Underground Water on Mars?

WaltonNews wrote in with a story about possible underground water on Mars. The article begins: "The Mars Express spacecraft, from the European Space Agency (ESA), has indicated to scientists that the dry atmosphere and surface on the planet Mars does not necessarily mean Mars is dry underneath the surface. In fact, a huge storehouse of water and carbon dioxide could be found in underground reservoirs."

Re:Not a new result

[nwbvt]

I think the point of the research being referenced (though the link is bad, so its hard to tell) is that new experiments show the water loss rate should be much lower than they previously thought, which means all that water that used to be there must have gone somewhere.

Re:For Heaven's Sake...

[rbanffy]

We did. It was called Beagle 2.

It was supposed to dig down a little bit and try to take some underground samples.

Keep in mind that most mining equipment is not very portable, if at all. Taking it to Mars and landing it safely is beyond our current capabilities.

OTOH, we could smash a block of something and analyze the resulting plume. There is no better way to dig a crater that smashing a 1 ton bullet traveling at a couple kilometers per second.

There is, but try smuggling a nuke to space these days...

Re:format

[OriginalArlen]

I have a deeply unpopular opinion round here which is that, even if humans actually walk on Mars in our lifetimes (I'd put the chances of that at 5/1), the chances of any permanent settlement are nil, zip, zilch, nada. You have to understand how much it would cost, and that there would be no economic benefits at all apart from the teflon/tang/spacepen type spin-offs; and if that's the aim, there are plenty of much more useful projects that could be run which would have just as many technological spin-off benefits. You have to understand how hard it would be to get there and maintain life support in such a hostile environment. How long would the US settlers have lasted if they'd had no natural resources apart from lots of very very salty / acidic dusts and regolith, a dim sun, low gravity, and had faced instant death in the event of a loss of air pressure / failure of any of several thousand literally "mission-critical" systems? Oh wait, for some of those failure modes, death would be slow, lingering, and unpleasant. And we'd all have to watch it on TV every night. *shudder* no, thanks.

See, I said it was unpopular. Bye-bye karma, I barely knew ye ;)

Re:format

[stevesliva]

How long would the US settlers have lasted if they'd had no natural resources apart from lots of very very salty / acidic dusts and regolith, a dim sun, low gravity, and had faced instant death in the event of a loss of air pressure / failure of any of several thousand literally "mission-critical" systems? Oh wait, for some of those failure modes, death would be slow, lingering, and unpleasant.

Even in the relatively temperate climate of North America, there are plenty of ways to die.

Regardless, I've actually thought along the same lines about colonization, and it has a lot to do with the economic rationale for going in the first place. Once there is one good reason to establish a population, everyone else follows to support that population. Columbus thought that we'd settle to get gold and silver, at Jamestown it was tobacco (eventually), in New England and Atlantic Canada it had a lot to do with just leaving Olde England and perhaps a very little to do with cod fisheries and fur trading. But once those settlements started, other economic activites were established to support the local population.

Once it becomes cheap enough to visit Mars with regularity, be it for simple science or tourism, it would actually make sense to establish a permanent base, rather than bringing everything along each time.

Re:format

[WindBourne]

Actually, your opinion matches up with a number of folks. Of course, most of them believe that ID is real.

Thank god that it is not likely to win. Simply put, it is no where near as expensive as NASA or even you believe. Why? Because of NASA's and RKA (USSR/Russian space agency ) precursor work of figuring out what works.

1. Launch will be provided by any number of transports. My belief is that spaceX and scaled composites will capture the bulk of this within another 4 years.
2. Bigelow's stations will be used for transport (100 million or so) nearly 100% based on NASA's work.
3. And then a modified BA-330 will be sent to the martian surface by 2015 to see how long it will last. (and yes, the BA-330 will be out by 2010 because of DOD's needs (they are going to use them to hide where antenna are pointing as well as provide a short sleeve work env for repair)). If need be, then craft will be put in a metal container to keep off the environment. (hopfully, one of the next surface missions will send some small samples of material to see how they really survive).
4. Armadillo's craft will be used for hopping around and doing mining on the surface.
5. Modified forms of Lunar suits will be used for the martianaughts.

No, your fears are trivial to get past.

The one hard part on all this is, power. We have 2 choices; Nuke or power sat. If NASA has a decent low-weight, high-power generator, then we will send that. But it is probably good for only 30 years and will probably not be easy to move. Of course, we could send a power sat and then beam the power down. But how much power?

In fact, baring war or worsening debt crisis (sadly, this is highly likely), I believe that we will be on the lunar surface by 2015 and mars by 2020.