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Mars Space

Early Morning Frost Spotted On Some of Mars' Huge Mountains (theguardian.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the major-discoveries dept.
Scientists have discovered early morning frost on the summits of Martian volcanoes near the planet's equator, indicating that water ice forms overnight in colder months and evaporates after sunrise. "While the frosty layer is exceptionally thin, it covers an enormous area," reports The Guardian. "Scientists calculate that in the more frigid Martian seasons, 150,000 tons of water, equivalent to 60 Olympic swimming pools, condense daily on the tops of the towering mountains." From the report: "It's the first time we've discovered water frost on the volcano summits and the first time we've discovered water frost in the equatorial regions of Mars," said Adomas Valantinas, a planetary scientist at the University of Berne in Switzerland and Brown University in the US. "What we're seeing could be a trace of a past Martian climate," Valantinas said of the frost-tipped volcanoes. "It could be related to atmospheric climate processes that were operating earlier in Martian history, maybe millions of years ago."

Valantinas spotted the frost-capped volcanoes in high-resolution colour images snapped in the early morning hours on Mars by the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). With colleagues, he confirmed the discovery using a spectrometer on TGO and further images taken by the agency's Mars Express orbiter. The frost appears as a bluish hue on the caldera floors and is absent from well-lit slopes. [...] [W]riting in Nature Geoscience, the researchers describe how Martian winds may blow up the mountainsides and carry more moist air into the calderas where it condenses and settles as frost at particular times of year. Modeling of the process suggests the frost is water ice as the peaks are not cold enough for carbon dioxide frost to form.
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Early Morning Frost Spotted On Some of Mars' Huge Mountains More

Early Morning Frost Spotted On Some of Mars' Huge Mountains

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  • I love how much we're learning about Mars in recent decades. It's fascinating to think that we really could colonize it in our lifetimes.

    • "We" are not even going to send a human in our lifetime, never mind "colonizing it".

    • I love how much we're learning about Mars in recent decades. It's fascinating to think that we really could colonize it in our lifetimes.

      Pretty much every point of land on planet earth that isn't in the middle of an active volcano is more hospitable and sustainable to human life than every point anywhere on Mars. Until we have thriving long-term cities at the poles, on mountains above 14,000 feet, and underwater, we will not have colonies on Mars.

      Sending people to Mars this century would be orders of magnitude LESS safe than, say, sending tourists down to see the wreck of the Titanic.

      • Until we have thriving long-term cities at the poles, on mountains above 14,000 feet, and underwater, we will not have colonies on Mars.

        We already have those cities, give or take 100 miles. What you're talking about isn't cities, it's incredibly expensive and mostly useless science projects. They can't be built as cities because a city a few miles away will outcompete them. We have 0 cities within commuting range of any Mars resources.

        • Until we have thriving long-term cities at the poles, on mountains above 14,000 feet, and underwater, we will not have colonies on Mars.

          We already have those cities, give or take 100 miles. What you're talking about isn't cities, it's incredibly expensive and mostly useless science projects. They can't be built as cities because a city a few miles away will outcompete them. We have 0 cities within commuting range of any Mars resources.

          I would appreciate if you could name the thriving cities we have at the poles, on mountains above 14,000 feet, and underwater.

          Not only do we have 0 cities within commuting range of any Mars resources, we have 0 anything within anything of anything of anything of Mars anything. Hence, there will not be thriving cities on Mars unless significant currently-unknown technology breakthroughs occur to replace each instance of "anything" in the previous sentence.

          I would suggest that you are vastly overconfident in

          • As I said, give or take 100 miles. For example, China is roughly speaking underwater off the shores of Equador, or at least their fishing fleets are. They don't need an actual underwater city for that.

        • We already have those cities, give or take 100 miles.

          Not sure which cities you're talking of within 100km even of either pole, or above 4000m altitude (or, indeed, below -5m altitude). In fact, I don't think there is any city anywhere at an altitude above 2000m altitude [quick check : Lhasa, 3600m altitude, and half a million people qualifies ; it's still got an average atmospheric pressure of 650~670 mbar - 2/3 of sea level pressure, or about 100 times nominal Martian atmospheric pressure. In practical ter

  • It most likely is, in which case so what? We've known that's possible since a bit later than Schiaparelli.

    • Huh? No it isn't CO2 .. very easy to determine the difference multiple ways. The easiest being measure the temperature at which the ice forms and sublimes.

      • There is nothing else to form and sublime in the Martian atmosphere.

        It consists almost entirely of CO2, N2 and some noble gas.

        Everything else is in trace amounts, and it is too hot for N2 to freeze, so quite obvious what it is.

        • Re:Is it carbon dioxide? (Score:4, Informative)

          by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @04:08AM (#64540201)

          Why should I believe you over a team of qualified planetary scientists from reputable universities publishing in reputed peer reviewed journal? https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

          • You can actually read what the people you choose to believe actually write.

            Most of the Martian atmosphere is composed of CO2 gas, and therefore CO2 frost can also form if surface temperatures are low enough30.

            • Re:Is it carbon dioxide? (Score:5, Informative)

              by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @04:34AM (#64540239)

              They state: "The presence of water frost is supported by spectral observations, as well as independent imagery from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. Climate model simulations further suggest that early-morning surface temperatures at the high altitudes of the volcano calderas are sufficiently low to support the daily condensation of water—but not CO2—frost."

              You're just being an ass at this point, lol. Can't even admit you were wrong. That's pretty sad about your character.

              • Yes, the presence of water is supported by spectral observations since the time we've had telescopes pointed at Mars. CO2 ice containing traces of water has also been seen in many places, and that isn't news either.

                What TFA is about, however, is a speculation, as in "climate model simulations".

          • He's a slashdot poster - every indication is that every single slashdot poster is smarter and more competent on any topic - not to mention more able to come up with effective snarky comments - than trained professionals. I would say slashdot is second only to TikTok in that regard.

            • Best reason I've seen to find out how to use TikTok.

              [Doesn't rush away to install it. "best ... yet" =/= "sufficient" when applied to "reason".]

      • The pressure AND TEMPERATURE are of similar importance.

        Don't forget - the entire industry of freeze drying food depends on evaporating water from products at well below the freezing point of water at sea-level pressures. (I've got a table of water's vapour pressure somewhere in my astronomy data files, if you're interested. I recall it took a while to find actual data, but it is industrial and scientific data.)

      • The easiest being measure the temperature at which the ice forms and sublimes.

        Sorry, forgot the other point. The easiest way to measure the composition of the frost is to compare the reflection spectrum of sunlight from the frosted regions, against the same region without the frosting. That's why TFS talks about the spectroscopy.

        The part in TFS about suggesting a rising air current bringing water vapour in from warmer, lower regions is important. They're implying (and obviously, TFP will say so) that the m

  • How are we supposed to do ISRU if there isn't easily accessible water (hydrogen) to make methane using the Sabatier process?

    • Mars is a dump. Why bother? Total waste of time and money that could be used to explore and start working on colonization of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

      • We'll start with the fact that Jupiter and Saturn are much farther away, and that sending a manned expedition to either one will take much more time and require far more supplies for the colonists just to get them there. And, if we're going to try to use solar power as an energy source, there's the nasty little detail that the amount of power available that way goes down as the square of the distance. Much better, probably, to start with a Lunar colony, as the distance is tiny in comparison and although s

  • FTA]

    "It could be related to atmospheric climate processes that were operating earlier in Martian history, maybe millions of years ago."

    I was under the impression that the concensus was that Mars lost most of its atmosphere a billion years ago or more.

    • most

    • As backslashdot says, "most".

      But also - Mars has about 1/10 of the mass of Earth. So, even if it had the same volatiles inventory as Earth initially (a fairly large "if"), it would only have about 1/10th the atmospheric pressure. In reality, it has less than 1/10th of that, supporting the model (it's not a swear word!) that Mars has lost between 90 and 95% of it's initial atmosphere. Which is compatible with it's amount of high-mass inert gases.

      The weasel words in "operating earlier in Martian history, ma

  • Has anyone calculated... (Score:4, Funny)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @04:54AM (#64540267)
    ...how many square metres of frosty rocks Elon would have to lick each morning to stay alive?

    • Given the Martian regolith is saturated with delicious perchlorates.... Zero?

      • saturated with delicious perchlorates

        sshhhh, don't ruin our "test"

      • The Martian regolith, at one point of measurement (Phoenix lander), contains about 1% m/m of perchlorates.

        In other news, a brine with up to 50% w/w perchlorate salts could, under the pressure-temperature conditions at the site, take hours to days to evaporate to dryness in the conditions of crater walls closer to Mars's equator, and at lower altitude (higher pressure).

        Those two do not add up to "a random piece of Martian soil will be saturated (a meaningless concept for physical mixtures) with perchlorate

    • For a frost layer 10 um thick, an area 100 m^2 gives 1 L of ice (a bit less after melting, but this is irrelevant since the frost range thickness is 1-100 um and 10 um is just an average they assumed). Internet says you need 1.5 L of water per day in the Gobi desert (cold desert).

  • I could swear I've seen photos from Mariner 9 or Viking orbiters in the 70's that had such frost there. Are they reinventing discoveries?

    Reminds me of IT fads where youngbies reinvent something from 30 years ago and think they are innovative.

    • I don't think any of the Mariner or Viking orbiters had spectroscopic imagers, which could demonstrate that the frosts they observed were water ice, not dry ice, pixie dust (if anyone has a reference spectrum) or coke (reference spectrum readily available, though I believe GCMS is the preferred analytical method for legal purposes).

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