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NASA Announces Water Found On Mars
s.bots writes "Straight from the horse's mouth, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has identified water in a soil sample. Hopefully this exciting news will boost interest in the space program and further exploration of the Martian surface." Clearly, this has long been suspected, but now Martian water's been (in the words of William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer) "touched and tasted."
Here comes the neighborhood!
Caveat Utilitor
Meh. Call me if they find crude oil on Mars.
Now what?
NASA found water on Mars over three years ago.
Well we know one place where the Housing bubble hasn't collapsed. The Deed I bought on MartianRealestate.com will finally go up in value. I purchased 3000 acres on the Martian polar regions. Now where to build my lake house...
I've given up on Slashdot's comment scores.
Seriously are we really that surprised we found water on Mars? Considering most of our galaxy is made up of the same compounds here on Earth, I wouldn't doubt if we found water on nearly all our planets, in one form or another.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I still can't believe we sent a small robot and let it run around on *Mars*. It seems so unfathomably far away that I find it hard to even imagine...
Next stop: Bacteria.
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...is what most people will think. Whilst this is of earth-shattering (well, mars-shattering) importance to a lot a scientists it isn't going to motivate Joe Public to commit any more tax money to the exploration of space, because they don't benefit from it themselves. This isn't a condition of human nature, this is a conscious choice by a significant portion of the population to never grow out of adolescent self obsession. People are told its good to be totally egotistical, and here is a product that will help you do that.
So no, it won't boost interest in space exploration; everyone who will raise an eyebrow to this news is already interested in space. People who didn't care before now won't care now.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
This will be remembered in the textbooks as one of the biggest discoveries in human history - and yet it will of course be presently overlooked by uninterested masses.
Will humanity ever get past our predilections with ourselves?
I can't fathom the significance of this event fully, and yet the public applause so well deserved is again, starkly absent.
oh well - I think it's great at least, maybe I shouldn't care so much what the masses think or care about.
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I wonder if we'll someday be able to look at the quantum state of the molecules, atoms and subatomic particles making up even pure water, to learn about its history. The way that we look at the chemical composition now, with more familiar instruments.
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Wasted tax dollars? I'm sure tax dollars are wasted on many idiotic programs than the geological survey of Mars. Space exploration is so important to understanding how the universe was formed, which in turn makes us understand how the earth was formed, which in turn makes us predict many events.
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The Viking landers observed frost in the 70's. Mars obiters found huge amounts of water underground. Ice is clearly exposed in many photographs. Knowledge of ice and water on Mars goes way, way beyond "suspected". If detecting ice is all this mission yields, it's a big waste of money. This mission was intended to give detailed information about what's in the ice and soil, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
The question for the last decade or two has been whether there is liquid water on Mars. Despite the low air pressure, even pure liquid water can exist in some places and times: aquifers, briny puddles and lakes, lakes enclosed in ice, etc.
No it won't, because water is a fairly common molecular arrangement. Electricty, atomic power, Earth being round, these are things that qualify as the biggest discoveries. In 10 years this particular incident of the rover will be forgotten, and in 100 years, the rover itself will be a historical footnote. How much do textbooks cover the Apollo program other than #11 and #13?
Less than 100 years ago, people believed that Mars had canals full of water. Then with better optics people realized that no, those trenches, causing an extreme belief swing the other way - that Mars must be bone dry, any water having long since evaporated. Of course that ignores the polar ice caps which spectrography can easily identify.
We've finally come into direct contact with H20 on Mars' surface rather than simply remote identification. While a milestone, it's a pretty damn tiny one. It will not be remembered in textbooks. Look how results of the Venus expeditions of the 70s are now glossed over.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
People are curious by default. But you can't make money on reveling in scientific breakthroughs. Since money is the only measure of success in our culture, R&D that doesn't directly translate into more capital is ignored and often ridiculed, though almost all real breakthroughs are performed through the state sector (through funding to universities or even directly by DARPA).
Billions upon billions are spent convincing people to buy products they don't need with money they don't have. It's all fun and games until the currency crashes and the environment is left in ruins.
In the meantime, Chinese kids and other kids from developing countries are looking with awe and go on to study math and science.
A generation from now, when they are the leaders of the World, our children will wonder why they're sweeping up after the assembly robots - Chinese will move their manufacturing over here because of our cheap labor. After all, they'll be busy inventing things and exploring space while we're watching the latest reality shit on TV.
I blame the educators for making such a fascinating subject dull and harder than it has to be. Why, I really didn't understand derivative and integral calculus until I took Physics. A derivative is velocity?! Cool! And its derivative is acceleration?!? Awesome! And the integral of velocity is distance?!?! I have a hard-on!
Why does it have to be taught on its own? Calculus was invented for science and teaching it as a separate subject just makes it completely abstract and a mechanical wrote type of process.
That's just one example of how science education is this society needs to be updated, revamped, or whatever you want to call it. And I'm really glad that girls are being encouraged more to enter those fields.
This isn't a condition of human nature, this is a conscious choice by a significant portion of the population to never grow out of adolescent self obsession.
Actually, I'd rather spend the majority of my resources on my children, which is probably a trait shaped by evolution to become part of the human condition. If you can send a mission to Mars without impacting my kids' education, future debt, or well-being, I'd completely support it.
It is momentous only because it finally proves that sustainable human life is possible on Mars. However, since Mars is sadly lacking a Magnetosphere, the fact that water and oxygen are available there isn't as useful as we would like it to be. Hmm... how hard is it to build a dome that blocks out all harmful cosmic radiation, yet still lets in the sunlight necessary for photosynthesis? Since any Terran originated life on Mars would require a pressurized dome anyway, how big a win is a Martian colony over a lunar or asteroid belt colony? Seems the only advantage of Mars is earth-like gravity, which is also a disadvantage if you ever want to leave the colony...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Is there any particular scientific significance to the discovery of water on Mars that isn't related to the possibility of discovering extraterrestrial life? I firmly believe that extraterrestrial life does not exist (and never has), so everybody else's excitement about it gets a little old after awhile. Is there another reason I should be excited about this?
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"Humans and all other organisms have a built-in feel for H2O." So do FTIR spectrometers, TGAs, Karl Fischer titrators, and other instruments. You're obviously not a chemistry geek.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Just to reiterate a point that a few others have made: the presence of water ice at the surface of Mars has been understood since at least the 1970's for high latitudes. This goes for parts of the polar caps (also made up of CO2 ice), and the seasonal frosts that are known to coat the very study area visited by the Phoenix lander.
Here's a snippet from an abstract of an article from 1982 (Journal of Geophysical Research, 87:367-370): "A new reflectance spectrum of the Martian north polar cap is analyzed, and it shows water ice absorption features. This evidence confirms the result of the Viking IRTM and MAWD experiments, which indicate that the north residual polar cap of Mars is composed of water ice during the season observed." The Viking 2 lander directly saw seasonal frost in the late 70's, as the Phoenix lander will in the coming months: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jplhistory/captions/vikinglander-t.php
The Phoenix results are new in that ice has been directly confirmed for shallow regolith ("soil") materials at the Phoenix site (as opposed to spectroscopically identified from orbit or from the Earth). This is a nice and important result, but is not a huge surprise (the site is known to be seasonally coated with water-ice frosts, and its sediments are distributed in a polygonal pattern that is analogous to what we see at high latitudes on Earth where freeze-thaw action dominates).
Phoenix is a great mission, but let's also give due credit to earlier workers.
For example, we don't know much about our own oceans and those are far more important to us as a source of food, minerals etc.
[sarcasm]Absolutely. We should immediately stop space research entirely and focus ALL of our efforts on the oceans. I can't believe no one is looking into this subject already.[/sarcasm]
I care if there is water on Mars. With the advent of nuclear and biological weapons, we now have the power to significantly fuck up our living space. Hell - one of these days there will be another asteroid strike.
It would be nice to know if humans can be self sufficient in places other than earth. That won't happen tomorrow, but it won't happen at all if we don't research it.
I don't know if you have looked up lately, but it turns out the universe is an awfully big place. We should probably look around a bit.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
from the so-val-kilmer-can-breathe-easy dept.
Val Kilmer? Don't you mean Dan Quayle?
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit ... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 1989-08-11 (reported in Esquire, 1992-08)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Must... resist... Iraq... comparison...
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Overall, we're not surprised. Scientists have been pretty sure there was subsurface ice there for several years based on ground-penetrating radar on one of the orbiters. Confirming this was a major goal of Phoenix. There weren't a lot of other good explanations for all that hydrogen detected by radar, but that still wasn't considered proof. Nor even were the images of the bright, ice-like material uncovered earlier in the Phoenix mission. Also, we already knew for quite a while about water vapor on Mars, but the next question was about large quantities of surface water.
The Phoenix team was a little surprised by exactly how it occurred, however. Because ice sublimates on Mars once exposed, they had to get the sample into the TEGA oven relatively quickly. It ended up being even stickier than previous samples (possibly due to melting of the ice by friction from the rasp) and didn't fall properly from the scoop into the oven. By the time the results were received, analyzed, and a conclusion reached, they considered the sample already spoiled, but because some likely made it into the oven, the oven was also "contaminated," which affects the accuracy of measuring relative abundance. So they managed to dump the "ruined" sample into the oven to compare it to the last "ruined" sample, but found there was water in it anyways. Unfortunately, because of the sublimation, this still doesn't give them the relative abundance. It also, as far as I know, was only inferred so far by calorimetry. In the next day or two, they should get spectroscopy results back, which will be even better verification.
Because of all this, they're going to spend some more time practicing and polishing their delivery method so they can get a truly fresh sample into the ovens. They've got 6 empty ovens left, although there might be a problem with the doors on some or all of them.
Nobody 'knew' is was there. Now we do.
Yes, we could ahve people on mars by now, but there isn't a real budget for it, so we send the specific mission robots.
When we are ready to build something their, we will send people.
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Could we send a Rove?
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Many, so very many.
A bottling plant on Mars would make crazy money. "Don't drink earth water, drink E.T water!" (even more if they pluralize that and convince people alien urine will give them super health).
And then the Mars company will give everyone hell for calling it Mars Water.
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It'll be Evian or Volvic who leverage the new market! Probably Volvic, if Olympus Mons yields a source :-)
Devil's Advocate: Then pay for it your damn self.
In that case, I for one would like my Iraq money back so that I can transfer it to NASA.