Mars Express Beams Back Images of Ice-Filled Korolev Crater (theguardian.com) 104
An anonymous reader shares a report: The stunning Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars is filled with ice all year round owing to a trapped layer of cold Martian air that keeps the water frozen. The 50-mile-wide crater contains 530 cubic miles of water ice, as much as Great Bear Lake in northern Canada, and in the centre of the crater the ice is more than a mile thick. Images beamed back from the red planet show that the lip around the impact crater rises high above the surrounding plain. When thin Martian air then passes over the crater, it becomes trapped and cools to form an insulating layer that prevents the ice from melting. The latest picture is a composite of five strip-like images taken from the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe, which swung into orbit around the planet on Christmas Day 2003. On the same day, the orbiter released the Beagle 2 lander, a British probe built on a shoestring budget, which touched down but failed to fully open on the surface. Mars Express photographed the Korolev crater with its high-resolution stereo camera, an instrument that can pick out features 10 metres wide, or as small as 2 metres when used in super-resolution mode.
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Re:SpaceX (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah it does take more technology to make a plane go further actually.
And so does making upper stages inject their payloads onto higher energy trajectories, but neither of those things has anything to do with landings.
But beyond that, one is Earth and ONE IS MARS.
That's exactly the point. The procedure of landing on Mars and it comparative difficulty is determined by conditions on Mars, not by how far away the conditions are located.
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If we could just as easily send a spacex rocket to mars as we can send one to an earth orbit, then I'd agree.
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It's more difficult (and expensive obviously) to land on a foreign planet than on Earth.
Are you sure? Earth has one hell of an atmosphere to deal with. As for expense, most of that is fuel cost and rocket engines.
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Exactly. It is easy to bring enough fuel for a suborbital flight and a powered landing, it is far more difficult to reach escape velocity and still bring enough fuel for braking and landing on another planet.
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It's more difficult (and expensive obviously) to land on a foreign planet than on Earth.
If it is, it's because of local conditions. Not because because of distance, as some "cosmological" moron above tried to claim.
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>No, I realized instead that distance is not a factor for landing success.
Actually it is - in two big ways:
- The lander is subjected to much longer thermal and radiation stresses during the long slow flight to Mars (since for whatever reason we haven't landed on the moon much), which means more probability of hardware failures.
- Since we've abandoned MAnned spaceflight beyond orbit, the lander must be pretty much fully autonomous - since any human interaction is subjected to light-speed delay - 2.6 secon
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Just because the pilot is probably a robot, doesn't mean there's no use for a human captain.
Even if it's only an abort switch under the control of human judgement, that's still a potentially big improvement over full autonomy, since even the best-programmed/trained AI won't have the same understanding of abort-worthy situations as a human.
And in reality, it's quite likely that other things benefit from human judgement as well. For example, landing on unfamiliar territory where additional information is bec
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Cosmological maths are required for space travel.
No, it's not.
You don't work in the field
Perhaps, but I've known since the age of ten how cosmology differs from celestial mechanics. (Are you nine, by any chance?)
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you're willing to lie about the difficulty in landing on another planet vs. Melbourne.
I can only imagine that you have some kind of random text scrambler in your head messing with the remnants of your reading comprehension.
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Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that involves the origin and evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang to today and on into the future. According to NASA, the definition of cosmology is "the scientific study of the large scale properties of the universe as a whole."
Exactly, NOTHING to do with operating planetary probes, as I already pointed out.
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Re: SpaceX (Score:2)
Wrong, Newtonian mechanics work fine for getting a craft to Mars. Cosmologists use General Relatively and other more difficult maths
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what bullshit, no relativistic corrections needed for Mars trip. All of us who studied orbital mechanics for our physics degree know this, you want proof pick up any of the standard texts.
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Kyosuke claimed it was EASIER to land a craft there than in Australia
I claimed no such thing. I said that places don't care about the distance from which you arrive to them. Mars won't make you landing easier just because you're only departing from Deimos either.
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No, it really isn't. You don't even need relativity - plain old Newtonian mechanics is quite sufficient for navigation within the solar system by anything yet built by Man. You'll get some discrepancies if you pay close enough attention, but nothing that wouldn't be corrected by dead reckoning, if not lost in the noise of other imperfections in your rocket.
You need orbital mechanics to hit what you're aiming for, but that's still simple stuff, and it'd be a real stretch to call that "cosmological maths" (w
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The video claims the LLTV had no computers. In fact, it had a fly-by-wire computer system.
Also, it's not a space-bound launch vehicle re-entering from hypersonic velocity at Mach 8, which is the novel aspect here. I don't think that anyone ever claimed that it was the first time someone shortly hovered for a while.
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So how long until corporate exploiters destroy it for profit, as retarded-growth-economic paradigms dictate as the only suitable outcome?
I'm sure plenty of Martians won't want their domestics and ice miners to be robots. /s
As far as destroying Mars for profit, it's way closer than Earth to the asteroid belt which is much more useful for raw materials.
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So how long until corporate exploiters destroy it for profit, as retarded-growth-economic paradigms dictate as the only suitable outcome?
No, you people believe that we'll never get there, and that if some team miraculously achieves a flags-and-footsteps landing, we'll never colonize the place because of the impossibly difficult conditions.
You can't have it both ways, dammit.
click the link (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a rendering. Real MEO data, but the image is CGI.
These images are an excellent celebration of such a milestone. Taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), this view of Korolev crater comprises five different ‘strips’ that have been combined to form a single image, with each strip gathered over a different orbit. The crater is also shown in perspective, context, and topographic views, all of which offer a more complete view of the terrain in and around the crater.
Mars Express gets festive: a winter wonderland on Mars [esa.int]
But I agree, it is one of the greatest Martian images ever.
What the hell? (Score:2)
A composite picture of the Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars, made from images taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera overlaid on a digital terrain model.
Anyone know why they had to, or chose to, use a digital terrain model, rather than just give the complete real pictures?
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone know why they had to, or chose to, use a digital terrain model, rather than just give the complete real pictures?
Because the real picture is from orbit, straight down. Which is rather boring compared to the image produced by the terrain model.
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Ok, so... water on Mars! Now what? Should we go taste it?
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Well, that's also pretty enormous reservoir of easily worked raw materials for construction (ice is pretty strong stuff, whether you're building "igloos" or melting ice-tunnels. Or both - if you're mining water you may as well make a useful hole, and vice-versa), and feed-stock for growing a sustainable ecology (along with CO2 from the atmosphere) for food, air scrubbing, oxygen production, and various wood and cellulose-based raw materials.
I'm curious as to how well graphene filters would do for removing
So why doesn't it (Score:2)
sublime away?
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Quite so. The triple-point of water is at about 273K (0C, 32F) and 612 Pa(0.006atm), Below roughly that temperature water is solid except at even lower pressures.
Meanwhile, Mars' atmospheric pressure at the surface hovers around 600Pa, and noontime temperatures on a tropical summer day on Mars only gets up to ~293K (20C, 68F), meaning most of the time, across most of the surface, Martian water will tend to be solid, though it may sublimate on a warm day, especially in direct sunlight. But it won't take mu
Great story. Glad for the break from politics. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess those pictures of your mother are fake too (Score:2, Funny)
Might make for some good books (Score:2)
Now I'm eager to read some of the next wave of "man on Mars" books from Kim Stanley Robinson and others.
Better late than never (Score:2)
Statement from NASA spokesman Mark Watney [imdb.com], "Now you tell me. If I had known this earlier, I might not have lost my eyebrows."
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It's a matter of terminology. The actual question is "is/was there *liquid* water on Mars" - but water is relatively special in that there are common names for its gaseuos and solid phases, so that "water" often implies "liquid". We've known for a long time that there's water-ice on Mars - the polar icecaps clearly contain both water and CO2. Now we're mapping and characterizing particular deposits that might be of interest to future researchers and colonists.
Mandela Effect... (Score:2)
great. (Score:2)