Orbiter Reveals Rock Fracture Plumbing On Mars

Riding with Robots writes "Mars researchers report that a robotic spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet has revealed hundreds of small fractures exposed on the Martian surface that once directed flows of water through underground Martian sandstone. 'This study provides a picture of not just surface water erosion, but true groundwater effects widely distributed over the planet,' said one of the mission scientists for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been regularly returning terabytes of high-resolution images and other kinds of data from Mars."

Comments

canals

[kenbo11]

Ahhh! the true martian canals!

Re:canals

[konohitowa]

I was thinking the same thing. I suspect Percival Lowell would have been happy that the discovery was made on a mission run, in part, from the observatory bearing his name.

Re:Data rate of 6Mb/s

[konohitowa]

Longer than that. It only has LOS with earth for 16 hours a day and uses 10 to 11 of those hours for data transmittal.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/spacecraft/communication.html

I was somewhat disappointed that the NASA page discusses the data in terms of how many CDs they would fill; however, at least they didn't try to tell me how many football fields would be required to lay the CDs edge-to-edge.

Re:Data rate of 6Mb/s

[houghi]

You could have gone to the homepage http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
There it states 67.5 Terrabits received. (Terrabits, not terrabytes)

And on http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/mission/sc_telecomm.html it gives a different figure, but that is static data, while on the first page it looks as if it is dynamic information.

The spacecraft has already provided more than 50 Terabits -- that's 50 million million bits. To put it another way, that's more than all the data transmitted by all previous JPL spacecraft put together!

Re:Misguided

[camperdave]

I'm sick of the comparison of crossing the Atlantic to space travel. The two are completely different. Columbus was attempting to find a cheaper route to known resources which could not be found locally. He was using ages old technologies which could easily be repaired by the ship's carpenter at any convenient island. His intended cargo would have paid for his journey no matter which way he went. Space travel, on the other hand, is not about cheaper resources. Everything is cheaper on Earth. Space travel uses experimental technologies (granted, it is well tested) that cannot be easily repaired en route. Finally, space travel has, apart from communications, weather, and other Earth monitoring satellites, never been profitable.

Probably the only point at which they might favourably compare is in the percentage of the gross national wealth needed to fund the voyages.