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Mars May Have Been 1/3 Ocean
coondoggie sends in a snippet from Network World, as is his wont: "It's possible that a huge ocean covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, a finding likely to reignite an old argument about that amount of water on the red planet, according to a new report. The study by the University of Colorado at Boulder is the first to integrate multiple data sets of river deltas, valley networks and topography from a cadre of NASA and European Space Agency orbiting missions of Mars dating back to 2001, the researchers claim." The National Geographic coverage of the news gives some air time to those doubtful that this study will prove definitive.
Philip K. Dick wrote several short stories about how we lived on Mars and didn't remember to reduce, reuse, recycle, curb our species appetites for violence (war) and sex (overpopulation). So we burned up the oceans when it all went kaboom!. But not before we sent people to live on Earth...
Now there are "billions and billions" of us. (sigh)
Update: it's been opened. It contains material. The report is due six months or so, so set a tickle.
Mars is easier than an asteroid. At Mars you have a planet to cancel your Delta-V with its gravity and atmosphere (limited though Mars' atmosphere is, it does help). Hitting an asteroid and returning is roughly twice as hard as hitting Mars and returning because you have to halt your motion at the asteroid using propulsion. It's a miracle Hyabusa returned at all - and it was three years late - because it missed its return window and had to wait for Earth to come back into position. The efforts of the ground team could be considered heroic - if some blood had been spilled.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You could, in theory, work around these issues in different ways. You could include fuel containers in the payload with parachutes - if we can give the robot some way to find them it can navigate to and attach them when ready. You could also send multiple rockets, some with fuel and one for the robot, but having them find eachother would be more challenging and landing areas would be much more prone to error in the proximity.
Still, it isn't impossible.
One plan for Mars sample return I read about involves automatic docking in low Mars orbit. One stage lands and a rover loads it up with material. An ascent stage (really just a missile) lifts off for low orbit. It docks with an orbiter which has enough juice to return to Earth.
All in all it is probably more productive to send better surface labs.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One of the recent TED talks about returning to Mars mentioned this.
In http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joel_levine.html (16 minute video) Joel Levine describes how
* We've found plumes of methane in the Mars atmosphere above some of the coastal and structures mentioned in this article
* On Earth, over 99.9% of methane is produced by living systems
* Our next mars mission should not be a lander, but a robotic aerial flyer that can give more precise measurements of methane and other gasses along with improved ground images
* Results from such a mission could be used to pinpoint with much higher confidence an appropriate location to send a followup lander for sample collection
The report is due six months or so
Oh, horseshit.
I hate when an experiment is performed and nobody says a word on what happened, even from a qualitative view.
They can at least describe what it looks like. "Grey dirt" would be plenty to hold me for the 6 months it takes to produce a full assay.