Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
What's the last 1%? Something really nasty, I bet.
Ian Ameline
Water + Solar/Nuclear = Return flight.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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!
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