Briny Water May Pool In Mars' Equatorial Soil

astroengine writes Mars may be a frigid desert, but perchlorate salts in the planet's soil are lowering the freezing temperature of water, setting up conditions for liquid brines to form at equatorial regions, new research from NASA's Curiosity rover shows. The discovery of subsurface water, even a trickle, around the planets warmer equatorial belt defies current climate models, though spacecraft orbiting Mars have found geologic evidence for transient liquid water, a phenomenon termed "recurring slope lineae." The findings, published in this week's Nature Geoscience, are based on nearly two years worth of atmospheric humidity and temperature measurements collected by the roving science laboratory Curiosity, which is exploring an ancient impact basin called Gale Crater near the planet's equator. The brines, computer models show, form nightly in the upper 2 inches of the planet's soil as perchlorates absorb atmospheric water vapor. As temperatures rise in the morning, the liquid evaporates. The levels of liquid, however, are too low to support terrestrial-type organisms, the researchers conclude. "It is not just a problem of water, but also temperature. The water activity and temperatures are so low in Mars that they are beyond the limits of cell reproduction and metabolism," Javier Martin-Torres, with Lulea University of Technology, in Kiruna, Sweden, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Comments

SeaMonkeys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously that means SeaMonkeys came from Mars!

Or we'll be able to seed SeaMonkeys on Mars and restart civilization that way!

Re:SeaMonkeys!

[mcfatboy93]

I think the intent of starting civilization on mars has a slightly faster time scale than waiting for evolution to make up its mind.

Re:SeaMonkeys!

[Rei]

We'll just 3d-print out a new civilization on Mars.

Re:SeaMonkeys!

[garyisabusyguy]

My first thought was that we would be greeted as, 'Ugly bags of mostly water'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Martian water is hypersaline

[Geoffrey.landis]

Yes, I've mentioned this before-- if there are bacteria on Mars, they will be extreme halophiles.
http://online.liebertpub.com/d...
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js...

Re:Martian water is hypersaline

[Tablizer]

if there are bacteria on Mars, they will be extreme halophiles.

Those kinds of politically-biased ad-hominem attacks are uncalled for!

Yeay!

[Rei]

What great news for the prospect of life on Mars! Quantities of a chemical that destroys organics on contact are so great that they suck water out of the soil and air!

Nasa's massive obsession with this self-sterilizing rock come at the cost of investigating much more interesting targets elsewhere in the solar system. The money going to Mars 2020 in particular could do so much elsewhere (we really could use a followup to Titan, there's so many mysteries there we're not even close to solving, while new missions to Mars are more trying to find new mysteries to solve and answering the same vague "questions" over and over again) At least Europe is going to get something now - not my personal favorite (if there is anything interesting there, which we don't actually know, it's buried way too deep for us to get at it for a long, long time). But at least it's not NASA's "All Mars Channel".

Re:Yeay!

[Rei]

Oh, and that infographic forgot Phoenix - so add yet another Mars lander to that list.

Re:Yeay!

[Sowelu]

Mars takes ~260 days to reach, with a payload that could theoretically bring humans...maybe 130 if we do some pretty crazy stuff. Europa takes three years minimum for a much smaller payload. Actually getting humans to Mars is already a big technical challenge, let alone living once we get there...it's going to take a heck of a lot more practical experience before we can get them to Europa.

Say what you want about the pointlessness of living off-world, but Mars is great practice. It's closer, it has more solar power available, and we can send bigger things with our current technology. Same with the Moon...great practice, but even less practical reasons to be there than Mars.

Re:Yeay!

[sribe]

At least Europe is going to get something now - not my personal favorite (if there is anything interesting there, which we don't actually know, it's buried way too deep for us to get at it for a long, long time).

If you're really that curious about what's in Europe, why don't you just visit the next time you take a vacation?

Re:Yeay!

[HBI]

At the cost of doing nothing else.

Re:Yeay!

[Sowelu]

I don't see anything wrong with one country being focused on one thing for a decade or two. It's efficient.

Re:Yeay!

[Tablizer]

To be fair, it's cheaper to explore Mars than Titan, being much closer to Earth. But I agree Titan is one of the oddest places in the Solar System and a prime target for new discoveries. A floating "boat" probe on one of Titan's polar lakes would be the coolest thing.

It's the only other body besides Earth known to have stable pooled liquid. (The Huygens probe was actually designed to float for a short period in case it had landed in liquid.)

Such a probe would have to be entirely RTG (radiation) powered because the sun is dim there. (Curiosity uses RTG by the way.) And relying data to Earth would require a Titan orbiter, which is not a cheap thing to do.

Re:Yeay!

[Rei]

If your goal is living offworld, the most earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth is the cloudtops of venus. A person could walk outside in shirtsleeves with just an oxygen-providing and eye-shielding face mask. Ordinary earth air is a lifting gas. Gravity is 0,9g. Aerocapture is simple. Water can be condensed straight from the cloudtops and oxygen hydrolized with the abundant solar power. There is zero dust to gum up the works (and the SO2 aspect is overplayed, even in the clouds it's not that concentrated).

If your goal is science, Mars isn't the place either, it's been way more studied than everywhere else but Earth and possibly the moon. People differ about what's the most scientifically interesting place but I'd argue that Titan has the most interesting unanswered questions.

If your goal is a colony that stands a chance of paying for itself (good luck with that), your best bet is an asteroid or cometary body (potentially with ice / CHONP, otherwise they can be shipped in with little delta-V from other asteroids / comets) that has abundant valuable metals in concentrated, non-oxidized forms for mining with little delta-V reqs for earth return or space use.

If your goal is a self-sustaining colony (a "backup earth" or whatnot), step out of the sci-fi novels. We're centuries away from that at best.

Re:Yeay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Goes all the way back to Lowell and the canals I think. Anyways, NASA does a lot of things but sending men someplace has always been one of their biggies. We are sending anyone to land on Venus as it is not technically possible to do and Congress has declared an asteroid landing boring. What's left? We're never going to get it together to send anything past Mars. Personally I want to do the Moon with some other countries and maybe set up Moonbase Alpha!

Re:Yeay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Meant to say we are NOT going to Venus....

Re:Yeay!

[Rei]

It's not necessary to have a relay, though it helps. The AVIATR concept, for example, involved no relay. The atmosphere is dense but it's not as much of a radio absorber as Earth's.

So many big questions. Are those suspected cryovolcanoes what we think they are, and if so, what's in that subsurface water ocean that they've been spewing out to the surface? What's eating up the acetylene and hydrogen? Where is the unexplained methane coming from? If something is breaking down the acetylene with hydrogen and it's not "living", what sort of natural catalyst could do that at such low temperatures? What on earth are those organic tholins that are everywhere? What are these long-chain organic compounds that are forming in the atmosphere? Could Titan have sitting on it the recipe for how the earliest life on Earth formed? What's in these seas - which are, it should be added, chemically different from each other? And on and on and on. Plus, there's so many incredible exploration concepts to try to answer the questions: orbiters, landers, boats, submarines, hot air baloons, blimps, fixed wing aircraft, tilt rotor aircraft, you name it. No funding for any of them. Even the cheap ones. It all gets dumped on Mars.

Re:Yeay!

[Nyder]

Mars takes ~260 days to reach, with a payload that could theoretically bring humans...maybe 130 if we do some pretty crazy stuff. Europa takes three years minimum for a much smaller payload. Actually getting humans to Mars is already a big technical challenge, let alone living once we get there...it's going to take a heck of a lot more practical experience before we can get them to Europa.

Say what you want about the pointlessness of living off-world, but Mars is great practice. It's closer, it has more solar power available, and we can send bigger things with our current technology. Same with the Moon...great practice, but even less practical reasons to be there than Mars.

The moon is even closer and a better launch point for exploring anything in our solar system.

Re:Yeay!

[Rei]

Venus is actually the easiest place outside Earth and the Moon to have astronauts land... for broad definitions of "land" ;) See this comment.

Of course, anywhere you send humans you have to have an excuse of "them doing science", even though we all know that robots do it far cheaper. On Venus, you would have a floating lab analyzing the results of balloon probes repeatedly descending to the surface, collecting samples, and bringing them back up to the "livable" heights for analysis. For obvious reasons, humans would not be going down there.

Who knows - maybe they'd find something interesting there? Maybe Venus's hellish surface concentrates some sort of rare minerals that might justify large scale balloon collection and return. Some day. ;)

Re:Yeay!

[blazer1024]

It works in Civilization.

Re:Yeay!

[someone1234]

>If your goal is a self-sustaining colony (a "backup earth" or whatnot), step out of the sci-fi novels. We're centuries away from that at best.

It will never happen, if we never start working towards it.

Re:Yeay!

[Tablizer]

It takes a big antenna for decent direct communications with Earth. I'm not sure it's worth it to carry around such a load on a probe. Plus, an orbiter allows communications when the probe is on the "hidden" side of the moon as it rotates. A day on Titan is 16 Earth days. I don't trust AI to make decent "big" decisions yet.

Further, what if you get to Titan only to discover the lake has moved or dried up? If you can go into orbit first, you have time to check and adjust plans. Thus, you might as well have an orbiter.

I'd propose a modest mission of such: two landers, one smaller one designated for floating in a lake, and one land-based probe to analyze the soil and atmosphere. The soil lander will have decent-sized chemistry experiments. A relatively simple orbiter would be the relay to Earth.

The soil lander would be stationary, but have a simple "pushing arm" for small-scale roving (and digging). Full-on roving ability takes up too much weight & resources. Plus, we have the boat-probe to study multiple shores via a combo of drifting and a basic propeller motor.

Re:Yeay!

[HBI]

I'm reminded of Keynes' warning about "In the long run, we're all dead".

Re:Yeay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia, China, India and others all claim to be headed for the Moon. If we did all start heading that way, we could loft enough gear to start the first lunar colony over the next 20 years. As far as CHON asteroids, fine, robot craft can direct smaller bits of them to the moon. 20 years after that we could have a base that was self-supporting, even to building its own equipment. There is NO easier place to start than the moon.

Re:Yeay!

[rtb61]

The moon provides a manufacturing point for heavy bulk elements required in space ships and stations. This manufacturing point would be at the bottom of a significantly lessor gravity well and thus would eliminate sending up anything other than electronic components, no producible bulk components and of course people. I can assure, without a permanent moon colony access to the rest of the solar system will be severely limited. The moon is the key to gaining real access to the rest of the solar system and is where the focus should be in order to reach much further out into space.

Re:Yeay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah the only thing we need to worry about in the cloudtops of Venus is the near-constant gale-force winds and electrical storms.

Hey, noone said you couldn't walk into a hurricane in shirt-sleeves!

Re:Yeay!

[Rei]

Wind speeds are irrelevant. Turbulence is relevant. Venus's cloudtops are not believed to be significantly turbulent in that layer. Who cares how fast you're moving over the surface?

It's known that there are electrical storms on Venus but not whether they ever exist at the altitudes in question.

Re:Yeay!

[khallow]

IMHO, they probably project various EM effects up to that altitude like their terrestrial counterparts do. But there are probably easy ways to keep from getting harmed by that.

And you're spot on with turbulence.

Re:Yeay!

[Rei]

Indeed, I prefer a relay too; I was just pointing out that it's not a fundamental requirement and there are mission proposals that don't use one.

Actually my "ideal" mission (a Titan sample return mission) has the relay probe be the propulsion stage (ion powered), and operating in a low orbit. While a tilt-rotor explorer would be exploring, the orbiter would be pumping its propellant tanks full of Titan's outer atmosphere (most ion engines are very propellant flexible, and the 1500m/s Titan atmosphere drag velocity is way less than the ion output velocity) and thus refilling its tanks for a return mission. So once the explorer returns on its ascent stage and re-docks, the propulsion stage now has full power and has full tanks for the return mission with the surface samples. Then back at Earth, not only are the surface samples returned, but also the residual Titan atmosphere in the propellant tanks. And both the propellant stage and explorer's (expensive) RTGs are recovered at the same time .

My ideal explorer is not a lander, but a tilt-rotor pontoon aircraft (I really don't see the point of fixed wing... tilt rotor adds in another driven component and joint, but it removes a corresponding required control surface, so it's a wash in terms of complexity, and it lets you land VTOL, then rest on the surface and recharge your flight batteries while doing surface science - aka, you can use a much smaller, cheaper RTG. Win-win-win. And while most propelled designs I've seen use ridiculously tiny quadcopter-ish motors to barely hold a heavy probe aloft (say a 0,5kg motor for a 120kg probe), my mission would have a several kilogram motor so that it'd have enough power to haul its ascent stage up to max flight altitude and velocity and reduce its delta-V reqs down to about 2k m/s. If the ascent stage has the same payload fraction as a Pegasus solid stage then that means that it'd only need to be about 150% the weight of whatever portion of the explorer you wish to return to orbit - totally doable. And the explorer doesn't need orbital maneuvering capability because you've got an ion-propelled propulsion stage out there that can come to you.

As an added bonus? You can do a stardust-style flyby of Enceladus for the added weight of a little aerogel, same with various rings, and a dip through the most extreme outer layers of Saturn with the scoop / pump feeding into a small sampling tank. Then it's not just a Titan sample return, but a Titan / Enceladus / Saturn sample return. And you save weight and cost on science experiments. You don't need to bring the science experiments to the Saturnian system, you just bring the Saturnian system back to Earth ;) No high power orbital radars or massive telescopic imagers like Cassini had, no surface chemistry experiments, no X-ray fluorescence setups... just a navcam on your propulsion stage, a multispectral pancam on your explorer so you can pick what to sample, and a good sampling arm with an abrasion tool (plus any flight hardware you can repurpose, such as the low power radar altimeter one would need).

Yeah, that'd probably be a Flagship mission. But my god, can you imagine how much data we'd get out of that?

(Concerning robotic arms... I was surprised how light they are when researching. MERs's very capable arms were barely over 4kg. Totally doable for even a mission where weight constraints are significant)

Re:Yeay!

[Tablizer]

A hopping "flyer" is certainly an interesting idea, but it seems kind of risky. Landings carry too much risk in my opinion.

I would instead opt for a "beefy" lander with good chemistry tools, but maybe with a secondary balloon-based drone to take a look around, and perhaps bring back samples to the main lander. If the drone gets in a wreck, the main lander still exists.

Defies climate models?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The discovery of subsurface water, even a trickle, around the planets warmer equatorial belt defies current climate models"

OMG! They must be DENIERS!

Re:Defies climate models?

[Fire_Wraith]

There are no Mars Climate Model deniers, because we haven't found oil/gas there.

Yet.

Re:Defies climate models?

[Anonymous Coward]

One would have thought with a 95% CO2 atmosphere, the global warming would have turned Mars into molten slag by now.

Re:Yeay! [correction]

[Tablizer]

Correction: "relaying data", not "relying data".

Also, I assumed the floating probe would last for months instead of a couple of hours, like Huygens did. Huygens was purely battery powered. Its "parent" probe, Cassini, was only in place to capture and relay data for a short period because it orbited Saturn, and not Titan. Thus, RTG power wouldn't have helped much by itself. Plus, Huygens was too small for longer-term studies. It was mostly an atmosphere probe, not meant for extensive surface study.

Fucking fake ass science

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurr durr we can spot water on a planet 120 light years away (you'll just have to trust us) but we can't find it on a planet we've sent landers to more than once. But we swear it's there. Fuck you science. http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

Re: Fucking fake ass science

[Anonymous Coward]

We know that there is water on Mars. For fuck sake we know that there are glaciers made out of ice on Mars. What we have not found is LIQUID water. So shut the fuck up you ignorant twat.

Like Tatooine

[DanielRavenNest]

Apparently moisture farmers and 'vaporators can be a real thing on Mars.

"defies current climate models" ?!

[fygment]

Everything that is known about climate is in those models ... how can they be wrong?

And don't go "... different planet ... ", it's thermodynamics (and a bunch of 'ologies) so ...

Fact is: there is a long ways to go before current climate models predict anything validly/consitently.