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Space Science

NASA Probes Reveal Vast Stores of Martian Ice 364

Posted by timothy from the can-be-shaved-and-flavored dept.
John Faughnan writes: "The BBC reports that a British newspaper has leaked stunning news from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Vast amounts of water ice are present on mars, "[if it] were to melt it could cover the planet in an ocean at least 500 metres deep." Researchers thought it would take a year to detect any water ice below the martian surface, but the huge quantity meant that weeks of observation were sufficient. The BBC notes that "The Mars Polar Lander was to touch down in exactly the right spot in 1999 and would have undoubtedly detected the ice had it not malfunctioned on the way down." This discovery will change plans for upcoming probes and may lead to a manned mission within the next two decades. The official announcement was scheduled for this Thursday prior to several publications."
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NASA Probes Reveal Vast Stores of Martian Ice More

NASA Probes Reveal Vast Stores of Martian Ice

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  • Ha! How long until it can be terraformed? (Score:3, Informative)

    by forged ( 206127 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @11:02AM (#3586978) Homepage Journal
    This is a serious step ahead for the feasibility of a terraforming project. I'm reading the Mars series from Kim stanley Robinson at the moment, this article is spot on!

    • Not just terraforming, but this makes a manned mission truly feasible. With huge stores of water available, we won't need to waste energy on moving as much. This means a manned Mars mission could be much cheaper.

      • The biggest obstacle to conventional terraforming, vs large enclosed habitation modules, is the solar wind. Mars doesn't have a strong enough magnetic field to stop it from slowly stripping away the atmosphere. I wander if it would be feasable to enclose the planet in a magnetic field by placing a network of guided stationary magnets, with overlapping fields, in orbit? For the time being, I agree with you that this discovery has more potential for making Mars into a manned pit-stop/science-outpost than terraforming.

        On an off-topic note, I think Venus would be the superior choice of terraforming project, given a solar shade to cool it down, and some advanced biological engineering to sequester the excess co2 out of the atmosphere. Both currently only concepts, rather than reality.
        • The biggest obstacle to conventional terraforming, vs large enclosed habitation modules, is the solar wind. Mars doesn't have a strong enough magnetic field to stop it from slowly stripping away the atmosphere.
          Interesting theory. However the gravity is more important.

          The magnetic field of earth is several hundret thousend kilometers wide.

          The atmosphere is 10? kilometers? Well, depending how you count: 400km is LEO. There is nearly nothing left from the atmosphere but spacecrafts are still breaked by it slightly and loose hight.

          The first point about mars: currently it has no real atmosphere, only one promille of the earth.

          The second thing: probably it had once, likely it has a lot of gas bound in the ground(regolith).

          Zubrin believes that heating up mars (creating a runaway green house effect) woiuld yield an atmosphere with 60% of earth presure. Likely with enough oxigen.

          The magnetic field is no issue in that.

          Cooling down Venus ... well, how much solar shade do you like to make? And how? Possible in theory, but for both planets it is open, currently, if they have right gas elements there so that providing the right temperature is enough.

          Venus has a big problem: the day lasts there some 200 earth days. 280? The day there is longer than the Venus year :-/ This means, you allways will have a very HOT day side and a very cold night side. You would need to accelereate its rotation .... no idea how one would try to do that. (In red mars, green mars, blue mars was a technical vison for that, but I forgott how).

          angel'o'sphere
      • Exactly.

        Just think, with all that water over there, instead of the real stuff, the astronauts could take powdered milk now!

        Now all someone needs to figure out is how to make a $200,000 kettle that will work on mars to boil the water. :-)

    • on terraforming (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mindstrm ( 20013 )
      Terraforming is a neat thought experiment.. but seriously. How arrogant are we to think we can take a place like Mars and make it habitable for humans when we can't even get our OWN planet under control? We are quickly decimating the earth and looking for a new planet to use.. so we can what, destroy it too?

      • Re:on terraforming (Score:5, Funny)

        by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @02:23PM (#3587593) Homepage Journal

        I agree. We should demonstrate that we can really melt the Antartic ice cap, before we arrogantly assume we can do the same thing on Mars where it's even colder.

      • Say you're right, worst case scenario, and we screw up when terraforming mars. Who cares? There's no way we're going to make it LESS habitable, and we can just bring our people home. As for any martian microbes that may buy it - well, I'll shed a single tear for them, I guess.

      • Re:on terraforming (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TrevorB ( 57780 )
        You do have a point, but a valid counterpoint would be that the research required to attempt to terraform Mars may have a significant positive impact in our ability to modify our own atmosphere.

        We've only been terraforming one planet (albeit for the worse) for a few hundred years. We need more data so we can understand exactly how we're damaging our own world. CO2, O3 are only two variables in a larger and likely mostly unknown equation...

        Then we could terraform Mars and Earth at the same time.

        I understand you're talking more generally, and this goes back to the "invest at home, not pie in the sky" debate. I'll leave that for another thread...
  • If this probe detects ice in the first meter of soil from 60 degrees south to the pole, how could it find enough water to cover all of Mars to 500 meters? There must be assumptions not described here, or a math error.

    • Re:The math on 500 meters of water? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MarvinMouse ( 323641 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @11:17AM (#3587029) Homepage Journal
      Having ice on mars solves two major problems with shipping human beings to mars, and even creating a settlement there.

      First, now we only need to ship enough water to keep them alive for the trip there, thus saving an incredible amount of energy.

      Second, which is not so obvious. We only need to send enough oxygen for the trip there. Why? Well, ice is water, water is H2O

      2 parts Hydrogen, 1 part Oxygen.

      You can chemically seperate the oxygen from the hydrogen using electricity, which is easily generated by either solar collectors and/or a nuclear powerplant. Thus, they can not only drink, but breathe when they get to Mars.

      This is an absolutely amazing finding (if it is true), since now it will become considerably cheaper to send people to Mars. Also, it might even become more feasible to leave them there with a colony then to send them back.

      • Re:The math on 500 meters of water? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Many people are neglecting the fact that Mars does not have the gravitational strength to hold oxygen in it's atmosphere. Melt the ice, it will eventually vaporize and then escape the planet.
        • I thought that atmospheric pressure and gravitational strength were not directly proportional to one another. After all, Venus has only 90 percent of Earth gravity, but 90 times our atmospheric density. I don't believe we can rule out developing an atmosphere on Mars, especially if we have a lot of water (in vapor form, an excellent "greenhouse" gas) to work with

        • It absolutely DOES have the gravitational strength to hold oxygen in the atmosphere. The red planet has a gravitational force of 0.32, which is more than strong enough to hold light gases near itself. The problem is that it will take much *more* oxygen and nitrogen to create a breatheable atmosphere, as the lower gravity means the atmosphere will be much taller, or higher above the surface.
        • Most room temperature O_2 travels below 2.88 km/s, so is well within Mars's 5.0 km/s escape velocity, The math and an explanation is bellow.
          Blockquote:
          Many people are neglecting the fact that Mars does not have the gravitational strength to hold oxygen in it's atmosphere. Melt the ice, it will eventually vaporize and then escape the planet.

          Equate average molecular thermal energy (3/2)kT with kinetic energy (1/2)mv^2 and you get v=sqrt(3kT/m). Where k is Boltzmann constant (1.38e-23 J/K), T is in Kelvin and m in kg.

          Now O_2 has mass 2( 2.66e-26 kg) = 5.3e-26 kg.
          And H_2 has mass 2( 1.67e-27 kg) = 3.3e-27 kg.
          Which comes from atmoic weight / Avogadro's 6.022e23 = grams/molecule.

          Say room temperature is 79F, 22C, 295K then O_2 is zipping around at 480m/s or 0.48 km/s (about 1000 miles an hour), similarly the average H_2 molecule is going at 1.9 km/s.

          The escape velocity for Earth is 11.2 km/s and for Mars 5.0 km/s.

          So at first glance earth can hold onto the average O_2 and H_2. Which is clearly not the case (Earth!=Gas giant). The rule of thumb is if the average molecular speed is greater than 6 times the escape velocity then it stays, otherwise it leaves.

          So 6*O_2 speed is 2.88 km/s, 6*H_2 speed is 11.4 km/s. So H_2 leaves earth's 11.2 km/s escape velocity, and O_2 is still well within Mars's 5.0km/s.

          If you use bc to check the math, set "scale=30" to avoid div zero.

        • Sorry, wrong, as pointed out Mars got enought grav. pull to sustain a atmosphere. However, Mars lacks a an magnetic field like Earth. This have allowed for the solar wind to slowly, bit by bit, blow the martian atmosphere away.
      • And by reacting the H2 with CO2 in the atmosphere you can make methane or CH4. This combined with some of the O2 can be used to power rovers and the like and maybe even the escape rocket. Why use methane instead of the H2 directly? Methane is a hell of a lot easier to store. It's basically just natural gas.

        Check out some of NASA's planned (well, studied anyway) missions [nasa.gov].

      • Hang on... 500 meters?

        How do we know that Mars is metric?

        Even NASA and its European contractors couldn't agree on whether metric or imperal measurements apply to the red planet.

        I don't think anyone should jump to conclusions over this ;-)
      • Second, which is not so obvious. We only need to send enough oxygen for the trip there. Why? Well, ice is water, water is H2O

        2 parts Hydrogen, 1 part Oxygen.

        Umm.. why bother to make oxygen from water when the martian atmosphere is made of CO2?

        1 part Carbon, 2 parts Oxygen.

        Pumping the atmosphere is much easier than mining ice.
  • This makes the colonization of Mars possible. This makes Terraforming possible. This makes fuel manufacturing easier. This makes oxygen generation easier. IF NASA plays this right we could easily be there by 2020. I just wish the money and the will exsisted because we have the technology to do this now.

  • Yay! Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dalassa ( 204012 )
    Hopefully a real manned mission will come out of this. We've set our sights to low in the past 30 years and allowed to many choice moments to pass. After we let the Pluto mission lose its chance to study an atmosphere I had lost all hope for Nasa.
    We must make a manned mission to Mars, people may talk about cost and worry over what scientific results it would have. Ignore that; go to Mars because it is there.
  • I thought we always knew mars had quite a bit of ice at the poles, but the fact that there is now enough to cover the whole planet in water is very interesting, i doubt the *whole* planet was ever covered in water though, because if so the whole surface would end up being ice right?
    • I thought we always knew mars had quite a bit of ice at the poles, but the fact that there is now enough to cover the whole planet in water is very interesting, i doubt the *whole* planet was ever covered in water though, because if so the whole surface would end up being ice right?

      It says that the there is enough to cover the planet with water at least 500 metres deep... there are many mountains that stick up much higher than that. So there would still be lots of dry land left above the 500 meter mark.
      • Well, then, that wouldn't be the WHOLE planet then, would it. Now, I'm not saying that the people who wrote the article are right, but this statement would mean that the highest point on Mars (Olympus Mons?) would still be under 500 meters of water if it were all liquid.

        And to answer the original question, over teh millenia, melting at the equator and freezing at the poles could move the ice into polar caps, even if the entire surface was originally under watrer.

  • This is good news. Not unexpected, but good. We'll have to wait for later missions for verification. And maybe an official NASA announcement. In the meantime, I'd urge support for the Space Exploration Act of 2002:

  • 500 meters? How? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by boa13 ( 548222 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @11:26AM (#3587052) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone actually looked at a Mars map? I'm running the latest version of the Mars Simulation Project [sourceforge.net], looking at the planet in topography mode.

    This planet has altitudes ranging from approximately -8000 meters to +22000 meters, with two very distinctive zones: around -100 W, mostly on the southern hemisphere, there is a huge, +5000 meters continent; the northern hemisphere is between -5000 and 0 meters; and there is a very impressive hole centered at 70 E and 40 S, between -7000 and -5000 meters, sourrounded by a 0 to 5000 meters zone - what happened there? A huge spacial hit?

    Anyway, saying Mars would be covered by 500 meters of water is completely meaningless. I guess they took the quantity of water and divided it by the surface of Mars. They mostly want to impress people, I guess, but I for one would be more impressed if someone came with a new Mars map showing the areas where the "sea" would be once the ice was melted. There is an illustration there [demon.co.uk], but of course it doesn't take into account the "real" quantity of ice/water.

    • Re:500 meters? How? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pong ( 18266 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @12:59PM (#3587349) Homepage
      In all likelihood they were just trying to convey just how much water there is. If they simply stated that there is evidence of at least XX billion gallons of water, that would mean very little to most people, so they chose to convey the amount of water in the context of the size of the planet, to make it more comprehensible.

      Quite sensible, really :-)
    • Anyway, saying Mars would be covered by 500 meters of water is completely meaningless. Later in the article they say "at least" 500 meters. Personally I find that hard to believe given the height of Olympus Mons.

      TWW

    • That's pretty close to the first thing I thought when I read that. 500 meters? Is that all over the planet? That must be a pretty flat planet then. I then thought to myself that everything I'd heard previously had led me to believe that Mars was not flat at all, and in fact has a couple of gigantic mountains on it. I agree with you, this seems like an odd statement, and they could impress me more with better statistics.

    • Re:500 meters? How? (Score:3, Informative)

      by isomeme ( 177414 )
      there is a very impressive hole centered at 70 E and 40 S, between -7000 and -5000 meters, sourrounded by a 0 to 5000 meters zone - what happened there? A huge spacial hit?
      That's Hellas Planitia, which is indeed an ancient impact basin. This page [nasa.gov] provides a good overview of Martian topography, with links to details.

      Fans of the old SimEarth game will fondly recall Hellas as the best place to aim ice asteroids early in the Martian terraforming process; being at such a low altitude gives Hellas the highest atmospheric pressure on Mars, so liquid water has the best chance of lasting long enough to do some good if you collect it there.



  • In a related story, NASA has announced that it will abandon its space exploration effort in favor of running a ski lodge catering to exclusive, high-income customers, like "P. Diddy". An unnamed source close to NASA has said that "We need to turn a profit, you know? Those rockets don't run on hydrogen, they run on good ol' American greenbacks! Like the ones P. Diddy has! He loves to ski, did you know that? He's big into everything NASA is into."

    "P. Diddy" declined comment, sighting his long history of producing music videos with fish-eye lenses, shiny space suits, and unmarked black helicopters.

    Cheers,

    Bowie
  • All right, so now that we know we got water on Mars its obvious we gotta get there ASAP. The question is how do we do it? Short-term there are two major alternatives for propelling a rocket to Mars: chemical or nuclear fuel. Chemical is what we are using right now for the space shuttle and satellite launches. The problem with chemical fuel is that it is not as efficient as nuclear powered rockets in terms of the time it takes to travel between Earth and Mars. I am sure someone who's got better memory than I can post the exact numbers in the comments.
    Building a vehicle that would send a colony to Mars is not easy task, from what I've read NASA would have to build something or at least assemble parts in orbit. Unfortunately Joe Public has a major problem with nuclear -- he is scared shitless that if we have something nuclear circling the globe it will crash on Earth spreading radiation.


    This is the point of my argument -- build a nuclear propelled rocket but assemble it in Moon's orbit which would provide safety in case of problems. I don't think anyone would complain if we accidentaly nuke the Moon since it a dead rock anyway. At the same time a base on the Moon would make for a good location for the people working on the construction of the rocket. Especially if US can put a base on the Moon before Chinese get there.

  • Manned missions and radiation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sh0rtie ( 455432 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @12:05PM (#3587175)

    This is great news if there is water on Mars but i believe one of the major stumbling blocks on a manned mission to Mars and sustaining him isn't so much water
    but getting people there alive.

    Astronauts just on the journey (180 days each way + 550 days for return journey planetary alignment) would be exposed to lethal doses of radiation meaning when they got to Mars they would already be too ill and poisoned to be of any use to science let alone come home, i don't really feel that comfortable in sending (volunteers) to die a horrible slow death from radiation sickness under the guise of "research"

    NASA have did do some research [nasa.gov] in 1998 on using dirt for shielding on any base but this doesnt answer the journey time radiation exposure problem

    I think we forget in our own insignificance that the ISS and the shuttle fly close enough to the Earth's magnetic field and our atmostphere to be protected from the worst effects of our Sun (radiation,flares,magnetic bursts,uv, etc) but once we leave for Mars we will be exposed to the Suns full destructivness and we still havent developed protective materials/shields (short of 6ft thick lead) that will protect us long enough not to kill us in the 915 day exposure of such a mission.

    I am still suprised that we think we can send people there after water when so far all we have sent is a glorified "remote control car" [nasa.gov] instead of an advanced humanoid type robots [honda-p3.com] like this [honda.co.jp] into space ,so maybe we could get a better idea of how we might perform if/when we get to the surface to mine this water.
    • NASA already has materials that would be used to protect astronauts on such a long voyage. While cosmic rays are pretty much impossible to stop, they are somewhat rare (on a solar scale). Solar flares would be a huge problem, but NASA has come up with a "safe area" inside any proposed Mars craft that the crew could go to during intense flares. The shielding was (IIRC) a type of lead foam composite that provided excellent protection for much lower weight than solid lead.

      And let's not forget that even though the ISS, Mir, and Skylab were all within the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, astronauts have been exposed to the Van Allen belts before and shielding protected them adequately. This isn't an insurmountable problem by a long shot.
    • Although it does pose a problem, radiation on a Mars Mission is not a mission stopper or even a mission slower. Any potential mission would be taking along a large quantity of water, food, and along the way building up stocks of the stuff that water and food becomes.....

      Arranging the tanks and compartments that carry such stuff to provide a solar storm safety shelter in the center of your "tin can" is a trivial design exercise. A meter or two of water between you and the radiation is pretty much all you need. The ambient radiation is a problem, although only in percentage terms (it slightly increases your chance of getting cancer sometime later in your life). The point has been made that you could recruit the crew from smokers; they couldn't smoke on the mission; and you would actually decrease their chance of getting cancer during their lives by sending them to Mars!

      Many, many design studies have been done utilising exactly the design I mentioned above, and it works. Read about it in this book [amazon.com] or at this website [marssociety.org].

  • Dr. Who (Score:3, Funny)

    by Graspee_Leemoor ( 302316 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @12:08PM (#3587182) Homepage Journal
    Every Dr. Who fan knew there had to be ice on Mars because it is the home planet of the Ice Warriors.

    graspee

  • EQUATORIAL Martian Ice (Score:3, Informative)

    by cybrpnk2 ( 579066 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @12:09PM (#3587188) Homepage
    A great deal of fuss has been made about the huge ice deposits at the Martian POLES, and overlooked in the excitement has been the even more important discovery of significant deposits of subsurface ice along the Martian EQUATOR. Check out this map [arizona.edu] and note especially the blue spots around the equator. These are important for several reasons - the teperature is hundreds of degrees higher than at the poles, making these spots far more conducive to life - and colonization.

  • Mars, water and a permanent base. (Score:3, Informative)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @12:23PM (#3587238) Journal
    I was happy ina kind of boyish school kid kind of way about reading this. I don't really think it makes that much difference in reality to the actual *need* or feasability for a permanent manned Mars base, because the Mars northern polar cap always had water ice (or was it the southern one? in any case one did) and a manned base would have had to melt the stuff anyway.

    The long term effect of this is that perhaps our descendants will be able to terraform the planet as envisaged by Kim Stanley Robinson and this is the kind of news piece that NASA needs to get public support for a Martian base, although, as I said above, in reality it doesn't change things that much.

    To the guy who warned about Radiation poisoning from solar storms on the trip to Mars. Ship designers have been thinking about that one for a long time and this is where the concept of a storm cell on board a ship comes from - a thick walled cell whose walls are basically water tanks to absorb the radiation i.e. ionised particles.

  • Less sand storms (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Sunday May 26, 2002 @01:02PM (#3587358) Homepage Journal
    One other thing that should be noted is that if the water is ever leaked to the surface, along with an increase in heat via CO2 being pumped into the atmosphee, then there will probably be a reduction in the amount of dust in the atmosphere, as the iron binds to water droplets. This would modify the atmospheric conditions and probably reduce the number of violent storms. Also, a humid atmosphere would probably also make it more favourable to life, if there isn't any already there.

    Without water it would be much more difficult to teraform the planet.

    This is unresearched, but I believe that it is a probable scenario, based on the knowledge I have.
  • Anyone know what the boiling point of water is at Mars' atmospheric pressure?

    TWW

  • The Mars Polar Lander was to touch down in exactly the right spot in 1999 and would have undoubtedly detected the ice had it not malfunctioned on the way down.

    Somebody or something sure is rubbing it in.

    "We found out that you would have discovered a cure for cancer if you hadn't been using a MS OS."

  • So would the water be saline, like our oceans? Or would it all be fresh water?
  • From discussions I have heard between serious scientists, the news that this much water has been found is great. BUT:

    It looks like the biggest roadblock to Mars colonization will not be air, water, or shelter, but microdust particles.

    Simply put, Mars has a very active atmosphere, which is a big planetary grinder, for lack of a better word. Some of the dust on Mars is so fine as a result of the atmospheric dynamics that it poses a danger to humans.

    How? Even though colonists would not breathe Martian air directly, the very small dust particles there will get into pressure suits and living quarters. Essentially, there is a danger that people would be breathing particulates and getting a Martian version of black lung.

    We don't know the extent to which this issue poses a danger to settlers, but it is a very real one. Add to that the harsh conditions, the dangers of dust storms, meteor showers, and unknowns we can't forsee, colonization of Mars will be very difficult indeed.

  • Damn, wish they had figured out that there was that much water up there 20+ years ago. Between the Soviets and the US we could have had ourselves one hell of a space race to the red planet.

    As things currently stand, the Chinese will probably get there unopposed, while the US tries to get funding and political support from its international partners, and the Russians sit around with perfectly good hardware, waiting for someone to hire them.
  • This supports one of the major theories of Martian water and what the hell happened to it. On Earth there's a process the planet has to cycle carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere. This is entirely dependent plate tectonics however. The theory is that Mars was warm and wet a billion years before Earth was but because it cooled faster than Earth because it was smaller its plate tectonics ceased. When that happened the CO2 process couldn't continue and the oceans began to freeze into the ground. It would be really cool if this discovery promoted more exploration on Mars. Having an ice boring probe discover some form of life would be pretty interesting. I wouldn't expect anything to be alive currently because its been many billions of years since water was a liquid on Mars. Even the deepest ice on Antarctica isn't older than a few millions of years.
  • Doesn't this radically increase the liklihood of life being found on Mars?

    I mean, that's a heck of a lot of ice, and we've got boatloads of bacteria that can/do survive in the Antarctic. Why not on Mars?
  • It would be interesting to correlate this map with an infrared thermal scan to detect geological hot spots - you might find underground liquid water that can be pumped instead of mined.
  • This is absolutely wonderful news. Now we need to get some models of whether orbital mirrors on the poles can create an atmosphere that will keep your skin together, and if so then how soon!

    But before that - core samples at the poles! There's a lot of easy to access history and maybe some organics we should know about in there.

    In the next 30 years we are going to have either an incredibly well policed and defanged world, or an awful lot of horrible politically motivated NCB disasters. And we don't have anywhere yet for the race to survive if we should make a mess with energy or nanotech research.

    Best thing going for Mars is, nobody's there yet that we know of, and anyone who goes will be likely be too busy playing the only game there is -- think of a new environment and what the survival traits will be. Time to fund nuclear rockets, breakthrough propulsion, and other things fanatics don't want to hear about.
  • ...in the end of "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale," also known as "Total Recall."

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