Orbiter Reveals Rock Fracture Plumbing On Mars 61
Riding with Robots writes "Mars researchers report that a robotic spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet has revealed hundreds of small fractures exposed on the Martian surface that once directed flows of water through underground Martian sandstone. 'This study provides a picture of not just surface water erosion, but true groundwater effects widely distributed over the planet,' said one of the mission scientists for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been regularly returning terabytes of high-resolution images and other kinds of data from Mars."
canals (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Data rate of 6Mb/s (Score:5, Interesting)
Longer than that. It only has LOS with earth for 16 hours a day and uses 10 to 11 of those hours for data transmittal.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/spacecraft/communication.html [nasa.gov]
I was somewhat disappointed that the NASA page discusses the data in terms of how many CDs they would fill; however, at least they didn't try to tell me how many football fields would be required to lay the CDs edge-to-edge.
Re:canals (Score:2, Interesting)
I was thinking the same thing. I suspect Percival Lowell would have been happy that the discovery was made on a mission run, in part, from the observatory bearing his name.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Misguided (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably the only point at which they might favourably compare is in the percentage of the gross national wealth needed to fund the voyages.