Slashdot Mirror
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.
The National Geographic coverage of the news gives some air time to those doubtful that this study will prove definitive.
3.5 billion years ago is too long ago for us to ever *know* definitively. We won't get to Mars for decades and it would be decades after that before any real "hands on" research could even bring us closer to a "definitive" answer (which will still inly be a best guess).
We don't know if the capsule from Hayabusa does contain material yet. Also note that a sample-return mission to Mars will be much more difficult than a sample-return mission to an asteroid. The gravity of an asteroid is negligible. But Mars has gravity that is around a third that of Earth. That's a lot. So a sampling robot would need to land on Mars and then return fighting against the large Martian gravity well. It would probably need to carry its fuel with it which means it would need to have a lot of mass to start with and which would make a safe landing even more difficult. We'll probably have successful sample-return from Mars before a human mission their but the technical difficulty with even a sample-return mission is immense.
It is all underground, frozen and waiting for someone to turn the melting reactor on.
Escape velocity, fuel supply, navigation. People always bring up those pesky problems. Gimme a spaceship that runs on dilithium crystals that you can run a starship at multiples of the speed of light indefinitely (or at least until the episode plot calls for them to be used up).
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Mars has an atmosphere, not much of one to be sure, but it does have one. Why else do you think so many landers used parachutes to help slow their descent?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.