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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
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.
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.
Thank god.
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".
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!
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.
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...
According to this article http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=05 -P13-00024&segmentID=7 the chances are high... Here is an extract
BURDICK: It is surprisingly difficult. I spent some quality time with a microbiologist at the Jet Propulsion Lab out in Pasadena, and this guy works in the spacecraft assembly facility where they build, well they built the Mars Rovers that are now out there on Mars. And this guy, his job is to kind of inspect what's left over and to see well, gosh, did any microbes survive the incredibly kind of harsh decontamination process that we've devised to get rid of them? And to his great surprise they have, and he's found at least one microbe that not only thrives in the spacecraft assembly facility, but seems to have actually evolved in it. It's a tough little spore, it eats aluminum. He found it growing on the surface of one of the Mars Rovers. It forms these spores and then the spores kind of group together to form a little, what he calls an igloo. It looks kind of like a macaroon under a microscope and when he cuts it open and exposes it to the light detection techniques that NASA's developed to look for life, he finds no sign of life and then when he puts this little igloo back together, the microbe comes back to life amazingly. And I asked him, "So you know you found this thing on the Mars Rover when it was being built. Do you think it's up there on Mars right now?" And he said, "oh yes, I'm quite certain, I'm almost certain that it is." So you know, I mean, it's just indicative of how life wants to spread. Either they're moving around inadvertently with us or they're moving around intentionally with us, but they are kind of reflections of our ambition, our desire to reshape the nature around us in a way that makes us more comfortable. You know, we can kind of demonize these things, but in a way they're really kind of impressive little critters. They're sort of doing what nature permitted them to do. And in a Darwinian sense, I mean, they're winners. I mean you've got to be, even if you don't like aliens, and there is quite a number of reasons not to, I think it's worthwhile sort of stopping and at least being impressed by their ability to thrive in a world that we think that we dominate. So far as we know, Earth is the only planet with life on it and the wind is blowing outward. We may well be the dandelion in the solar system.
Interesting...
Never happened. True story.
So THAT's what that giant white cap on the Martian north pole is!!! Doh!!
There go all my "Martian Cocaine" investments!!
Wouldn't evaporating or boiling some of the water via nuclear reactors
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Seriously do you have any idea of the amount of energy involved to do what you propose? Here's a hint: multiply 1370 W/m^2 minus 590 W/m2 by the cross sectional area of mars (around 3.6 x 10^13 m^2) to give you 2.7 x 10^16 Watts.
That's pretty much around the amount of energy you need to produce with your nuclear reactors to keep mars at around earthlike temperatures... To put this in perspective, a 1 Megaton nuclear device has a yield of around 4 x 10^15 Joules. You would need to be exploding the equivalent of 6 of these devices on the planet EVERY SECOND to generate enough energy. Then there's the problem of distributing the heat evenly...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
You talk about "significantly ... increasing the gravity." Are you really suggesting that we move planet-sized chunks of mass around the solar system? In order to increase the gravity of Mars by 10%, we'd have to move something on the order of the size of the moon. Do you have any idea how much energy that would require? It's completely infeasible for the foreseeable future; if you can manipulate the solar system on that level, you might as well just build a Dyson sphere or ringworld and have done with it.
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]
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.