Strange Globs Could Signal Water On Mars

Joshua.Niland writes "Strange globs seen on the landing strut of the Phoenix Mars lander could be the first proof that modern Mars hosts liquid water. Images from the robotic craft show what appear to be liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month. Just when is NASA going to fix that leaking roof on the backlot?"

Re:No, it proves there is water vapor

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Assuming of course that those globs are water and not Martian spit or something else.

Maybe a Martian dog walked by, took a whiff of the lander, and promptly took a piss on it?

Now that would be a headline for the press, "Traces of dogs found on Mars."

Do I have this right?

[chopper749]

We sent a robot to look for water on Mars. It lands in an icy puddle, and gets covered in mud and tiny droplets (that behave just like water). But we can't tell if it's water or not. Your tax dollars at work!

Re:Do I have this right?

[Anonymous Coward]

This way, NASA can ask for more money to send more rovers to see if the first rovers are wet. Then, and only then, will NASA say for sure that there might be more funding needed for more experiments to look for water.

Re:Silly

[fahrbot-bot]

If that was an astronaut up there this would be resolved in a minute, not a month.

...Astronaut samples the water, "Hmm, tastes pretty good...gack...gack..." Cue any number of "Martian Zombie" movies... Now do you see why we just send robots? Sure their programming sometimes goes bad and they start killing us, but don't EAT OUR BRAINS!

Re:Science has a high burden of proof.

[Yetihehe]

You both.

Re:So what? More important issue at this point ...

[Aris Katsaris]

Well then, we just need to increase the gravitational constant of the universe as well.

Re:Did I miss something?

[timmarhy]

please go back to watching american idol now, grown ups will keep doing the science. *pats on head*

Martian dog

[flyingfsck]

It proves that a Martian dog found a leg to pee on.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Did I miss something?

[nicklott]

Actually the final year of my space science degree almost entirely revolved around martian geology and impact cratering (you wanna know how many craters per square km there are in amazonis planitia? or the southern highlands? TS, go count em yourself...)

So anyway, bite me.

Re:Next mission...

[glittalogik]

Some say I'm bipolar...

...and that there's a portrait of your left foot in the Louvre basement.

The only thing we know is: you're called The Stig.

Wrong domain

[Belial6]

You registered the wrong domain. You should have registered martianhomeopathy.com. I just checked and it is still available, as well as the .net, .org, and .mobi variants. You see, shipping millions of gallons of water down from Mars would be prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, if you market it as 'Homeopathy', you can actually advertise that you have diluted billions of gallons of earth water with just one itty bitty tiny drop of actual Martian water. This will be seen by many of the homeopathy crowd as giving it more powerful juju than if you had shipped 100% pure Martian water.

While I'm not saying that getting that first drop of Martian water would be cheap or easy, but it certainly would be cheaper and easier than setting up a full scale harvesting and shipping system for pure water.

Re:No, it proves there is water vapor

[tcolberg]

Would this "dog" be green and have a broom on his head?

Re:Duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such thing as solid water. Once the substance known as "water" forms a solid, it's referred to as "ice".

Re:Science has a high burden of proof.

[flewp]

Yes. Some people will starve. Some people will be unemployed.

It would be nice to minimize this, but what is the proper way to do so?

Feed the unemployed to the starving?