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."
Plumbing? (Score:5, Funny)
Who cares about alien plumbing?
I want their electronics!
Re:Plumbing? (Score:5, Funny)
Ignorant fool!
Everyone knows that the key to intergalactic understanding is knowledge of the location and inner workings of alien plumbing!
Why do you think everytime another intergalactic race stops by here, that they anal prob our hillbillies?
Plumbing inspection, i'm telling you!
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Bah! The chances of anything living on Mars, are a million to one.
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That's what you get for drooling over Seven of Nine.
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Who cares about alien plumbing?
Itsa me, Mario!
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Re:Misguided (Score:4, Funny)
Waste of resources? How else would we know that Martian rocks have cracks in them
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Having a moon base, on the other hand, would not be a major waste of funds.
Re:Misguided (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to the moon could have been seen as a waste of resources, but it brought back rocks that has helped us understand our own planets past.
Going over the Atlantic in the 1400s was probably a waste of resources, I mean, people were still clinging over the idea that the Earth was flat at that time, but yet, somehow someone went over in order to find another way to India (sort of suggesting that at least some people thought the Earth was round), but in anycase, what they found was a new continent, but yeah, it was a waste of resources anyway. I mean, people where pretty sure that the ships would fall of the edge of the planet then.
People experimenting with flying in the 1800s and early 1900s where probably wasting resources as well, I mean, what's the point. You could go (almost) anywhere on the planet by ship, horse and foot.
Sending up the first satellites was a waste of resources, I mean, we have no use for meteorological reports or detailed maps or navigation systems. I mean, we where doing fine before this, and who would have known that those applications would be developed using satellites.
In-fact, our early ancestors leaving Africa probably wasted a lot of resources transporting themselves to Europe and Asia, what is the point of going somewhere at all? They should have stayed in Africa and made sure that the problems at home where solved before they decided to leave.
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Probably not. Three ships aren't all that expensive, even in the time and place Comumbus wanted them.
Note, however, one crucial difference - while Columbus was trying to sell the voyage as a trip to the Indies, most educated people knew that that was impossible. Contrary to popular rumour, most everyone with any sort of education knew perfectly well that the world wa
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There are plenty of resources in space that may prove profitable to mine. He-3 on the moon is probably the best example at this time, but there are several other bodys out there that can provide resources for humankind.
Sending probes to Mars is inherently useful since it helps us understand the origin of the solar system and to prepare humankind for the problems involved with long duration space travel. It also gives us very important information necessary for future colonisation of Mars (I mean, you really
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Space travel, on the other hand, is not about cheaper resources. Everything is cheaper on Earth.
Everything is cheaper on Earth, RIGHT NOW.
Everything is more abundant in Space, Full Stop.
When the cost of getting things to orbit gets cheaper, and the technology robust enough to repair en route we will have to re-evaluate the comparison.
And yes I've read Roland Brak's thoughts on Asteroid Mining.
http://ronaldbrak.blogspot.com/2006/02/great-asteroid-mining-con.html [blogspot.com]
Don't forget there was a time when boats were not so seaworthy, navigation not so advanced and sailors stayed close to the shore. The overland
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Read about the Flat Earth Myth [wikipedia.org]. By the early middle ages, and certainly by Columbus's time, it was almost universally accepted that the earth is round.
The reason why nobody wanted to fund Columbus's voyage is that he wildly miscalculated the distance to Asia, thinking that it was far closer than it really was. Everybody else had more or less accurately calculated the westward traveling distance to Asia and knew that current ships couldn't make that far of a journey. Coincidentally, the American continents
Columbus got lucky in several ways (Score:2)
Plato thought the earth was round because spheres were really really cool perfectness. But by the time of Eratosthenes ~1700 years before Columbus, Greek astronomers had a pretty good idea how big the earth was (within 5-10%, depending on quite how long a stadia was), and they had a reasonably accurate estimate of the distance to the moon as well. An Indian astronomer around 500 AD had the circumference to within 60km. Columbus, on the other hand, thought the Earth was only 25000 km around, not 25000 mil
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It could have been done cheaper via automated probes. Debates about this get long and heated, I should note; but I find the "robot" side the stronger argument.
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No, it could not have been done cheeper with automatic probes at that time. The state of art artificial intelligence was not on level of what would be required for good scientific value to be brought back.
You could have built a machine to bring back rocks, yes, but at that time, AI was not even close to be able to find rocks of interest. It is approaching that level today though. So... you basically needed 30-40 years of investments in computer science and AI in order to approach a level of technology that
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Who says anything about AI? In general its hard to tell what the rocks are about until brought to an expensive Earth lab anyhow. Geologists on the moon didn't seem to help much. Plus, a remote camera can take detail at least as good as the human eye can see, and in more colors than visible to the human eye, so that multiple human experts on Earth can examine them for candidate returns.
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Waste is an important requirement of human progress. Waste is to civilization what compost is to gardening.
Take the 19th century British railroad bubble. Loads of people lost their shirts investing in rail companies, the result was that Britain gained an excellent rail network at little public expense.
Take the Internet bubble of the 90s, where many quixotic ventures started with a hasty powerpoint presentation and a VC desperate to get some kind of stake in the land rush. Vast fortunes where burned on
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Why do we care about ground water in Mars? Don't we have bigger things to do here on Earth? All these Mars missions seem like a major waste of resources. Where is our moon base?
Boy, are you in the wrong thread.
Re:Matian Plumber's Crack jokes. (Score:2)
I don't know, but my first reaction was that they were trying to say that rocks fractured the Mars Lander's plumbing, and my second reaction was that there should be a bad joke about plumber's cracks on Mars in there somewhere. Maybe you've just got better taste...
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Ok.. so a probe is regularly returning terabytes across the solar system, but ISP's are forming lobbying pacs proclaiming they can't offer the speeds they advertised for people on earth.
Something's rotten in the state of denmark.
Yeah because one probe with line of sight to the planet is just as complicated as networking millions of homes across a country that's several thousand miles wide.
Look, I'm annoyed at Comcast too, but let's not create any new PHB dialogue for Dilbert.
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I'm quite certain if you paid as much for your data as NASA is for theirs, your ISP would be more than happy to run a dedicated OC-3 to your house. They might even toss in a complementary handjob.
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Or complimentary, depending upon your happy ending preferences [damn I hate it when I write the wrong one of those two].
Data rate of 6Mb/s (Score:3, Informative)
I was going to challenge this but it appears MRO transmits data about ten times faster [wikipedia.org] than other probes. Nevertheless, at 6 Megabits/second it would take 370 hours (over two weeks) to send one Terabyte.
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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.
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Re:Data rate of 6Mb/s (Score:5, Funny)
You could have gone to the homepage http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ [nasa.gov]
There it states 67.5 Terrabits received. (Terrabits, not terrabytes)
They could have gotten it down to 99 kb, but the damn webmaster insisted on a Flash animation.
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You could have gone to the homepage http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ [nasa.gov] There it states 67.5 Terrabits received. (Terrabits, not terrabytes)
Oh, the irony of a device on Mars transmitting terrabits of data.
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You could have gone to the homepage http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ [nasa.gov] There it states 67.5 Terrabits received. (Terrabits, not terrabytes)
Oh, the irony of a device on Mars transmitting terrabits of data.
Yeah ... especially since it's spelled terabits.
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The spacecraft has already provided more than 50 Terabits -- that's 50 million million bits. To put it another way, that's more than all the data transmitted by all previous JPL spacecraft put together!
Does not compute error!Geek violation detected, manditory geek terminology review forced! Kilo: 1 thousand octal Mega: 1 million octal Giga: 1 billion octal Tera: 1 trillion octal
Geek terminology review terminated! Further geek violations may result in requiring violator to write 50 (base 10) sentences hand
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nevertheless, at 6 Megabits/second it
goddamnit, they've got faster broadband on Mars than I've got at my house.
yeah, so my latency is better, bfd.
canals (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.
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Whoever modded Parent troll and GP redundant needs to brush up on their Martian history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal [wikipedia.org]
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Oh no (Score:1)
Name redundency detected (Score:1)