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Mars Orbiter Finds Evidence For Ancient Rivers, Lakes
Cowards Anonymous points out news that studies based on data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found that vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes when the planet was young. The studies also suggest that the water existed for quite some time, often in standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter. NASA provides a color-enhanced photo of a delta within a crater. Quoting:
"The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, preserve a record of the interaction of water with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period of Mars' history, approximately 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. This period corresponds to the earliest years of the solar system, when Earth, the moon and Mars sustained a cosmic bombardment by comets and asteroids. Rocks of this age have largely been destroyed on Earth by plate tectonics. They are preserved on the moon, but were never exposed to liquid water. The phyllosilicate-containing rocks on Mars preserve a unique record of liquid water environments possibly suitable for life in the early solar system."
Their obviously an underground civilization. Will make excellent troglodytes. Get their corbamite!
They had plenty of greenhouse gases. The problem was that after the geomagnetic field of Mars was lost, the solar wind was able to strip away the atmosphere, leaving it today at about 5 to 10 millibars (in contrast with the Earth which is about 1000 millibars).
What is that? Boy that sounds like a Cliff Claven quote if I've ever heard one. "Y'see Noam - it was back in the Noahchian period of Mahs when the mahtians would take baths in the wahtah and lakes. This has been proved with the phyllosilicahtes found up thah.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Mars' magnetic field has not always been as weak as it is now. One theory is that as it's core cooled, the magnetic field vanished, allowing the solar wind to penetrate and blow away the atmosphere. If this turns out to be accurate it might be possible to teraform mars ( or rather, repair it ) by creating a magnetic field through artificial means.
Thar she blows!
Men of the Moon, quick! To the space whalers!
"'scuse me, 'scuse me, officer JPLNazi coming though... "
...vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes...
This has been OLD NEWS since the Viking orbiters, more than thirty years ago, though thanks to the demands of the mass media, the goldfish-like attention spans of the general public and the rigours of academic tenure, publishing, and funding rounds (not to mention PR teams at academic institutions, who often seem to know jack shit about the subject they're writing a press release on) it gets recycled every time there's a water-related Mars discovery. I'm sure I've seen three or four water-related stories based on MER (rover) research, then there's the Mars Express data, Mars Odyssey's spectrometer data (hint: why do you think Phoenix happened to land somewhere where there's water ice 5cm below the surface - luck?). Oh yeah and of course Phoenix is just about to drop ice scrapings into the TEGA oven and cook out any water, carbonates, in fact everything else that vaporises at less than 1000 degrees C.
The significant aspects of the two new papers (one in Nature, on in Nature Geoscience) are indeed the phyllosilicates, more commonly known as clay minerals. (if you're thinking of the clay in your back garden, imagine it after lying in an Antarctic dry valley for a three plus billion years, in a near vacuum, and hammered with UV. To the layperson this is what Arthur Dent would have identified thusly: "well, it's rock, isn't it?" It adds to the evidence for medium-term (up to 10^6 years) periods of free-standing or flowing water on the surface at essentially every scale, from regional morphology such as flash flood outflow channels, river deltas, coastlines and the like down to rock formations that are clearly indurated, contain silica minerals (google 'Spirit Tyrone') or haematite (blueberries, which are concretions formed in water-saturated rocks) and vugs (voids left by water-soluble crystals.) When you wet particular kinds of rocks that Mars is known to have a lot of, you get clays (phyllosilicates) as a result.
By the way the NASA image isn't
"colour enhanced"
-- that's CRISM data overlaid on a visible-wavelengths image. (CRISM is a spectrometer and is the instrument that ID'd these minerals.)
...standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter.
This statement is, uh, mistaken. What it's getting at is the notion that long periods of exposure to water is generally considered to be probably very very important if not essential to early life. ("organic matter" would be anything with a carbon atom in it, e.g. coal, plastic, methane, oil... it's one of those words that means something totally different in particular scientific context. Like "metals" (tho' that means at leat three different things to different sciences...)
Much much more at a popular search engine near you.
our inevitable colonisation of Mars
Look, we are never, never, ever going to "colonise" Mars. There's no reason to do it except SF fantasy wish fulfillment or too much time spent watching scientifically nonsensical films and books. IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. James van Allen was right. There's no reason to go there when we can do anything humans can do with robots for a thousandth of the cost and risk. Yes, it's "slower" than spending a couple of hundred billion dollars over 20 years, but so what? Mars has been there for 4000,000,000 years; it's not going anywhere.
If you're very very lucky, your children or grandchilden may live long enough to see a manned landing; personally, I very much doubt it. Hmmm, I must get round to setting up that thingy on longbets.org ...
The gist is that as the atmosphere was stripped away and the grew too cold and low pressure for surface liquid water to persist for long enough to cause obvious landforms, it was going into underground aquifers and ice deposits. Every now and then a big transient source of heat (volcanic eruptions or magma plumes in the mantle, and impacts, basically) deliver a big pulse of thermal energy that melts a large quantity of water. Result, landforms like canyons, areas with very large boulders that were carried from "upstream" by the floods, etc. There are other causitive agents, eg collapse of crater-rim walls releasing lake water, ice damn collapse, Milankovic cycles warming areas, polar wander... (and if the new idea about the lowlands results from a gargantuan impact are correct, it seems likely that the upper crust migrated significantly over the planet to reach an equilibrium position with the lowlands at one pole or the other, the Tharsis bulge (Olympus Mons et al) near the equator, etc.
This is somewhat appropriate for this discussion:
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
--Arthur C. Clarke
These cheap landers with specialized probes show just how much more powerful our science can be when we interact with its subjects through matter-on-matter operations, rather than just interacting with energy as we do in telescopes, or interacting with information as we do in simulations.
When we actually send a human to Mars, a "generalized probe" with sensory and mechanical amplification equipment, we'll really be getting to work, down to brass tacks.
--
make install -not war
The experts said, "mechanised rail travel was impossible because people would suffocate from the change in air pressure", then they said heavier-than-air flight was impossible", then they said "supersonic flight was impossible because the aircraft would shake itself apart". Up until 60 years ago, traveling between the USA and Europe was on the order of months of time, rather than hours.
But developing the technology to allow for high speed travel for long distances is an evolutionary process. Good examples are the evolution of sea-going craft from simple coracles, currachs, log rafts, then wooden ships, paddle-steamers, iron-hull craft up to ocean liners and nuclear powered air-craft carriers.
Any kind of interplanetary travel would be the same - protecting the crew from the elements (radiation) is the first obstacle, then there is the problem of propulsion over a long period of time. And then there is the actual process of manufacture if the vessel cannot travel from the surface of a planet.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
but the fact that Venus has no signs of life proofs that women do not really exist and are just the results of a fevered imagination. This handily explains why slashdot, a bastion of clear thinking, has no women.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No--it goes without saying that humankind will eventually need to control its number in order not to overpopulate Earth. That's all.
Space migration? You will not migrate the billions that Earth can't sustain to Mars, at least not without completely exhausting our resources ...
Possibly mankind will move to space/Mars. But that means a few hundred or some thousands--not billions--of people will establish a new human habitat, kind of a backup. But this will not reduce or even shrink the net number of people on Earth.