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Massive Martian Glaciers Found
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."
And it's about time. Now we just need to get some "volunteers" to get on a spaceship...
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
Why the need to spell out water ice? Shouldn't H2O be implied and if it's something else (methane, ammonia, etc) then spell it out.
Just wondering.
What's interesting to me, is that they mention in TFA that this ice can't have formed recently. The current Martian climate won't allow it. Meaning that the glacier was laid down ages ago when such formations were still possible, got buried beneath the debris, and has basically been sitting there since.
Forget water harvesting, I'm more interested in studying the ice in situ. If there ever was life on Mars (which is independent of the question of whether there's life there now), the odds are good we'd find evidence of it frozen in the glacier. Cold preserves, objects frozen in ice erode slowly, and the living things generally need water to survive.
Of course, anything that ever lived on Mars would likely have been microscopic. I doubt we'd find anything as big as a terrestrial animal. It'd still be the first evidence of life outside of our own planet though, which is a pretty frickin' huge deal.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I wonder if this discovery had been made a few months earlier if they would have altered the course of the Phoenix lander to try to touch down on the glacier. Or is the crust on top of the glacier too thick for Phoenix to get through? This seems like a prime target for future missions to analyze the ice and look for signs of life.
I think we need to send Bruce Willis and a crack team of oil rig workers to do some drilling on Mars...
Sounds like we should be taking a new look at the "Mars Express" concept. This just screams for a direct look-see by real human beings. And we could really use a project that would kick-start a new wave of technological innovation.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
1. Establish moon base, mine water-ice, build solar-powered magnetic rail launcher and ore smelter.
2. Combine water with mixture of moon regolith plus mined magnetic materials, freeze into projectile, use rail launcher to send into low moon 'parking' orbit.
3. Use mirrors in moon orbit to melt regolith/metal/water mixture from projectiles in 'parking' lunar orbit. Form into desired hollow and radiation-resistant Mars transport. Build necessary habitat inside. Attach VASIMIR propulsion which will use hydrogen extracted from water from which ship is mostly made. Attach Mars lander made mostly from materials mined on moon. Use oxygen from from hydrogen fuel extraction for breathing during trip. (You could even do roughly the same thing on Mars for return trips, or at least refuel/re-shield with sufficient supplies sent ahead on unmanned vehicles to get started.)
4. Get your ass to Mars! Get your ass to Mars! Get your ass to Mars!
5. Profit!
Probably much I've missed, or am mistaken about. Sounds good to me, though.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Undoubtedly, the quantities of materiel for a Mars base would be huge. What I can't understand is why nobody is ramping up to spread that job around. Seems to me that there are plenty of companies, states, countries, and so on, who would be delighted to get the chance to spend millions of dollars to have their stuff being used by a Mars crew. And it seems to me that we now know both how to get missions to Mars and how to have them work together.
Why is nobody trying to convince Wisconsin to start their own Mars mission to send five kilos of cheese into Mars orbit along with some clothes from Lands' End and fifteen or twenty kilos of brats and cheese bread? We know that UW Madison has some kickass space scientists and plenty of engineers. Or what about having developing nations pay a fifty or sixty thousand dollars a kilo to get their signature products added to a vessel to then be built and launched by one of the umpty-dozen New Space companies? There are plenty of options.
The smart thing to do at this point is to start pushing non-federal entities to start their own launch programs to launch their own payloads to Mars orbit where they can either wait for landing instructions (safely a few hundred miles or more from the base) or to be ferried down by some purpose-built vehicle.
Not all supplies are high tech. There is no reason that we need to wait years and years before we'll be ready to send low-G cheese, for crying out loud. The vacuum sealers sold in every supermarket today are more high-tech than the gear used to prepare consumables for the Apollo missions. Thousands and thousands of kilos of supplies would fit into this category. Clothes. Food. Bedding. And on and on. And, frankly, there are plenty of ways to structure the contracts so that Mars crew aren't obligated to use what is sent. Something would have to be pretty damn bad to get left in the cold but there's no reason that option can't be included.
And think about it. This way the logistics work is spread around, too. And the cargos can launch at high-G, travel at near-ambient temperatures in low-atmosphere vessels, and in a dozens of different ways, be a hell of a lot cheaper to send then trying to get everydamnthing shipped in a human-capable vessel. Sending everything in one vessel is like shipping a package by buying an airline ticket for it. This would provide the option of "parcel post".
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
So find some ice-filled underground caverns and make the first colonies there. Build some large graphene "world domes" above them, as greenhouses to grow crops in. Mars is very geologically stable, so humans can expand their presence underground like an expanding ant colony, while building large graphene bubbles topside for agriculture.