Probable Water Ice Sighted On Mars 393
CraftyJack writes "Bright white chunks in the trenches dug by the Phoenix Lander have disappeared, leading Peter Smith & co. to believe that the chunks were ice that has since sublimated."
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Probable Water Ice Sighted On Mars
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Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
pictures don't lie? (Score:2, Insightful)
Dry ice? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, it's confirmation that the white stuff at the poles really is ice (and not some unknown martian substance that just looks like ice).
Second it means that the lander is digging in the right places to find all of the interesting stuff that goes along with water. It's tremendously interesting to discover whether there's carbon-based fragments in the water (suggesting life did or could exist) and to figure out what else is in the water.
Not exactly scholarly (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh really? No qualification there? No "this appears to be sublimation of ice" but a definite "this is a picture of ice"? The dumbing down of the net is officially complete.
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you fail it. Heinlein figured out how to move things from luna to terra cheaply a long time ago, if Platinum was just lying about on the moon, we would catapult it to earth with little cost. Moving oil on the other hand might be a more dangerous endeavor.
Re:what they should do (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you have a problem with it but the Chinese and Indians wont. So much for your supreme court ruling.
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
If everytime we talk about Mars or Titan we must make jokes about oil and America we might as well pick the one jokes which were proven to be funny.
"If that was oil the US would plan a manned mission for next year. They'd send the marines claiming that the Martians were hiding weapons of mass destruction." [slashdot.org]
"Well clearly we now need to spread Freedom and Democracy to the poor oppressed [Martians], who will welcome us with roses and be able to finance their own reconstruction." [slashdot.org]
"By an amazing coincidence, [Mars] doesn't actually have democracy over there... Yet." [slashdot.org]
You're welcome.
Re:co2 ice ? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:what they should do (Score:2, Insightful)
We don't know the planet is dead yet, doofus. There is still a very real possibility of extremophile microorganisms existing on mars.
Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:3, Insightful)
"First, it's confirmation that the white stuff at the poles really is ice (and not some unknown martian substance that just looks like ice)."
Or perhaps it is just weird martian substance that still looks like ice, even close up?
All I want to know is... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know the above is meant as a (seriously overused) joke, but it did get me thinking. If there was previously liquid water on Mars, and carbon-based life developed roughly along the same lines as on Earth, and internal geothermal processes are similar, than it's conceivable that there is oil, too. Although that's an awful lot of "if's". Also, if we were capable of getting oil off Mars economically, we also wouldn't need oil for energy.
Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:0, Insightful)
Cannot anything else sublimate? I would think dihydrogen monoxide is not the only substance capable of this feat.
Re:This is why robots aren't great for science (Score:3, Insightful)
See: Apollo 1 [nasa.gov].
Re:Oil, Water, Life on Mars? So what?! (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the swearing, my point is that if it is used as commonly as in your original thread, it really does water down. I got absolutely nothing against colorful language. My point is if you put in too much color, the whole thing becomes a gaudy mess rather than a well accentuated splash here and there.
Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, it does sound like you are trolling. But I'll bite.
First off, you are aware that one of the best ways to improve your national engineering cadre (and thus, your economy, standard of living, etc.) is to attempt things that are at the border of your capabilities, or even just a tad beyond, aren't you? Even if the only thing out there was a big brass ring that was way far away, it would pay to push your limits by constantly trying to grab it faster, or cheaper, or whatever.
Second, you realize I hope that NASA's budget is minuscule in the big scheme of things; we spend much more on things like professional sports and junk food that are even less useful. Our entire space program from 1958 to today cost less than our current misadventures in the middle east.
Third, did you ever stop to think about where the vast majority of the available resources are? From energy to precious metals to useful chemical to just plain space the overwhelming majority of the resources we know about are out in space.
Given all that, it hardly seems sensible to deride the space program as useless.
--MarkusQ
what't the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Viking lander already observed frost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_2 [wikipedia.org]
Furthermore, experiments with simulated soil and athmosphere suggest that that frost actually turns liquid when it melts.
Re:Not exactly scholarly (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise we know there is ice on mars, and one of the very few ways that a solid lump can disappear without trace is for it to sublimate. Other ways are for something with long limbs to have reached over and picked it up or perhaps they were iron rocks attracted by passing magnetic clouds, or perhaps a tiny blackhole opened for just long enough to remove those pebbles. However we've pretty much proved conclusively that there is no long-limbed life on Mars and every other way is vanishingly improbable so Occam's razor tells us that it is likely enough that this is ice that we can, on website designed for popular consumption, dispense with the endless qualifiers.
Re:This is why robots aren't great for science (Score:5, Insightful)
Manned space flight is afraid of a few deaths? What evidence do you have?
Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee die during a ground test and we still landed on the moon 2 years later.
Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliff died in the Challenger explosion and we were back riding the same design to orbit 2 years later.
We lost Rick Husband, William McCool, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon in the Colombia reentry. And again, 2 years later we're back in space on the same vehicle.
Just because you're too much of a wimp to risk your life doing something amazing and unique, don't condemn the rest of us to mediocrity.
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus, I thought I signed onto slashdot, but after reading the comments I realize I must have clicked on Fark by mistake.
Re:This is why robots aren't great for science (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of people who would volunteer for such suicide mission even if they were NOT terminally ill.
Really, if you can have people whose JOB is to murder other people and public is totally confortable with it (hint: its Soldier), volunteers for suicide missions should not concern public at all.
Cultural taboo to overcome is "suicide", not "kill".
Re:This is why robots aren't great for science (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's the scientific way. Don't prove it for yourself, take someone else's word for it.
Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:2, Insightful)
~z
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
But in order to know if that phase diagram is correct, it must first be proved by someone.
Yes. Better yet, under stringent laboratory conditions. Which means a much more controlled environment than the inside of your freezer (e.g. in an environment that contains _only_ water. Water vapor behaves somewhat different from an ideal gas, which means that your results may deviate as soon as you have other gases in the environment). If you do the freezer/ice cube tray experiment, how do you make sure that there isn't any liquid water involved when you're not looking ? (Oh, I know: You _know_ that water cannot be liquid below 0.01 Celsius ... which means that you're relying on the phase diagram to be correct. Congratulations, you've just proven the correctness of the phase diagram by relying on the phase diagram to be correct.).
If the current phase diagram had fundamental errors in it, a lot of the processes that rely on water behaving exactly this way simply wouldn't work. Also, there'd probably be something on the order of a Nobel prize in for anyone who can prove the error ... and experimenting with water really isn't rocket science.
Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether parent is a troll or not, the question raised deserves some kind of answer.
Getting into space is not the long term goal.
The long term goal is to get back into The Garden. The way to do that is to move all the factories (and most of the engineers) into space. This is all spelled out in the Ecological Manifesto. Which you can find written in the reflection of the clouds on any stillwater lake where you've got solitude surrounded by a few acres of wilderness.
Re:fake picture? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I don't think it looks fake. But, you could easily point your radio telescope at Mars and verify that there is a signal coming from that direction.
20 years from now, we're going to have junior high school students saying that Phoenix and Spirit/Opportunity were faked. I only say this because my spouse is a science teacher and still hears that the Moon landings were faked.
Re:This is why robots aren't great for science (Score:2, Insightful)
Human psychology, particularly when dealing with nations of people, doesn't always work logically.
Each one of those three cases you mention, while tragic and horrible, don't really fall into the nightmare scenario of human space exploration.
It's not just the deaths we fear, it's the helplessness and impotence of an impending death we can do nothing about in the void of space, or the horror of unretreived bodies. A fiery death is something we as humans understand. There is tragedy, there is heroism and glory, we honor their sacrifice, and we can move forward.
There is a huge difference, emotionally speaking, between a shuttle reentering Earth's atmosphere and incinerating, and what could possibly happen on a manned mission to the Moon or Mars.
Imagine a scenario where, say, Apollo 17's boosters fail to fire after landing on the moon, dooming the landing crew to run out of oxygen and die on the moon. No amount of Apollo 13-style duct tape heroics can save them. They slowly die as a horrified public watches, and there is nothing that anyone can do to save them. Their bodies remain on the Moon, and every time someone looks up at the night sky, they see dead Americans in adddition to or in place of a crowning human achievement, until a future mission possibly retrieves their bodies.
Or imagine a manned Mars mission where a critical rocket malfuntions and the crew is doomed to hurtle out into the void of space, and there is NEVER realistically a possibility of retrieving the bodies once they finally die.
Now, I don't know if this would usher in a new dark age of space exploration, because it has never happened. I'm not advocating against human space exploration either. Clearly, for all of our costly fleshly limitations, humans are by far still the greatest possible conductors of science and exploration.
However, it is also important to acknowledge that we don't truly know how humanity as a whole would react to the worst that could possibly happen in human space exploration because, thanks to the brilliance of engineers and a good deal of luck, it hasn't happened yet.Re:Was there ever doubt? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just my two cents to add...
Exploration of the next horizon is part of being human. To stop exploring would be to deny something that is fundamental to who we are. The principle of utility is a horrible metric when the objective is poorly understood....
For a long time, art made no sense to me, seemed like a waste of time, but it is an expression of human creativity and a reaching for beauty. Unless you care about seeking beauty, art doesn't make sense. Unless you care about seeking the truth of the universe, space exploration doesn't make sense.
So, the question I would pose to the grandparent is what happened to make you lose interest in exploration? Have you never been curious about what is over the next hill that you haven't seen? Because really, that is what this is all about.