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Massive Martian Glaciers Found
Posted by
timothy
on Thursday November 20, @09:56PM
from the could-be-a-trick dept.
from the could-be-a-trick dept.
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."
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Time to move... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
And shut down slashdot? - Never!!!
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
Getting to that ice will require a team of hard-drinking, undisciplined misfits and renegades who know a lot about drilling and can learn all the space travel crap on the side.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
Valentine Michael Smith?
Weren't you born there?
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
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UNDERGROUND CITIES (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes indeed, you first! I'll be satisfied to have myself cryogenically frozen (Did I happen to mention you first for that too?) and thawed out in a generation or three when the colonization effort is well under way. Guess I'm not much for a.) getting slowly cooked by solar radiation b.) constantly worrying about a hole the size of a pinprick sucking all the atmosphere out of the ship, c.) either losing my sanity in the confines of ship I can't leave for months on end or waiting for my fellow shipmates to do the same and d.) finally arriving at my destination which is even less hospitable and almost certainly more dangerous than life on the ship.
Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to do so.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to do so."
Replace mars with the new world and it holds true. Your points a, c and d also hold true. For b if you change it to sinking then you are right there too. I'm pretty fucking sure the first people on mars will be remembered as heroes for a loooooong time.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a tad worse than the new world. No air and no food. Dust that will corrode anything. Poor mineral deposits. No open water. Basically, complete alien and inhospitable environment. Being second best in the solar system is a pretty low bar.
Pluses for no hostile natives, though.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Insightful)
no one is going to be sailing to Mars in a 15th century galleon or caravel. the reason our "New World" is Mars is because technology has advanced a fair bit since the 1400's.
our astronauts aren't going to be stricken by scurvy, nor are they going to contract polio, malaria, or other now preventable diseases. they also won't die form bacterial infections that killed millions of people before antibiotics were discovered. that means a small cut or cavity won't turn into sepsis or bacteremia and kill you.
astronauts are also not at risk of getting lost due to a lack of modern navigation technology. in fact, any trip to mars will likely be backed by billions of dollars of science/research, technology, and years of extensive preparation and planning. and any candidates for Mars exploration or colonization will be specially chosen for their educational and technical background and given additional training on top of that. so they're likely to fare a little better than the average 15th century explorer.
and even people who climb Mt. Everest bring their own oxygen, food & water. why would astronauts going to Mars need to worry about no air/food? if we were going to send anyone to colonize Mars they'd be living inside of a space habitat. they're not going to be dropped off on Mars butt naked without any supplies or shelter. in all likelihood by the time we send our first manned mission there'll already be some kind of habitation module, sustainable power plant, chemical oxygen generator, and usable water supply.
any astronaut going to Mars is going to have a much longer life expectancy than the average 15th century European, much less a 15th century explorer. aside from perhaps the psychological strain, going to Mars would be a cakewalk compared to traveling to the New World in the 1400's.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Interesting)
You are forgetting we still haven't actually resolved the problem of preventing crew irradiation during their travel to/from Mars.
That is a show-stopper, 100% chance of being irradiated beats the off-chance to get a new world disease.
Shielding rises the mass of the vehicule, which is already a problem that forces us to a slow travel due to our limitation to chemical rockets.
We need to switch to a different and better propulsion system like a nuclear one in order to escape this quagmire of Shield/mass+length of travel compounded problem.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
Pluses for no hostile natives, though.
... that we know of.
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel of Mars colonization Red Mars , the author suggests that any colonists would have to be somewhat eccentric.
Check. I break up quotes and respond to separate parts of a post.
That's not because of the dangers they will face, but because they are leaving behind friends, family and the general wider human society for the rest of their lives.
Check. Give me a connection to play WoW and were rolling.
Where do I sign?
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Re:Time to move... (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile, sometime in the future:
"Owners of the Martian Pirate Bay today mocked a letter from Earth lawyers. 'Ooh, you scare us like the quidlap-iko after sunfall. We have news for you, your laws don't apply here. So stuff it up your ozone hole!'"
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Fossil water (Score:5, Interesting)
What's interesting to me, is that they mention in TFA that this ice can't have formed recently. The current Martian climate won't allow it. Meaning that the glacier was laid down ages ago when such formations were still possible, got buried beneath the debris, and has basically been sitting there since.
Forget water harvesting, I'm more interested in studying the ice in situ. If there ever was life on Mars (which is independent of the question of whether there's life there now), the odds are good we'd find evidence of it frozen in the glacier. Cold preserves, objects frozen in ice erode slowly, and the living things generally need water to survive.
Of course, anything that ever lived on Mars would likely have been microscopic. I doubt we'd find anything as big as a terrestrial animal. It'd still be the first evidence of life outside of our own planet though, which is a pretty frickin' huge deal.
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Re:Fossil water (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a couple reasons I wouldn't expect anything large. The more obvious reason is that, if there were large native lifeforms (plant, animal or what have you), they'd be the first to die off. Generally, the bigger you are, and the higher up the food chain, the harder an ecological catastrophe hits you.
Since Mars hasn't be suitable to most forms of life for ages, and since it seems likely it became gradually less and less habitable as time wore on, it stands to reason that larger hypothetical Martians would be long gone. Small, survivable life forms would stick around a lot longer, possibly even to the present day. The odds of finding something frozen in the (geologically) recent past are a good deal better than the odds of finding anything from a couple hundred million years ago.
The less obvious reason is that I doubt there ever were large Martian lifeforms. There's a world of difference (pardon the pun) between being totally ecologically sterile and being Earth-like, and while I'd wager that Mars probably had something alive sometime in it's history, I doubt it ever got much past bacteria, and maybe simple plants. Too cold for one thing, and too dry. I've seen a couple different theories about how Mars was in the past, but nothing I've read suggests abundant heat, or water, or a thick atmosphere.
Granted I don't like to assume that the standards for life on Earth are the same as the standards for life elsewhere, but since we don't have any other basis for comparison, that assumption will have to stand. Plus, if living things adapted easily to extreme cold and scarcity of liquid water, you'd expect the poles here to be host to a larger variety of life. A world only slightly more hospitable than Antarctica doesn't seem like the best place to find big fauna.
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SciAm sucks (Score:5, Informative)
(American Scientist is much better)
The original NASA press release is at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20081120.html [nasa.gov]
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Phoenix mission a waste? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if this discovery had been made a few months earlier if they would have altered the course of the Phoenix lander [wikipedia.org] to try to touch down on the glacier. Or is the crust on top of the glacier too thick for Phoenix to get through? This seems like a prime target for future missions to analyze the ice and look for signs of life.
I think we need to send Bruce Willis and a crack team of oil rig workers to do some drilling on Mars...
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hey (Score:5, Funny)
we can put mammoths there
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
because scientists don't like to use vague and imprecise language.
if "ice" means "water ice," then what do you say when you just want to refer to ice of any kind?
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
"Ice" and "metal" have different meanings in planetary science than regular old chemistry. "Ice" can refer to any solid "volatile" substance (water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen...) and "metal" (IIRC) refers to other solids (carbon, silicon, iron...). Since lots of carbon dioxide ice has been found on mars in the past, it's worth making the distinction.
Also, when you're talking about the makeup of stars, "metal" refers to everything other than hydrogen or helium.
IANA astronomer, planetary geologist, etc.
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Re:Three times the size of City of Los Angeles? (Score:5, Funny)
LoCs are data size. CoLAs are a measure of land area.
Everyone knows that - it's taught to kids before they are even 30 shark nipples high.
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Re:Total Recall (Score:5, Funny)
Since we're on the subject of Total Recall, and I the only one who noticed that Indiana Jones IV completely ripped their ending off Total Recall?
The better question is why haven't you had a memory block installed for IJ4 like the rest of us?
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