Flowing Water Discovered on Mars

Dolphy writes "BBC News has the latest big scoop on the Mars phenomenon. Researcher Tahirih Motazedian apparently uncovered proof quite some time ago of flowing water and surface change on Mars."

High res images

[t0qer]

Higher res images [msss.com]

(o) <----put that karma right here :P

Re:Water's not the only liquid in universe

[umofomia]

Mars's surface temperature goes down pretty low at night to some -100 degree Celcius, at which nitrogen (roughly our air) is liquid as well (at earth ground pressures).

Um... the temperature at which nitrogen turns liquid is -195.8 degrees Celcius. With Mars' lower air pressure, I'm sure it's even less.

Meanwhile, even at the poles, Mars does not go below -150 degrees, so there is no place on Mars at which nitrogen will turn into a liquid.

Re:Water's not the only liquid in universe

[panurge]

First, the boiling point of nitrogen is much lower than -100C. And the atmospheric pressure of nitrogen you would need to get a river to flow when the temperature dropped would mean a planet much bigger than Mars.

Second, the remarkable thing about water is that based on simple chemical rules it should not be a liquid at ordinary temperatures: ammonia, with a similar MW, is a gas. It is the strong hydrogen bonding between water molecules that gives it the high melting and boiling points, and the very wide range between them. The ideal liquid to sustain life has a wide range between MP and BP, dissolves a wide range of substances, is itself mostly unreactive, is made from elements common in planets, does not react with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon or sulphur in the liquid state at ordinary pressures, and is easily formed in chemical reactions (which implies a small molecule). Water fits the bill extremely well. Another liquid which is quite good is ethyl alcohol. The other small molecules (ammonia, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, methyl alcohol, hydrogen cyanide) all fall down badly or one or more of the criteria.

Water may not be the only liquid that makes a suitable carrier for life, but it would be really hard to find a more suitable one. Human experiments to use alcohol instead are rarely successful for very long.

Re:Water's not the only liquid in universe

[_Eric]

OK one step further: Martian Atmosphere [nasa.gov]

Surface pressure: 6.36 mb at mean radius (variable from 4.0 to 8.7 mb depending on season)
[6.9 mb to 9 mb (Viking 1 Lander site)]
Surface density: ~0.020 kg/m3
Scale height: 11.1 km
Total mass of atmosphere: ~2.5 x 1016 kg
Average temperature: ~210 K (-63 C)
Diurnal temperature range: 184 K to 242 K (-89 to -31 C) (Viking 1 Lander site)
Wind speeds: 2-7 m/s (summer), 5-10 m/s (fall), 17-30 m/s (dust storm) (Viking Lander sites)
Mean molecular weight: 43.34 g/mole
Atmospheric composition (by volume):
Major : Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 95.32% ; Nitrogen (N2) - 2.7%
Argon (Ar) - 1.6%; Oxygen (O2) - 0.13%; Carbon Monoxide (CO) - 0.08%
Minor (ppm): Water (H2O) - 210; Nitrogen Oxide (NO) - 100; Neon (Ne) - 2.5;
Hydrogen-Deuterium-Oxygen (HDO) - 0.85; Krypton (Kr) - 0.3;
Xenon (Xe) - 0.08

So we're talking carbon dioxide. Pressure is 7mb or 7hPa or 0.7kPa (earth pressure beeing around 1000hPa or 100kPa)

Here's a phase diagram of CO2 [wisc.edu]

So at such low pressures, CO2 is vapor at diurnal temperature ranges. My theory seems not to hold. Please go back to sleep.

Re:Terraforming wont be so hard after all..

[Anonymous Coward]

Many plants do not need Animals or Insects to exist. Flora comes always before fauna.

Re:Terraforming wont be so hard after all..

[Noodlenose]

Gosh,

don't you kids read Kim Stanley Robinson? Mars terraforming has never been better researched and presented than in K.S.R.'s Mars Trilogy.

Read and learn all about Mars.

But Quayle did save NASA

[tjstork]

Hey, the guy wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but, during the really big budget deficit days of the late 80's and early 90's, Bush Sr was like, well let's axe NASA. Dan Quayle intervened to get NASA put back into the budget.

Re:Water's not the only liquid in universe

[tigersha]

There is a large difference between D/RNA and water. Water is an extremel simple molecule and acts as the carrier for the processes in life. Nucleic acids are
extremely complicated molecules that are used to store information (used to encode proteins)

Now, it is quite possible to envision an organism which uses some non-nucleic acid information storage system. However, for the trivial carrier molecule there is not really that much choice.

There are only so many simple molecules out there.

In the medium-complexity range, whould there we any other chemical structures which could replace proteins? I am not a biochemist...

I agree that we should not look for life just as ourselves. Alien life would probably not have DNA and might not have proteins. So we should not look for those.

However, they would probably be water based and therefore that is a good starting point.

AFAIK there is not many reasons to replace Carbon either, so they would probably be organic too. Another thing to look at.

Anyways, I am not an biochemist, again. Soany comments from the experts are welcome.

Some of us knew this more than 2 years ago

[Slashdolt]

"Placitas, NM, 07/19/2000 -- New research by investigators for the Enterprise Mission (www.enterprisemission.com), a private, not-for-profit space science research organization, has revealed strong evidence of present day liquid water on Mars in recent Mars Global surveyor images. Coming on the heels of the June 22nd, 2000 NASA press conference in which Malin Space Science Systems investigators Michael Malin and Kenneth Edgett asserted the possibility that Mars may have had liquid water in the geologically recent past, this new photographic evidence confirms that liquid water is almost certainly existent on Mars today."

The rest is below.

http://www.enterprisemission.com/press-water.htm l

Re:In the exalted words of our esteemed former VP.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit...Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe." ...Governor George W. Bush, 8/11/94

I've also seen this quote attributed to Al Gore...

Re:Terraforming wont be so hard after all..

[mezelf]

I am not an ecelogical expert (by no means), but in my opinion, you will still need to be very careful about what plants you bring there and you will probably need to manage them very closely. When you don't bring animals with you (birds spring to mind), that means that none of the seeds the plants produce get eaten (except for what the people harvest). This means that plants can and eventually will start growing where no people live (yet). If they are the wrong type, they could exhaust the soil, preventing anything else from growing there for quite some time.

This hasn't happened on Earth, since here, the entire planet is covered with all sorts of fauna and flora (OK, it wasn't like that right from the start, but it took a very long time to get it this way. Time that humans simply don't have).

It isn't quite the same thing (plants can't move), but just think about what happened when someone brought a few rabits to Australia, some centuries ago.

Not to mention radiation

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nasa.gov/HP_news_03102.html

Re:In the exalted words of our esteemed former VP.

[croddy]

qualye quotes (like gore quotes and bush2 quotes) are more often false. snopes [snopes.com] does attribute this one to him though.

Re:Terraforming wont be so hard after all..

[sab39]

One thing I've wondered ever since reading RGB Mars is how much of the science postulated in the trilogy is based on verifiable current knowledge, and how much is speculation?

For example, the books postulate huge underground aquifers - clearly, based on this story, that's something we haven't been able to determine yet. "There might be water" vs "There's enough water to fill several oceans" is a big leap!

How much of the other science that KSR relies on for terraforming to work (eg the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the chemicals that are available from the Martian soil) is based on things we actually know about Mars, rather than just guesses? Anyone have the background to know how likely these guesses are to turn out to be true, based on our current knowledge?

For that matter, does anyone even know the up-to-date status of this story and just how much water is supposedly there?

Re:In the exalted words of our esteemed former VP.

[Himring]

Wtf? I just checked out what www.snopes.com had to say on this quote, and at the page:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/quayle.htm

It says this, at the top of the previous paragraph, before giving a list of quotes:

"Most of the ones on the following list are actual Quayle quotes" ('most of the ones'?... nice writing there wannabes).

K, so, like, which 'ones' are real 'ones' and which 'ones' are not?!?

Geez. Again, don't use Internet sources in term papers....

conspiracy theorists be damned

[barakn]

Credible scientists as well as the lunatics were claiming the stains were a sign of water quite a while ago. What is new about this most recent observation is that newstains have been found (i.e. we now have photos before and after their formation). This just strengthens an old argument; it isn't a new argument.

More details

[Drog]

Another article on this (with a ton of links) can be found here [scifitoday.com].

PDF of this research

[corleth]

For anyone that is exterested, there is an extended scientific abstract of this work, here [usra.edu], to be presented as a poster on Thursday evening at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. This is a serious conference (I'll be there as usual), and so we'll soon see whether this stands up to scientific scrutiny.

Having read the abstract, and work by Mike Malin (PI of the camera on Mars Global Surveyor) and co-authors, who proposed that these features were water some time ago, I think that there still needs to be more work (and more importantly, supporting evidence, e.g. spectral) before there will be a concensus that the streaks are indeed caused by water. However, the fact that there is clearly a change means that, if these are caused by water, then they are certainly VERY recent (i.e. a few years), which has profound implications. The question would then need to be asked, is the water flow due to an active hydrological system caused by climatic and orbital change, or is it related to volcanic/hydrothermal processes? The latter seems unlikely as there is no evidence, to my mind, of an unusual thermal anomaly in the vicinity of Olympus Mons. Also, there are streaks like this in many other areas of Mars. However, it may be possible to set up a hydrothermal system without an easily detectable thermal anomaly - I don't know for sure. I'll try to ask the author what she thinks next week.

-Karl

Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Scientist, Lancaster University, U.K.