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"Puddles" of Water Sighted on Mars
eldavojohn writes "Further reinforcing the theory of a wet Mars, NewScientist is reporting on what appear to be water puddles in newly taken images from the Mars rover. While these results are controversial, the assumption that these blue 'puddles' are water still has to be tested by engineers. They'll try to measure the uniform smoothness of the puddle surfaces. Analysis will also examine their apparent 'opaqueness', where in some areas observers claim to see pebbles underneath the surface of the blue areas. From the article: 'No signs of liquid water have been observed directly from cameras on the surface before. Reports last year pointed to the existence of gullies on crater walls where water appears to have flowed in the last few years, as shown in images taken from orbit, but those are short-lived flows, which are thought to have frozen over almost immediately.'"
Direct link to image: http://space.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/d n12026/dn12026-2_250.jpg
Gotta say, can't think of what it could be besides water. On the other hand, aren't the images artificially colored?
You're making Dan Quayle look good!
We have puddles of water right here.
... the water system in Mars' Endurance Crater was polluted today by a leak in the rover Opportunity's RAT tool hydraulic system today. NASA scientists were quoted as saying "D'oh! Better luck next time". In other news, the inanimate carbon rod was promoted to the rank of Lt. Colonel today ...
Even the Mars rovers are starting to see mirages after 3 years on a desert planet.
-- my sig got
Isn't the Mars Rover in an area where there couldn't be free flowing water? Last I checked the temperature and pressure were far from the conditions needed for liquid water to flow freely on a surface.
And as someone mentioned earlier the images are artificially colored. It's probably just a mineral deposit or something.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Why did the image in the article have an enlarge feature? They made it about a whole 2% larger. I feel ripped off by shit like that on the web.
In any case, this is an interesting find.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Come on you scientist nerds. Keep examining photographs until you find a face -- no, water. That's it, we must find images that match our preconcieved notion of what it'll take to get a bigger budget, more subordinates, etc.
It seems that the colored composite picture shown in newscientist's article was derived from these two original left-right pictures from Opportunity's navigation cameras on day 285. There are many more similar pictures around day 285, with these flat paths around the flat stones. In the 'Burns Cliff' Color Panorama (high res), the newscientist's image is just a fraction of the cliff: it's in its very center, where you can see a V and the steepness of where it is located.
1) The surface just seems a bit too steep to me to accumulate any liquid water in such amounts for a pond, since it's facing up the border of the crater in the original pictures. The rover was taking the picture from the bottom up, so also the material wasn't in the lowest part of the terrain.
2) In the original JPL's pictures, you can see the same 'watery' material all way up to the border of the crater: it's distinctly darker. In the panorama, it's interesting to note that it doesn't go all the way down to the bottom of the crater, where you can see a brighter dust covering everything.
Does this darkness means humidity? I fail to see streaming water, maybe flat thin ice sheets from a humid surface but this seems to be explicitely discarded when the author says that "If they were ice or some other material, they'd show wear and tear over the surface, there would be rubble or sand or something." (btw, sand on this steep cliff?) A very thin dark powdery sand looks more likely, but someone needs to go there and poke it to be sure. Any ideas about this? I'm unable to find the original paper to have a look at it.
Can anyone explain how they came up with the bluish hue in the composite picture, since the original pictures do not seem to have any filter information? (the 25th character in their names is 0 instead of some specific filter frequency)
MarsRoverBlog.com is discussing it, this isn't a flat area, but on a 20-30 degree slope. It is part of Burns Cliff in Endurance Crater.There is plenty of evidence for water on Mars, just not in these images. There is evidence of something other than dust, probably water seepage from underground, at Meridiani and Gusev. Orbital images have shown water in the polar caps and probably a frozen sea in Elysium. There are what appear to be ponds and flowing rivers in some images, especially the first Mars Express image released a while ago.
i nds-puddles-on-the-planets-surface.html
http://www.marsroverblog.com/discuss-mars-rover-f
This "puddle" however, doesn't stand the test.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Maybe, in the future, human physiology could be altered to allow Mars explorers to subsist on water which has a 25% chance of being water. Obviously, those explorers would need to consume four times as much of this water.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
The burden of truth typically lies with the person asserting the positive. However, in this case it would be interesting and useful to hear other explanations for this photo, because it *does* appear to reveal something of interest.
The article states "Levin and other researchers... have published calculations showing the possibility of 'micro-environments' where water could linger, but the idea remains controversial". Has anyone ever produced such a 'micro-environment' in a lab, and then tried to store water in it?
What the heck is a micro-environment, anyway? Am I being too cynical in thinking that it's an environment, just with a sexed-up name?
Actually, the Martian sky frequently has a pinkish hue due to the large quantities of suspended dust grains. If you live anywhere that has wildfires (like SoCal) think of what it's like when the air is full of smoke.
That is an urban myth. The oceans are blue because pure water is very slightly blue. In large quantities, like lakes or oceans, the blue comes out. If it was just due to the reflection of the sky then large bodies of water would by white on overcast days.
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=536615119& size=o
Does anybody else find it odd that they can't tell whether or not this is water? I mean, were they so positive that they wouldn't find water on Mars that they didn't include any way of testing for it?
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Drinking Martian water is not something to be done without careful consideration... Martians place a very high value on the sharing of water. If you're going to do it, you mustn't do it without understanding the full implications of doing so - the cultural significance and the implicit promises that accompany water ritual.
May you never thirst...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Am I really the only one here who actually played in the dirt as a kid?
... let's assume you don't have first hand experience with how liquid-like dry silt can be. Just today I read an article on Nasa's site that got me thinking about this topic. It's about how one of the rovers has again had its solar panels cleaned off by wind. If Martian winds can pull that trick off, clearly wind erosion must be ongoing on Mars, and has been going on for what, BILLIONS of years? Now...
...but with that wind erosion, what would be the lowest limit for particle size on the Martian surface?
... it's nice to dream and all, but what we're dealing with here -- again, at least on the surface -- is one very dry surface that has a heck of a lot of ultra-fine silt lying around in a low gravity environment.
Originally an outwash plain during the final ablation phase of a glacier, the 5+ wild acres I grew up on as a kid had a variety of clay, soil, and silt types. This "OMG, there's water on Mars!" reaction has come up at least once before here on Slashdot, after someone posted a link to a photograph that showed dark plumes spilling down a small incline. Some of the reactions here depressed me back then too. Have so many people really become so disconnected from the earth that they can't recognize ultra-fine silt when they see it?
Ok, so fine
without any liquid water...
without any biological activity...
without any volcanic activity...
Let me put this another way: there has been an erosional force running on that planet for a billion plus years, to this day, and no force (at least on the surface) is present to conglomerate or cement those particles back together. This, to me, means that all surface particles must be being eroded down to some lower limit in silt particle size. I bet there's all kinds of weird and wonderful physics going on down at that level, but I'm digressing.
Folks, as apparently the only person here on Slashdot who's ever played with dry silt, I have some sad news for you: I would be shocked if there weren't patches around that didn't look a heck of a lot like liquid.
Here's another story to contemplate: do you remember when one of the Mars rover's got stuck? The NASA engineers went off to the hardware store to recreate the soil conditions, and picked up things like dry cement powder and diatomaceous earth. And you have to remember that Mars' gravity is what, 1/3 that of Earths? Come on kids
Mars: where a dry surface flows like water.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
ok, i'm no trained profesional in hydrophysics, but where i'm from, water obeys the laws of gravity. if you look closely at that picture, you see what is claimed to be "water" in a configuration that it could not hold, and/or would not end up in on any surface. especialy a sloped one. (short runs both up and down the "slope" and runs in oposite direction of what apears to be "primary flow" it looks like extermely fine blown sand to me. blown sand on rock.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
As a matter of fact, the ocean looks gray on an overcast day. In other words, it's the same color as the sky.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Why are they still arguing about the existense of water on Mars?
Definitive proof was found long ago!
Life is wet, then you dry.
add re-plumbing to colonization cost
My red baseball cap looks black in the dark. Does that mean it's not really red? No, of course not. It just means there's not enough light for the color to be seen.
Likewise on overcast days there is not enough light for the blue of the ocean to reveal itself. If you were correct and the ocean was just reflecting the gray of the clouds, it would appear white on many overcast days (when the clouds are white), but it does not.
If you look at the colored pic next to the original black and white, it looks like someone was just bored in Gimp and did some coloring. The whole side-hill in the blacknwhite pic must be water if the colored pic is true.
j 5.jpg
http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/6572/39317433n
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Well, sadly, war is often useful, but anyway...
How about landers on Venus, Mercury, or any of the dozen interesting moons around Jupiter and Saturn? How about trying the Mars Polar Lander again, getting it right this time, so that we can study the frost?
We might learn quite a bit if we did any of that. But no. We go back to the SAME DAMN PLACE. It's familiar and easy.
Really, we don't get good science payback from YET ANOTHER toy driving around on the warmer/flatter part of Mars. Exploring is about going to NEW places. Going back to the same place, when there are reachable unexplored places remaining, is only excusable after a couple decades of technology advancement.
God dammit, what a load of populist crap that site is. They should not be allowed to use the word scientist in their name. Their content is far from science. I guess someone at slashdot is getting paid well for the proliferation of links to that site.
They're canals!
We've known about the Martian canals for decades!
This is news?
This is true. Glass is also slightly green. Looks transparent when you look from the front, but look into a thick pane of glass from the edge and it's green. Just gotta stack enough of it up to notice. Nothing is perfectly transparent.
This is consistent with the picture. Depending on the filter they took the picture with, it might look VERY blue. They commonly represent the image obtained from the UV filter as "blue" when they want to produce a color image from the pancam, but have not used the true blue filter in the image set. Give the absorption spectrum, that would make it look bluer than usual because water absorbs UV even better than blue. Notice that the lowest point of that graph is just outside the visible range to the left of blue. That's UV.
In one place it says, "...the Mars atmosphere is essentially a vacuum..." In another place it says, "The problem is, there are winds on Mars..." If it is essentially a vacuum, what is the composition of the wind?
Whoever keeps marking people as troll is indeed a troll themself.
looks like American beer. Wet cold and flat.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
If its not on Space.com then its not real space news. This false color photograph is showing something but its not water.
Actually, this water does ... Pluto's pissed about being kicked out of the family of planets, and he's marking territory.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Looks like ice to me. The lighter strip along the edge of the left "fork" looks similar to the microfracturing that happens when ice on the surface of a puddle expands and pushes against a steep edge. And in the middle of the photo (the right "fork"), the angular darker lines look like stress lines, also caused by ice expanding as it freezes.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
but do they have any oil?
[snip].... water is very slightly blue, in large quantities, the blue comes out .... [/snip]
This is true. Glass is also slightly green.
I attest to that. And air is slightly cyan/blue as well. In large quantities (such as a big sky), the cyan/blue comes out.
There's nothing like reading a good piece of science on Slashdot.
There's something I can't figure out: for some reason on sunset and sunrise, water becomes slightly yellow/red, just like the air.
I'm not sure what's with that, maybe as the sun gets ready to turn off, as heading into the ocean every night.
PS: Water reflects blue a bit better, but honestly, check some photos. You see the reflection on the surface. Water isn't cartoon bright blue as shown on the "proof photos" on Mars, especially when you lack the blue sky.
My quick count shows 7 surviving probes on the surface. They got pictures (see wikipedia), a soil probe, gas measurements, temperature measurements, pressure measurements, and spectrometer measurements.
It's been 26 years since the last landing, and a few more since the technology was chosen. Don't you think technology has gotten better in the past 30 years?
At the very minimum, we could set down landers with modern cameras in a few diverse areas.
In some ways, Venus is easy. The atmosphere is so thick that you can skip the parachute and air bags; the USSR just picked a non-aerodynamic shape and put shock absorbers on the bottom.
They paint the walls of the pool blue (duh). Not arguing against blue water, but hey... the world's largest swimming pool is crap compared to the ocean, and we don't paint the ocean floor... yet.
FairTax baby!
something like metamorphic rock like Obsidian, which looks watery with its conchoidal fractures and shiny black surface...wouldn't be surprised if it isn't molten rock flow exposed.
P.
Keep in mind that our pools are also laden with chemicals to keep them "clean"
i ve-lake).jpg
In nature there aren't too many sources of pure H2O, collections of glacial water pools/collections are probably one of the few naturally-occuring sources of relatively pure water, and you'll note that they tend to be quite blue.
http://crevassezone.org/Photos/Graphics/2836L-(Og
Good God, I like New Scientist because they have an attitude, but couldn't they have asked an actual MER scientist about the image? That's a false-color image. For what it's worth, the Pancam true-color page is here: Pancam True color and the full-size true-color panorama of Endurance crater is here: Endurance Pan. Try looking at this, instead of the false color single frame, and just try convincing yourself that you're seeing water on the sloped sides of the crater.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/594/1n153135181 eff37ljp1950ho2.jpg
u ssion_page/41
from
http://www.marsroverblog.com/dyn/entry/54280/disc
The surface just seems a bit too steep to me to accumulate any liquid water in such amounts for a pond, since it's facing up the border of the crater in the original pictures.
Indeed. That image is looking right up the crater rim into the sky. The rover itself was tilted at something like 22 degrees IIRC, just near the slippage threashold. Liguid would flow downward and empty out at that angle. I remember looking at similar images when oppy was in Endurance, and some such places did indeed look like water. However, fine powdery dust seems like a better explanation to me. If the powder is consistent in composition and small-grained, stereo triangulation would not be possible. Also, those images look compressed such that some of the detail may be washed out. Oppy had to compress lots of images in order to transmit them in a timely matter. There were notable transmission bottlenecks around the time Oppy was near Burns Cliff, I remember reading. Rover managers were afraid that the probe was wasting time waiting for images to upload and orbiters to pass overhead.
Table-ized A.I.
There are a number of things wrong with that article.
1) The images are false colour. All images taken by the rovers (or any probe for that matter) are never true colour. They generally take images through various infra red and green and ultraviolet filters. When combined, they create unnatural coloured images. So that blue soil you see wouldn't really be blue if it were to be seen with the naked eye.
2) The specific image shown were taken on the rim of Endurance crater, not at the floor of it. Water can't exactly pool on a slope.
3) Although the summery on slashdot here says "newly taken images...". This is also incorrect. They were taken in 2004.
I don't doubt that there is water on Mars, but I don't think it can pool on the surface (due to the low atmospheric pressure), nor do I think this photo contains any evidence of pooling water either. It may contain evidence of past water how ever.
As a matter of fact, the ocean looks gray on an overcast day. In other words, it's the same color as the sky.
Protip: any SCUBA diver will tell you that water absorbs the red end of the spectrum much faster than the blue end, which is why you lose all the reds at around 40 feet depth, and at 100 feet everything is mostly shades of blue. It has NOTHING to do with the color of the sky which, because of the Compton effect (ie lots of water vapor in our atmosphere) is also blue.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why do they keep sending such crappy cameras to mars? If I took a picture of a puddle of water with my 1 megapixel cellphone camera I could tell it's a puddle of water. Why is it so hard for them to take good pictures?!
The blue is digitally added. This comment on the thread linked above to the original image.
According to the thread the image was taken on a slope, meaning relative to the rover the surface in the picture appears flat. Relative to a flat plain this surface is fairly slanted, so if this was a liquid one would think it would appear to be flowing. My guess is that it is just sand. If you have ever seen a desert that can get windy the sand in some areas can look incredibly smooth like a liquid would. I think this may be what happened here.
By the time you see the reds and oranges in the sky on a sunset, the sun is actually already just below the horizon. Different wavelengths (colors) or light bend differently through the atmosphere. The blues and greens don't bend as much as the reds and oranges. So when the sun is just under the horizon, the sky turns orange and red because only those wavelengths get through. In this case you actually are seeing the reflection of the sky rather than the inherent color of the water itself.
Why can't it be crude oil?
Wouldn't it evaporate more slowly than water?
Camping on quad since 1996.
Since there's no definitive evidence that these are puddles of water, saying that puddles of water have been found on mars is jumping the gun... The title of the story should be something along the lines of "Puddle-like object found on Mars". Then again, the people at NASA need more funding after all of those budget cuts... so it might be good for them to overhype stories and give them exaggerated titles to get the public/congress/president/etc. to get excited and cough up some more money for them.
I was being sarcastic.
Come on kids ... it's nice to dream and all, but what we're dealing with here -- again, at least on the surface -- is one very dry surface that has a heck of a lot of ultra-fine silt lying around in a low gravity environment.
It's quite clear that soil surfaces on Mars must regularly be exposed to liquid water. Why? Because we've already pretty much seen it: the Viking lander saw ground frost in its images, and at temperatures and pressures on Mars, that frost can turn liquid.
(Incidentally, silt was, by definition, created in running water.)
So, while I agree that these pictures don't show liquid water and that we haven't seen any puddles of water on Mars yet, an ultra-dry explanation of Mars doesn't work, and liquid water or salt solutions on the surface of Mars are not just possible, but likely.
Occasionally, but more often green of white.
And who says we don't paint the ocean? Maybe YOU don't.
For all the fun we poke at them for mixing imperial and metric units, they've done a fantastic job with the Rover, still working so long after its "due date". Congratulations to all people involved.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
martian puddle source :-)
Lakes and oceans look blue on earth mostly because they reflect our blue sky.
That's crap; they're blue because they scatter blue light more, same reason the sky is blue in the first place.
They paint the walls of the pool blue (duh).
I used to live in a house with a pool that was painted white; the water looked bluish-green. (Not due to algae!)
Water flows like dry silt.
you had me at #!
and one GIANT PUDDLE
The Pancam is probably the best calibrated science camera ever built by humans, and definitely the best calibrated camera ever built weighing less than a few hundred grams. Does your cell phone take radiometrically calibrated 12-bit images in 13 spectral bands? And, more important, can it send images back from Mars? Look at publications with pancam specifications at the Pancam instrument page.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The article didn't have a larger image because then you'd see that the puddles aren't on the crater floor, but actually on a
huge slope
Read more in this forum
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
OK, I learned something there. Thank you!
Still, some of the blue color has to come from sky reflection. I mean, the sky clearly is blue, and water clearly does reflect some light. Some percentage of the blueness you see in photos of earth from space has to come from either source. Sadly we can't check what it looks like under clouds in those photos.
Does anyone know how much is from each factor?
As I wrote a few years ago in A Failure of Vision the filtering that NASA has been doing to accurately recreate the actual colors of Mars's surface actually makes it harder to tell what you're looking at. If you were living and working on Mars, before long your eyes and brain would adapt and you wouldn't see the red planet as particularly red.
If you go and adjust the ground to the rusty red in NASA's usual photos with this new photograph the water doesn't look nearly so watery any more. But when I lined up the peaks in the red, green, and blue channels to try and get an approximation of the original image (only an approximation, of course... but this has produced realistic looking images for me in the past... reddish, yes, but a red like you might see in Arizona) I got this picture of what appears to be normal-looking (not food-coloring-blue) water.
So my question is... what else have people missed, because they're seeing Mars through Earth-filtered images?
Maybe if a few folks out there tried this trick on other NASA imagery we'd find out.
Not sure what filters that image used, but this version looks more like NASA's "true color" images
A D37MIP2273L257C1.JPG
http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/pds/257/1P153927090R
Suddenly doesn't look much like water any more does it...
(Cheers to unmannedspaceflight.com for that pic)
This is irrelevant: we're talking about what is REFLECTED from the surface, NOT transmitted into the depths.
I don't ask this implying that it must be water, but rather I ask for more speculations. I wonder, maybe these are massive collections of opalite.
So much is known about mars: but this of course means that so little is known as well. The planet is harsher, and yet less harsh, than anywhere on earth. There is little atmosphere, so the whole breathing situation is much harsher, yet because of this fact 100km winds would fail to move a tent.
I think it's important to guess and wonder about things.
Personally, I hope it is water and that inside is a vast civilization of nano-sized intelligent beings. I hope one day they look up at the sky and witness a gargantuan machine staring down at them.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
You fail to realize that if water absorbs red light, water will not REFLECT red light, and thus it would look - blue - since the blue light DOES get reflected. Provided the water is deep enough. Amount of red light absorbed is proportional to the distance traveled by the photons. Thus, shallow water is transparent (everything is allowed through so you can see the bottom), and deep water is dark blue. You can still see all the colors of a fish swimming 1 foot beneath the surface, though. You just won't see the bottom.
Bah, its not my job to teach you basic high school physics. Continue to live in your ignorance, by all means. You might also consider moving to Kansas.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Curious why I hadn't thought of this question before, but what could the density of air be on mars which has a large effect on wind power, if it's approximately vacuum?
I don't use PhotoShop, myself. The Gimp is good enuff.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Oh yeah? Then why does the sky look blue? Explain that Mr. Smartypants!
To answer my own (rhetorical) question...I always thought that the ocean looks blue for the same reason that the sky looks blue: all those short blue wavelengths get scattered about, and some are reflected back to our eyes. The red light just keeps on going, and doesn't get reflected back. But this is probably one of those "simple" things that aren't so simple, and I'm totally wrong.
For what it's worth, the North Atlantic isn't blue, anyway--it's a startling turquoise color. I crossed the Atlantic a couple of times (U.S. Army troop carrier...bleh), and noticed that while coastal waters (the English Channel, say) are indeed blue, once you get out into deep water it's blue-green.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Overrated: For when your ego can't handle the chance of someone metamodding your Troll.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I love "Enlarge Photo" buttons that open up the photo in the exact same dimensions and resolution as the one in the article. Anyone find a higher quality image?
Also I was under the impression that water is blue on Earth because it reflects our blue atmosphere. Why would water on Mars be blue? Or is that a false-color image?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Yes, Mars is far away.
Because Mars is really far away.
Why was I modded troll?!? Water DOES indeed have a slight blue tint to it. Oceans are blue even on cloudy days because the sky has little to do with the fact that water is already blue. For those who still hold to the misconception: fix your brain.
Water has a slight blue tint to it. You don't notice it in a glass, but it's obvious in a lake on a cloudy day, or in a deep indoor pool. Since I was modded troll by imbeciles, I'll post this fact again: WATER IS BLUE.
You were taught wrong, as, apparently, most people here were. Water has a slight blue tint; that's why it looks clear in a small glass, but in a deep indoor pool, lake (on a cloudy day) or underwater in the ocean, it's dark blue. Because: WATER IS BLUE.
Since it is on ESA, does not seems to be fake http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808 BE_0.html
This is rather old news
If this is a fake please let me know.
On the Planetary Society blog page, Emily Lakdawalla has completely demolished this assertion, showing the "nearly-true color" version of the image (the one shown is highly colorized), and the context image showing where on the sloped wall of the crater this "pooling water" is supposed to be.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Most of the blues we see (in general) are a result of Rayleigh scattering. Blue wavelengths don't tend to make it very far in our atmosphere, so the blue we do see is often scattered lights of other wavelengths.
Fnord.