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Water Ice On Mars
cathector sends along a story from SpaceWeather.com on the discovery of water ice on Mars.
"Scientists have figured out the mysterious white substance unearthed by NASA's Phoenix lander on Mars. It's frozen water. The breakthrough came last week when Phoenix's stereo camera caught the substance in the act of disappearing. Bathed in martian sunlight for four days, the white substance sublimated — i.e., it transformed from solid to gas without passing through the liquid state. This is how water behaves on Mars.... Some readers have asked, how do we know the white substance is not frozen CO2 (dry ice) instead of frozen water? Answer: Phoenix's landing site is too warm for dry ice. The average daily temperature is about -70 F while dry ice requires temperatures lower than about -109 F." The animated GIF showing the ice sublimating is pretty nice too.
Yeah, but we know how the substance behaves, we have knowledge about the environmental conditions, etc. Knowing what we know, few substances are going to exhibit those characteristics in that environment.
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So, we spend a few hundred million to land something on Mars, a major part of whose mission was to confirm or debunk the existence of water there, and after 24 days all we can say is "Look, it's sublimated so it's probably water!"? I'm hearing jokes about Americans forgetting to include some simple 'test for water' equipment in their 325 million 'let's see if there's water on Mars' probe.
So, is anyone else thinking 'wtf?' like me? Why are we reduced to using pictures to try and determine if the stuff is water? Where the hell are the results of the conclusive tests so we don't have to use words like 'probably', 'most likely', and 'it shure looks like watuh, don' it?'.
Come on, NASA, you're making yourselves look incompetent.
You have two grammatical errors in your first sentence. But thanks for the lecture on standards.
The picture they show of this at NASA.gov shows what would be frozen liquid water but we know that it wouldn't have been deposited there as a liquid unless it came from a different planet and was deposited there by a landing craft after the trench was dug. H2O wouldn't desublimate in a form that the sheet ice in that trench takes. Even if you feel that a water desublimate on Mars could take the appearance of frozen liquid sheet ice on Earth, you'd have to believe that the robotic scoop perfectly dug the trench to clear all the dirt off the thin fragile sheet of ice without breaking it, or if it was thicker before the dig, shaved it down to a perfect millimeter thick sheet of ice. If the liquid wasn't deposited there intentionally, it was deposited there accidentally by leakage of some sort of liquid from the craft.