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Lots of Pure Water Ice At Mars North Pole
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jan 21, 2009 09:24 AM
from the so-what-my-freezer-has-tons-of-it dept.
from the so-what-my-freezer-has-tons-of-it dept.
brink2012 writes "Planum Boreum, Mars' north polar cap contains water ice 'of a very high degree of purity,' according to an international study. Using radar data from the SHARAD (SHAllow RADar) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), French researchers say the data point to 95 percent purity in the polar ice cap. The north polar cap is a dome of layered, icy materials, similar to the large ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, consisting of layered deposits, with mostly ice and a small amount of dust. Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles).
The study was done by researchers at France's National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (Insu), using the Italian built SHARAD radar sounder on the US built MRO. SHARAD looks for liquid or frozen water in the first few hundreds of feet (up to 1 kilometer) of Mars' crust by using subsurface sounding. It can detect liquid water and profile ice.
Mars southern polar cap was once thought to be carbon dioxide ice, but ESA's Mars Express confirmed that it is composed of a mixture of water and carbon dioxide.
The study on Mars north polar cap appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union."
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Atrocious Summary (Score:3, Funny)
This is the worst written summary I have seen in ages. With all the unit conversions, I wonder if this guy is a former engineer for an old NASA Mars probe team...
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and we STILL don't know how many Libraries of Congress or Volkswagen Beetles...
Is the amount of ice at the poles sufficient to account for the watermarked features of the planet? A simple 'yes', 'no', or 'maybe if' answer to THAT question would be interesting.
of course (Score:2)
tough to skate on the canals in winter without water.
So Close (Score:5, Funny)
Sufficient Sunlight - Check
Friable surface (soil) - Check
Sufficient Source of water - check
Sufficient Atmosphere - ummmmm
Sufficient Magnetosphere - uh oh
Cigar - Nope.
Close, but no cigar.
Re:So Close (Score:5, Insightful)
What's really not easy to deal with is water and oxygen supplies - if you have to haul every single kilo of water up the gravity well, you add a massive burden to the operation.
The fact that we have large quantities of ice to work with, means we have both water, and - by virtue of solar power if necessary, oxygen from electrolysis.
That's really the major ingredients that are needed to consider a place 'habitable' if not exactly 'comfortable'.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
we have both water, and - by virtue of solar power if necessary, oxygen from electrolysis.
With water? Forget solar power. We'll do power electrolisis with nuclear fusion.
Re:So Close (Score:4, Insightful)
we have both water, and - by virtue of solar power if necessary, oxygen from electrolysis.
With water? Forget solar power. We'll do power electrolisis with nuclear fusion.
How about fission? We already know how to do it.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
solar power is crappy enough here on earth and even worse on mars.
If we ever get arround to doing anything on a large scale on mars (rather than tiny little rovers that manage less than a kilometer per week) I would strongly expect it to be nuclear powered.
still you are correct, water is very usefull for habitation (you can make oxygen and food from CO2 and water simply by growing plants)
Re:So Close (Score:4, Funny)
So presumably you're going to blow your first wish on making 400 square kilometres of solar panels magically appear? Why not just wish for a nuclear plant, or better yet, Alyson Hannigan riding a pony?
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logistics (Score:2, Funny)
Look at that bottled water opportunity! (Score:5, Funny)
Martian Water!
4 billion years old, untouched by mankind!
Unique solar system chemistry boosts your base DNA!
Live longer!
Improve your love life!
Martian Water: Now only $1,000 a liter!
Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity! (Score:4, Interesting)
That would be an incredibly cheap price to pay for a sample from another planet. Considering the costs of storage, and transport yea that would be VERY cheap. The demand would be incredibly high and would not cover the shipping and handling costs.
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Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity! (Score:5, Funny)
You're right! It sounds almost too good to be true!
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity! (Score:5, Funny)
The trick, of course, is to dehydrate that water before it leaves Mars. Your liter of water turns into a small packet of dust which your customers simply need to reconstitute before use.
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Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity! (Score:4, Funny)
The trick, of course, is to dehydrate that water before it leaves Mars. Your liter of water turns into a small packet of dust which your customers simply need to reconstitute before use
I guess you would call that Marsani?
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity! (Score:5, Informative)
Still cheaper than a liter of printer ink.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I tried drinking that once. I prefer water.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
...don't forget naturally carbonated!
Technical name for it (Score:5, Funny)
We have a name for a mixture of water and carbon dioxide. It's called "seltzer water". With added impurities, it's sold as "soft drinks".
Mmmm ... Martian dust cola. Satisfies your body's need for hundreds of trace minerals.
A new goal for the rich and pretentious ... (Score:2)
What is the volume? (Score:2, Insightful)
[blockquote]Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles). [/blockquote]
OK, so how many libraries of congress, or Niagra Falls is this? All joking aside, how does this relate to single units of glaciers or land masses, not non-continguous lakes. For example, how many Anta
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What is the volume? (Score:5, Informative)
The salty Caspian Sea is the world's largest land-locked body of water. It contains approximately 18,900 cubic miles of water (78,700 cubic kilometers).
Lake Baikal is the world's largest freshwater lake in terms of volume. It contains about 5521 cubic miles of water (23,000 cubic kilometers), or approximately 20% of Earth's fresh surface water. This is a volume of water approximately equivalent to all five of the North American Great Lakes combined.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose that's Baikal [wikipedia.org] in Irkutsk, Montana? The world's most voluminous continental lake (singular) is Baikal. The Great Lakes may cover more area, but that doesn't translate into more water.
If you insist... (Score:3, Funny)
Okay, the volume is approximately equal to 25,000,000,000,000 apples.
Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares about water ?
Just discover petroleum on another planet, and there will be a tough competition to get there !
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Close enough?
Call me when it rains Martinis.
NASA... (Score:2)
To paraphrase the words of Hauser/Quaid, "Get [our collective] ass[es] to Mars!"
Landers are cool, 'bots are cool, but people are better!
When do they start bottling it (Score:4, Funny)
and sending it down to hit store shelves?
If they can have "iceberg" water, I'm sure Mars water will also have an audience:
http://www.finewaters.com/Bottled_Water/Canada/Berg.asp [finewaters.com]
Me? I'm going into the dihydrogen monoxide business.
H2O+CO2 (Score:2)
Club soda! I'll bring the cognac and lemon.
You have to get to Mahs (Score:3, Funny)
Earth's oceans are about 96.5 % pure water (Score:5, Interesting)
So the water is 95% "pure" - what's in the 5%? For comparison Earth's oceans are about 96.5% "pure" so the water on Mars certainly would not be drinkable without processing but that's fairly easily done, I think.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that salts will not generally freeze out in ice, especially ice that forms by precipitation (as is assumed for the Martian poles). I would assume that the polar caps are very pure ice, with some dust and dissolved CO2. If you melted it, the dust would drop out, and the result might very well be drinkable.
This is one case, though, where I think "Trust, but Verify" definitely applies.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You first - I'm not drinking anything containing cryogenically frozen Martian organisms.
Ocean Equivalent (Score:5, Informative)
Since Mars's Surface Area = 144 million km^2, this implies (for 2.5 million km^3 of ice) that ice caps are enough to supply a water layer 17 meters deep over the entire surface, or maybe 50 meters deep in Hellas and the Northern lowlands, if it was all melted. (If the polar caps entirely melted, that alone would raise the surface pressure above the triple point of water, so liquid water would be possible. The Hellas Basin is deep enough that the pressure is above the triple point now, and it definitely could have liquid water in it if the climate warmed some.)
Note that the polar caps show very clear signs [arizona.edu] of layering [arizona.edu], presumably caused by the long period obliquity oscillations [obspm.fr], and are in general very young geologically, so it is not beyond belief that, say, the Hellas basin fills up with water on a regular basis, every 500,000 years or so.
So we're less atypical than we think? (Score:5, Interesting)
The last time I posted on this - pointing out that so far 100% of the actual planets we've explored have been inhabited - someone replied repeatedly emphasising the words "on Earth" - whereas my entire point was that this view is "Earth exceptionalism". Other than a few vague words in a book written over 2000 years ago by one small Middle Eastern tribe, we have no written statement on the subject (while most Indians religions support a plurality of worlds.)
Mars may not be inhabited by life, it may never have been - but we are now seeing a lot more water than previously believed, and evidence of methane generation. The probability must be assessed as non-zero.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The earth IS amazingly exceptional, we just don't know how unique it is.
Frozen ice on Mars is great, and may make the Herculian job of colonising it or starting outposts later a bit easier. It still looks like its a sterile rock, raising self-sustaining colonies on antarctica and in the seas will be far easier in the short term (100 years).
In contrast earth is a full ecology with macroscopic life so large it is visible from space. There may be 1 or even 10^6 equivalent biospheres in the galaxy (we don't
Now, this is the plan. Get your ass to Mars. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh,
Re:We had pure water once... (Score:5, Funny)
Yea just look what the salt industry did to our oceans, we can't even drink of the ocean anymore.
Parent
Re:We had pure water once... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fresh water has and is contributing to the continued salinization of our oceans. Originally as water is a solvent and streams/rivers dissolved rock on its way to the ocean and left it there with evaporation, now with all the salt on the roads in the winter plus 6 billion people urinating all over the place.
I wonder if it ever have a bad effect though, considering that we use the ocean as our toilet and food source at the same time.
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Re:We had pure water once... (Score:5, Funny)
What's even crazy is the FISH.
Get this: the fish breathe the water, they poop AND pee in the water, they drink the water and they eat other things that also live in the water.
I mean, they basically live their entire lives in the water they crap in.
Yeast are like that, too.
Anyhow, I'm gonna go grab me a tall, frosty mug of yeast shit infested water.... I mean beer...
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And it's not just around our Sun and our Moon anymore [youtube.com]! What the hell is going on?! What is oozing out of our ground?!
Yes, the Fall into Sin of Environmental Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
A cow could die upstream and wipe out a village.
Seriously, people drank beer and wine for a very good reason. It was sanitary and wouldn't kill you like the water would.
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Re:Yes, the Fall into Sin of Environmental Religio (Score:5, Funny)
A cow could die upstream and wipe out a village.
Seriously, people drank beer and wine for a very good reason. It was sanitary and wouldn't kill you like the water would.
Also, if you drink enough of it, you stop caring about all the cow corpses lying around!
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Bunk (Score:2)
Re:Bunk (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Mineral? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a widespread urban myth that distilled water is harmful. I've heard it all my life. Look at all the discussion [google.com] at these sites. Some say there are benefits, some say it'll kill you. Too bad KiwiCanuck didn't "research a little more."
Parent