Water Discovery Is Good News For Mars Colonists 247
astroengine writes "By now, we probably all know that there was once significant quantities of water on the Martian surface and, although the red planet is bone dry by terrestrial standards, water persists as ice just below the surface to this day. Now, according to a series of new papers published in the journal Science, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity has found that the Mars topsoil is laced with surprisingly high quantities of the wet stuff. And this could be good news for future Mars colonists. 'If you take a cubic foot of that soil you can basically get two pints of water out it — a couple of water bottles like you'd take to the gym, worth of water,' Curiosity scientist Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, N.Y., told Discovery News."
That's a whole lot of dirt, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you couple it with water/fluid recycling techniques, you stand a good change of doing well.
I find it strange that they would focus on just drinking water in the summary, when water will give you fuel and oxygen as well, and will likely be the greatest byproducts of this type of mining.
Great, let's send plants (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, next step, let's find some plants that might be able to grow there. Let's make Mars a green planet. I think that's really the next step, can we take a desolate planet and make it remotely suitable for life. I'd like to do the same thing with Venus, which I'm sure will be much more of a challenge.
Ratio seems too high (Score:2, Interesting)
You can all do the maths (yes, I said "maths", not "math") yourselves, but one cubic foot of anything is about 27 litres in volume. Two pints is about 1.2 litres, so the soild is apparently saturated with water in a ratio of 25.8: 1.2 (25.8 + 1.2 = 27). That seems like an awful lot of water for a presumably desert-dry planet, so I'm calling bullshit on this.