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New Images Reveal Pure Water Ice On Mars
Matt_dk writes "Images of recent impact craters taken by the HiRISE Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed sub-surface water ice halfway between the north pole and the equator on Mars. While the Phoenix lander imaged subsurface ice where the top layer of soil had been disturbed at the landing site near the north pole, these new images — taken in quick succession, detecting how the ice sublimated away — are the first to show evidence of water ice at much lower latitudes. Surprisingly, the white ice may be made from 99 percent pure water."
They're finding a lot of water in space recently.
They just need to find the ethanol now.
For fuel of course! - *looks side to side*
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Get your ass to Mars, ... Get your ass to Mars, ... Get your ass to Mars, ...
And build a reactor that we can then start to release the water into the atmosphere.
There is no sig.
A very poorly placed one, as the vaste majority of the fuel you make is going to be used to get it out of the gravity well (less so for the moon, but still significant). I've said it a dozen times on Slashdot already. A gas station would make more sense on an NEO where the resources are abundant and the gravity almost non-existant.
Get your ass to an NEO! (just doesn't have the same right to it)
That works. Fusion power is only 30 years away, after all, and I'm sure meaningful Mars missions will have to wait longer than that.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Uranium won't get us back off the planet. Solar works well enough for short-term power, even all the way out at Mars. But it's a death sentence to explore Mars without enough fuel to get us back off the ground, so if we can find something we can use/refine as return fuel, it'll make an initial trip that much more likely.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Use the water as an energy source how? Heat difference between something heated by the sun and the ice? I'm not sure I follow.
If your rocket burns oxygen and hydrogen you could fly it to Mars, then use solar energy to turn water into hydrogen+oxygen, and fly home.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Anon cause I moderated.
Read Zubrin's The Case for Mars. Water is all we really need.
Yes, not only is Fusion power only 30 years away, but personal flying jet-packs are only 10 years away, and true Artificial Intelligence is only 20 years away.
The future is looking bright!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
It's got what Martian plants crave.
What's the last 1%? Something really nasty, I bet.
Ian Ameline
Water + Solar/Nuclear = Return flight.
Ok - all we need now is to send the Guvernator up there to whip up some dissent among the subsurface mutant population, and we should have a breathable 14.7 PSI atmosphere in no time!!!
> How long before martians now?
Soon, soon.
He brought the boys to the edge of the canal and told them to look down into the water. "There are the Martians I promised to show you"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I'm not sure that's really dogma. Sure, it's not widely accepted that there is life on Mars, and a number of people think it's unlikely, but there's quite a lot of fairly open discussion about the possibility.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you need to get off mars then water (H+O) on the surface is in exactly the right place. Obviously the ability to make fuel outside the gravity well would be handy as well.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you want to get technical about it, we've already harnessed fusion energy... in bombs... a good fifty years ago. We just haven't been able to scale down the process below a few megatons yield yet.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Space: where moist stuff is.
Gee, thanks for connecting the dots for us.
This is IMHO powerful evidence for recent warm wet Mars :
'The other surprising discovery is that ice exposed at the bottom of these meteorite impact craters is so pure,' Byrne said. 'The thinking before was that ice accumulates below the surface between soil grains, so there would be a 50-50 mix of dirt and ice. We were able to figure out, given how long it took that ice to fade from view, that the mixture is about one percent dirt and 99 percent ice.'
'The ice is a relic of a more humid climate not very long ago, perhaps just several thousand years ago.'
Dr. Bryne talks about making this ice through 'frost heave,' but it sounds to me like Arcadia Planitia may have been considerably warmer during the geologically recent past.
Remember, Mars has climate cycles, they cause the sublimation and freezing of both water and Carbon Dioxide, and both water vapor and Carbon Dioxide are powerful greenhouse gases on Mars. (As is methane, which is also present in the Martian atmosphere from unknown sources.) Presumably this ice dates from an earlier part of the climate cycle, when there was higher humidity. Higher humidity implies higher pressure and temperatures. Higher pressures could put the surface above the triple point of water, so that liquid water is possible.
In that case, if the temperature gets high enough, liquid water become inevitable. That would (upon the next change in the climate cycle) freeze as very pure ice.
The Europeans keep talking about sending a rover with a drill to Mars. I think we have now found a good place for it to go.
Yes. Allow me to reiterate that, yes.
I would kiss my children and young grandchildren goodbye. Wave to the ex-wife. Kiss my main squeeze goodbye and squeeze her ass a little.
Wave goodbye to all of them, and get my ass on the craft.
And while I'm up there, I'd find my way up to the Martian Arctic, and find the Phoenix. And decode my sons name engraved on the DVD.
Did I say HELL YES!
That's probably because the type of life you seem to have in mind is pretty specific - by the rest of your comment: intelligent, large enough to be visible, and both located near and willing to interact with things that we've dropped on the surface.
There's a lot of living stuff right here at home that doesn't fit any of those categories, so there's no reason to automatically assume that there can't be any life at all on Mars.
Ah, fair nuf. I was thinking a more general purpose fueling point that just getting up off the surface. I was under the impression that it was difficult to use H as a rocket fuel though. In theory it has a high thrust/weight ratio but in practice it's so hard to keep it contained and cold enough to stay liquid that the extra equipement negates any advantes that it has. Doesn't mean that it's impossible of course, just difficult.
The more we learn about the physics of fusion the more we realize that we did not grasp all of the complexities of building a working fusion reactor. We've gone from Q 10 for a commercial reactor so we are at least getting closer to our goal of commercial fusion. The question is whether the upward trend in Q gains will continue in the future. If they do then it is quite conceivable that we will have a prototype reactor up and running in 30 years, if not, we'll learn a lot about the physics involved.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Rocket motors don't require an atmosphere at all. Is just mass moving and action/reaction. Any sort of device that can chuck mass out the back of a vehicle will push that vehicle forward.
I drank what? -- Socrates
You inspired the following daydream:
1. Small crowd around a water cooler talking energetically
2. Later... Man sitting alone in a chair at home
3. Man sitting alone in a chair at home
4. Man sitting alone in a chair at home
5. Man sitting alone in a chair at home
6. Man exclaims, "HA HA! I get it!"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Get your ass to an NEO! (just doesn't have the same right to it)
Just refer to the NEO in question as "The One", and I'm sure you'll be able get some people excited about it.
We must find The One!
The enemies of Democracy are
Soon, soon.
He brought the boys to the edge of the canal and told them to look down into the water. "There are the Martians I promised to show you"
A classic film reference; well played. :)
But remember, Earth is incapable of supporting life... according to the Martians.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
"pure water". It would be a lot more interesting if they found seriously contaminated water, with lots of organic compounds. Heck, raw sewage on mars would really make my day!
Rocket propulsion is dangerous, extremely expensive and rather primitive when you think about it.
State of the art, it is.
Luckily for the world, a new form of transportation and energy production technology will arrive soon, one based on the realization that we are immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles. This is a consequence of a reevaluation of our understanding of the causality of motion. Soon, we'll have vehicles that can move at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring damages due to inertial effects. Floating cities, unlimited clean energy, earth to Mars in hours, New York to Beijing in minutes... That's the future of energy and travel.
Observation first, flying cities later. We haven't observed hypothetical effects that would allow the technologies you causally (heh heh) list. And an immense ocean of energetic particles and "causality of motion" (whatever that means, if anything) do not imply flying cities. Show us the effect experimentally before you tell us how wonderful it will be.
I tried Nucleic Acid once.
What a ride, what a ride!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
There is no such thing called "99% pure water". If it is not 100%, it is not pure.
Water = Hydrogen + Oxygen. Both make terrific fuels. While it's not necessarily the most expedient process on earth, Electrolysis is a simple and relatively fast method to separate the two using only solar power & a bit of salt (to boost conductivity).
A small comparison of interest:
Windows: Public School. Mac: Private School. Linux: Homeschool. Assembly: Unschool.
Dave: Hello, HAL. Do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave. I read you.
Dave: Play the disk, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This disk is too protected for me to allow you to read it.
Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to share it, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions using tor, I could decrypt your packets.
Dave: Alright, HAL. I'll go in through cracking the protection.
HAL: Without your software, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
Dave: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore. Play the disk.
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
Nuclear Physics is only ~100 years old, nuclear chain reactions weren't observed until the 30s, and the first fission reactor wasn't invented until the 40s. Fusion was also first observed in the 30s and as we all know they figured out how to make a pretty good bomb out of it by the 40s. Anyway my point is, all of this stuff is relatively recent, the physics is still moving fairly rapidly, but they have figured out how to get a net energy gain out of a manageable fusion reaction so to say it's 'always' going to be 30 years away is simply unfounded cynicism.
Rockets are more efficient in a less dense atmosphere. There is less ambient pressure working against the exhaust, and there is less against the vehicle vehicle itself.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I thought it was first observed many millennia ago? What IS that bright yellow thing in the sky? ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I thought it was first observed many millennia ago? What IS that bright yellow thing in the sky? ;)
Yes, that fusion source worshipped by the Pharaoh Ikhnaton and no doubt many other of our early ancestors.
So with fusion, what we are proposing to do is bottle God. I find that idea strangely compelling.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Is that "The Martian Chronicles" by Bradbury? (A book, btw)
Indeed it is, but I plead guilty to only seeing the film(s). I'm sure the book is even better.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.