Pure Water found on Mars

Pretty cool, makes for sustainable manned missions to Mars!

www.foxnews.com...

Water Ice Exposed in Mars Craters
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Andrea Thompson

Craters gouged into the ruddy Martian terrain have revealed subsurface water ice closer to the red planet's equator than would be expected, new orbiter images show.

The ice also seems to be 99 percent pure, instead of the dirty dust and ice mixture some scientists expected to see, scientists said today.

And while numerous surface features on Mars suggest that water once flowed on the red planet in the past, the new discovery - detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science - adds to the evidence that has been piling up in recent years that water exists on present-day Mars, in the form of subsurface ice. It also gives scientists a way to further probe the Martian surface for signs of water ice.

Because water is essential to life as we know it, any findings of potentially once-liquid water has implications for the search for evidence of possible past Martian life.

The new finding comes just one day after scientists announced new evidence for water ice on Earth's moon....

Rest of the story at link



[edit on 24-9-2009 by Dbriefed]

kind of scary that meteors are crashing into Mars all the time (its what led to this find), but I say we send the next probe to these craters. too bad I didnt see any cool new pictures of Mars like the blue/green moon pics. They said the part of the crater with the water was blue, so no need to change the colour now guys!

reply to post by Totalstranger

They didn't. This image has been available for a long time.
apod.nasa.gov...
Here's a better quality version
www.astro.virginia.edu...

reply to post by Phage






Hey it's news to Fox people.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

reply to post by SLAYER69

Actually, what the article is about is fairly new information. But that there is water on Mars is not. Nor is the fact that the ice is blue(ish).

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by Totalstranger

 

They didn't. This image has been available for a long time.
apod.nasa.gov...
Here's a better quality version
www.astro.virginia.edu...

cool. I also found some pics on New Scientist. Obviously I knew about the water, but the only pics I had seen were the poles and the ice in the rovers treads. Now lets release it Total Recall style and terraform this mother!!

First and foremost -- cool find.

BUT...I've been reading all about water on the moon and now Mars, and it seems to me that the very first thing we humans say is "Yeah! Now we can go explore and use the water that's already there!"

Now, I would like space exploration to continue don't get me wrong. But I just can't escape the feeling that, once again, we are setting out to destroy yet another planet. (and moon)

I think it's painfully obvious we have YET to learn our lesson. Of course, i thought that when I found out that NASA was bombing the moon....

I think that we as a WORLD should learn that you can actually get ahead without destroying everything in your path.

Sorry....just my 2 cents.

Why do I get the feeling that water is very abundant out there? And if my feeling is correct, you know what that could mean!!!

We do live in exciting times indeed.

That is what's interesting. Imagine that water is a common substance throughout the Universe.

Not just damp soil, or traces of frost, but pure water at or just below the surface.

[edit on 24-9-2009 by Dbriefed]

reply to post by impaired

Water is very abundant. Water vapor and water ice are all over the place. Liquid water is harder to come by.

reply to post by Dbriefed


You forgot just one word, "frozen".

Because water is essential to life as we know it, any findings of potentially once-liquid water has implications for the search for evidence of possible past Martian life.

I thought we were talking about the Moon.

reply to post by patmac


Why did you think that? Did you misread the thread title?

The fact we can find water on both the Moon and Mars relatively easily means:

1) A better chance Moon and Mars habitation (humans need water to survive) and means you can extract liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for rocket fuel for a return trip from both places.

2) Near 100% certainly we'll find primitive lifeforms on Mars and a small chance we might even find primitive lifeforms deep in the lunar soil.

Originally posted by ArMaP
You forgot just one word, "frozen".

Hi Armap. I think you also forgot to add 'mostly/overwhelmingly' as that is where our best current evidence seems to be leading.....

Having said that i have in the past pointed out the 'mud' ( as have others) that the rovers have left in their wake as well as the now numerous studies and official data that indicates that water can and do exist at some latitudes and depths...

You remember this one?

"One of the science team members, geologist John Grotzinger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the Magic Carpet was intriguing because it showed that the soil in the area wasn't necessarily brittle but was capable of a "plastic sort of deformation." He and fellow geologist Michael Malin acknowledged that the scraping looked like mud in low-resolution imagery. But they insisted that dry, fine-grained soil could exhibit the same quality."

www.msnbc.msn.com...

So it can look like mud but it just can't be because we simply can not, apparently, trust our eyes and instruments when it comes to Mars....

Hellas Impact Basin
The depth of the crater (6 to 7 km[1] (3.7 to 4.3 miles) below the topographic datum, or "sea level" of Mars) explains the atmospheric pressure at the bottom: 1155 Pa[1] (11.55 mbar) (.34375 InHG). This is 89% higher than the pressure at the topographical datum (610 Pa, or 6.1 mbar or .18 InHG). The pressure is high enough that water is speculated to be present in its liquid phase at temperatures slightly above 0 ?C (32 F).

en.wikipedia.org...

"There's a subtlety between having every reason to believe [water] is there and having this higher level of certainty," said Bruce Jakosky, a professor of geological science at the University of Colorado, and the director of the university's center for astrobiology.

"We now know pretty convincingly that there is liquid water on Mars, and that it's relatively accessible near the surface," he said.

www.space.com...

"I have also seen liquid water running from snow melting on dark rocks heated by sunlight in Antarctica, even though the air temperature was below -20 °C."

There are many places on Earth where liquid water and ice co-exist in sub-zero conditions, says Hoover. The most famous example is Lake Vostok, an expanse of water roughly the size of lake Ontario lying 4 km beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet acts as a blanket, shielding the lake from Mars-like temperatures at the surface.

Will explorers one day discover oases like Lake Vostok beneath icy terrain on Mars? No one knows. But instead of "Follow the Water," the mantra of future colonists on the red planet might well be "Follow the Salt."

science.nasa.gov...

A team of researchers from the University of Arkansas has measured water evaporation rates under Mars-like conditions, and their findings favor the presence of surface water on the planet. Water on the planet's surface makes the existence of past or present life on Mars a little more likely, according to the group.

Derek Sears, director of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, and his colleagues graduate student Shauntae Moore and technician Mikhail Kareev reported their initial findings at the fall 2003 meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the AAS.

The researchers have brought on-line a large planetary environmental chamber in which temperature, pressure, atmosphere, sunlight and soil conditions can be reproduced. Sears and his colleagues use the chamber to investigate the persistence of water under a range of physical environments and to study its evaporation.

"These findings suggest that even under worst case scenarios, where wind is maximizing evaporation, evaporation rates on Mars are quite low," Sears said. This implies that surface water could indeed exist, or have existed recently, under the given conditions on Mars.

www.spaceref.com...

On Mars the globally-averaged surface pressure of the planet's atmosphere is only slightly less than 6.1 millibars.

"That's the average," says Haberle, "so some places will have pressures that are higher than 6.1 millibars and others will be lower. If we look at sites on Mars where the pressure is a bit higher, that's where water can theoretically exist as a liquid."

science.msfc.nasa.gov...

And as you know i have a few more that i have chosen not to bore you with, again, today. Liquid water exists on Mars today and in a few years time it will, as in the past and so many other terrestrial discoveries, be accepted as 'obvious' and not worth discussion. What should really be debated is how much standing water there is on Mars today and whether we in fact have large lakes, small oceans, or just a few rivers and such.

Luckily i have time on my side ( 29) so if this site lasts that long we will have some admissions coming up in the next decade that will upset quit a few deceived and misinformed minds.

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX
Having said that i have in the past pointed out the 'mud' ( as have others) that the rovers have left in their wake as well as the now numerous studies and official data that indicates that water can and do exist at some latitudes and depths...

I am still waiting for a photo that shows something that can only be explained as mud, as far as I have seen there is only dry soil, like the one in which Spirit is stuck since May.

In this animation (done by a member of another forum) we can see how the soil reacts to the pressure done by the RAT, although dry it reacts in a way that reminds me of sand soaked in water, it moves more to the sides than up when pushed by the RAT.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/8827e19003925a4b.gif[/atsimg]

Luckily i have time on my side (29) so if this site lasts that long we will have some admissions coming up in the next decade that will upset quit a few deceived and misinformed minds.

I have less time, but I hope to see that type of discovery, it looks like they (NASA) finally are starting to understand that the time of geology only missions is over.

Related:

New impact craters at five sites in the martian mid-latitudes excavated material from depths of decimeters that has a brightness and color indicative of water ice. Near-infrared spectra of the largest example confirm this composition, and repeated imaging showed fading over several months, as expected for sublimating ice. Thermal models of one site show that millimeters of sublimation occurred during this fading period, indicating clean ice rather than ice in soil pores. Our derived ice-table depths are consistent with models using higher long-term average atmospheric water vapor content than present values. Craters at most of these sites may have excavated completely through this clean ice, probing the ice table to previously unsampled depths of meters and revealing substantial heterogeneity in the vertical distribution of the ice itself. www.sciencemag.org...

And:

Mars has quite a bit more water than previously thought, according to a new report in the journal Science. NASA said its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted ice at five new Martian craters, likely kicked up by meteor impacts [Reuters]. It’s no surprise that the NASA orbiter found water, it’s the size of the find—twice as much as in Greenland’s ice sheet—that surprised scientists. The ice is just under the surface, so it was only visible after the recent meteor impacts.

The ice was found half way between the north pole and the equator, which is the farthest south ice has been found on Mars. Scientists believe that water once flowed across the planet, but most thought the surface had been largely dry and parched, with planet-wide dust storms, for billions of years. They had long known that water ice and carbon dioxide ice accumulated at the poles in winter, but until now, they had no idea how far from the poles the underground ice sheet extended [Los Angeles Times].blogs.discovermagazine.com...

Image: www.nasa.gov...

reply to post by Phage


What are the odds of present dormant or active extremophiles such as the ones found on earth ice sheets (I believe in Antarctica) being present?

Some photos that show the impacts, at full resolution (around 25 cm per pixel).

HiRISE photo PSP_010861_2265
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/a85917d989f43185.jpg[/atsimg]

HiRISE photo ESP_011494_2265
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/9313529e8c46f814.jpg[/atsimg]

HiRISE photo PSP_010585_2255
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/a38aa99ca2760a73.jpg[/atsimg]

They remind me of the Dry Valleys in the Antarctica.

Wow. those first two pictures look like the water flash froze in mid-splash!!!

Cool pictures ArMaP