW, all atmospheres lose molecules to space, but it gets more then enough back from tiny (and bigger) particles falling down to earth; this may be true for Mars as well, EVEN if the atmosphere dissapeates faster).
I'm not saying this IS true, but it's one of the many theories out there that try to explain the current state of Mars. Untill we know the actual truth about the matter, it's far too soon to claim terraforming isn't possible on Mars. Depending on the cause for Mars' thin atmosphere, and the level of replenishment, it might well be a viable option.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
But seriously, why would it have to be an astronaut "currently active" in the space program? Surely you could still have Neil Armstrong or John Glenn be your astronaut hero. I'm sure a lot of people still hold up Michael Jordan as their sports hero, even though he's been retired for years.
That illustrates my point precisely. First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
I'm not sure we compare Michael Jordan to an astronaut. The analogy holds, however, much deeper than you think. More below:
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings.
That could be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first who did something only 12 humans have done, and we remember some firsts. Heck, do you know who stayed in the command capsule and flew around the moon while the other two were cavorting? Do you know who the first 3 were that flew around the moon? Do you know the first 3 that died?
Today, I think only some will know about Virgil (Gus) Grissom, even fewer will know his two crew members names: Edward White and Roger B. Chaffee. Astronaut deaths unfortunately became a lot more common with the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and thus the uniqueness of the deaths of the first three faded (Time has a lot to do with it as well, although had those other two disasters not happened, many more would know about the original Apollo 1 crew). Other than Christa McAuliffe, who else died on Challenger? Why do we know her? (Hint, she was a civilian astronaut - the first) What about Columbia?
Now to get back to the Michael Jordan analogy. Note that while we may still know Michael Jordan, I will guarantee you that many of today's teenagers do not. He's not a hero to them, he's before their time. He will fade although he will be remembered for a while. Look at Wilt Chamberlain. He too has largely faded, although he still holds several records. Charles Barkley, on the other hand, flashed and is almost forgotten.
Basically fame is fleeting, unless you're completely severed from the rest of the population by your actions. Certain (in)famous people will long be remembered (Charlemagne, Hitler, Einstein, Nixon, Washington, Armstrong, Stalin, Hawking, Julius Caesar, etc) and you'll note there are more infamous than famous ones in that list. There's a definite reason for that, and that is that (fortunately) it is much easier to go very negative than very positive outside the envelop of normal human behavior.
Even when someone does go far outside the norm, they can be forgotten. Quick - who was the first person to break the sound barrier? That was considered at the time to be as large a feat as the moon landing. You should have seen some of the articles of the time, even by scientists, about the absolute BS about what happens when you break the sound barrier. Makes for very entertaining, but sobering, reading. You see, the equations for air flow reach an asymptotic limit, or singularity, at Mach 1. In reality, it's quite similar to our current understanding about the speed limit of light. It too reaches a asymptotic limit, but the laws of physics as we understand them prevent us from accelerating anything faster
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
"(e.g. 'Witches' is best interpreted as potion-makers in the Old Testament, homosexuality is usually referred to in regard to rampant sex without regard, which was particularly dangerous in the age before real medicine,[....]"
So, basically, you interpret the bible like you see fit.
That's all fine and good, but if it's up to any individual to interpret it the way it fits him/her, then people who believe 'witches refer to more then potionmakers' and 'homosexuality is about same-sex sexual behaviour' have as much validity then your interpretation of the matter.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
More massive even too. Does something in (near) permanent orbit "weigh" anything?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
This is very exciting as it makes the idea of colonizing Mars sometime in the next 100 or 150 years a little closer. The article mentions even more water:
There's long been known to be an enormous amount of water in Mars' polar caps; the question was how much.
Let's engage in a little creative exercise, for those who have this notion that Mars will be colonized within the next hundred, hundred-fifty years (by colony, assumedly "mostly independent"). Pick a category you would need on Mars -- power, metals, ceramics, plastics, adhesives, clothing, lubricants, hydraulic fluids, dyes, solvents, abrasives, food, personal items, medications, etc -- and pick a specific representative in that category -- say, in ceramics, ferrite suitable for transformer cores, or in plastics, teflon for coatings in high-corrosion environments (like many refining processes). Take your pick. If you want me to break down a particular category, just ask. Once you make your pick, we'll trace back the dependency chain for producing it.
The dependency chains are almost always monstrous.
The simple fact is that, on another planet, you're entirely dependent on modern technology to survive. Modern technology inherently spawns massively long dependency chains. We don't notice these things in our daily lives. We write with a marker and never give a thought to all of the chemical and physical processes that went into making the plastic, the foam core, and the ink, and everything it took to make those chemicals, and everything it took to make those chemicals. And so on. Look around you. Almost everything you see has dependency chains like that. To have a mostly self-sufficient colony on Mars, thus, you must be able to satisfy most of those dependency chains locally. You're talking mining hundreds of minerals (can't find some? Uh oh, you're in trouble!), which will be dispersed across the planet. You're talking about an industrual complex the size of a major US city. Which you'd have to set up on a planet for which it costs tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to land payload there.
Don't hold your breath.
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.
It would have been way more awesome if they discovered enormous amounts of frozen pizza on Mars.