Martian Atmosphere is Supersaturated with Water Vapor

This article states that a satellite from the esa has found that the atmosphere of the red planet is super saturated with water vapor. The funny thing is that nasa had to have know about this. They discovered it using spectrometry and nasa has defiantly taken a spectrograph of the martian atmosphere.

www.dailygalaxy.com...

From the article:

Although numerous spacecraft have visited Mars over the past half a century, very few direct measurements of the vertical structure of the planet's atmosphere have been made. Since most of the spacecraft instruments have looked down at the surface, it has only been possible to infer the horizontal distribution of gases in the atmosphere, leaving the question of how water vapor is being mixed into the atmosphere almost unexplored.

I think NASA always had it's main focus on finding water in the soil, perhaps falsely assuming that there would be none to find in the atmosphere.

Originally posted by kalunom
From the article:

Although numerous spacecraft have visited Mars over the past half a century, very few direct measurements of the vertical structure of the planet's atmosphere have been made. Since most of the spacecraft instruments have looked down at the surface, it has only been possible to infer the horizontal distribution of gases in the atmosphere, leaving the question of how water vapor is being mixed into the atmosphere almost unexplored.

I think NASA always had it's main focus on finding water in the soil, perhaps falsely assuming that there would be none to find in the atmosphere.

I think that's being quiet naive,nasa would have known about this already without a doubt!

either way this is a monumental finding the implications of what this could mean. I think the odds of life being ether present or present some time in the past has gone up.

Where there's water there is life, Or soon will be.

Watch sooner or later Mars will have breathable pockets of air, "Total Recall" could easily become reality.

I am pretty certain that NASA sponsored research has done at least a FEW spectroscopic imagings of the martian atmosphere. My guess is it was either an inconvenient result, or was considered to be in error for some reason, since we keep hearing the same "water cannot exist on mars except in solid form" over and over.

Originally posted by NewsWorthy
Where there's water there is life, Or soon will be.

Watch sooner or later Mars will have breathable pockets of air, "Total Recall" could easily become reality.

According to Richard Hoagland, Goro Adachi and Holger Isenberg, Mars has atmosphere and NASA has doctored the imagery database of Mars, for obtaining that reddish color.







www.enterprisemission.com...
www.goroadachi.com...
mars-news.de...

Google for Andrew D. Basiaggo and Project Pegasus.

The article is talking about water vapor high in the Martian atmosphere (20-50 km). Where the atmosphere is that thin it does not take a lot of water vapor to supersaturate it. What was surprising was that the vapor was carried that high above the surface without condensing out into clouds of ice.

The discovery does offer an explanation of what became of the seas that Mars apparently had at one time. Rather than forming underground "glaciers", the water may have been broken down by sunlight and escaped into space.

"The data suggest that much more water vapor is being carried high enough in the atmosphere to be affected by photodissociation," added Franck Montmessin, also from LATMOS, who is the Principal Investigator for SPICAM and a co-author of the paper.

"Solar radiation can split the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which can then escape into space. This has implications for the rate at which water has been lost from the planet and for the long-term evolution of the Martian surface and atmosphere."

www.dailygalaxy.com...

The mars global surveyor had a spectrometer. Also microbes can live in very extreme conditions as long as they they have access to the chemicals they use for the basic functions of the organism. High altitude survival would be plausible.

One shouldn’t automatically trust anything one reads on Daily Galaxy. That site specializes in tabloid science.

If you click the links at the bottom of the article, one takes you to the ESA PR office home page (‘ESA Portal’) and the other just opens up a blank page. Typical DG incompetence.

However, this time they seem to be telling the truth

En effet, si plusieurs sondes ont visité Mars depuis les années 70, la plupart de leurs instruments se sont concentrés sur les données de surface : ils ont appréhendé l'atmosphère martienne uniquement dans sa composante horizontale. La question de la concentration en eau en fonction de l'altitude restait donc quasi inexplorée pour Mars. Les relevés effectués par le spectromètre SPICAM (2) embarqué à bord du satellite Mars Express ont aujourd'hui permis de combler cette lacune. En effet, SPICAM peut établir des profils verticaux de l'atmosphère par occultation solaire, c'est-à-dire en scrutant la lumière du Soleil qui traverse l'atmosphère de la planète durant son lever et son coucher.

Contrairement à ce qui était établi, les chercheurs ont découvert que la sursaturation en vapeur d'eau est un phénomène fréquent sur Mars. Ils ont même relevé dans l'atmosphère martienne des niveaux de sursaturation très élevés, jusqu'à plus de dix fois supérieurs à ceux rencontrés sur Terre. Source

Basically, it seems, no-one’s actually looked at the Martian upper atmosphere till now. All probes concentrated their sensors on the surface.

Step by step..... The time is over, NASA.

No big news on Mars (evidence of life) means the death of NASA in few years.
Other smart competitors on the horizon.
S&F.

Originally posted by BriGuyTM90
This article states that a satellite from the esa has found that the atmosphere of the red planet is super saturated with water vapor. The funny thing is that nasa had to have know about this.

Who said NASA didn't know there was water in the Martian atmosphere??

They talked about it, they even graphed it, what more do you want? This is right off a NASA.gov web page:

humbabe.arc.nasa.gov...

Based on spacecraft and Earth-based observations of Mars, we have a good understanding of the annual cycle of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere. The most important source of this water is the north residual polar cap from which large quantities of water vapor sublime during late spring and early summer. The apparent regularity of the cycle allows us to make a model prediction of today's atmospheric water vapor distribution on Mars...

Note that the total amount of water in the atmosphere is very small (measured in precipitable micrometers). If all the water in the Martian atmosphere were to rain out at any given time, it would make a puddle less than a hundredth of a centimeter deep!

A hundredth of a cm eh, I don't even know if I'd call that a puddle.

That page shows separate graphs of the water vapor abundance in the northern hemisphere vs the southern hemisphere, it's quite detailed information.

www-mgcm.arc.nasa.gov...

At the present season -- late northern spring -- there is a nearly uniform distribution of water vapor over the low latitude regions of Mars best observed from Earth. The atmospheric inventory of water should continue to increase for several months as water sublimes off the permanent northern polar ice cap. For more information on Martian water, see the Mars water page.

That illustration shows the water vapor content is not uniform, and it's densest near the pole where the water vapor sublimates. It also varies by season.

This new article is adding to the knowledge about the distribution of the water at different altitudes, specifically at high altitudes. NASA knew a lot about water in the Martian atmosphere before this, but we can always learn more.

Martian water means these are really trees!

www.msss.com...

Martian water means these are really lakes!

ida.wr.usgs.gov...

Originally posted by Heyyo_yoyo
Martian water means these are really trees!

www.msss.com...

Martian water means these are really lakes!

ida.wr.usgs.gov...

edit on 1-10-2011 by Heyyo_yoyo because: (no reason given)

And Martian Methane means there is life!

Methane can also be produced by early internal pressure and heating of carbon in planetary rock. As most of the methane seepage is around the Mars equator seasonally, it also is rather constant. Water vapor 50 km above the surface 10,000 times less than earth doesn't suggest any kind of life.

Martian methane could be produced geochemically, without the need for life. The building blocks of methane (carbon and hydrogen) exist in different forms, called isotopes, that differ in mass. Geochemistry isn't picky and will use whatever isotopes it finds to make methane. Life, however, prefers to consume lighter isotopes. There are in general two ways to detect isotopic abundances. The first involves a mass spectrometer, which separates the different isotopes using electric and magnetic fields. Although great for a lab, a mass spectrometer sensitive enough to detect a biological signal in martian methane would be too large for a rover.

The alternative is to use an optical spectrometer, which measures the frequencies at which a gas absorbs light. These so-called resonant frequencies depend on which isotopes make up the molecules in the gas. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) launched this year by NASA, will carry such an optical spectrometer (the Tunable Laser Spectrometer, or TLS). This device may be able to measure the carbon isotope ratio in martian methane, but may not unequivocally determine whether life or geology is the source of Martian methane.


I'm also curious, as to what benefit NASA would gain by NOT releasing any known findings of Martian atmospheric water vapor. The accusations that NASA has anything to gain by not disclosing all of the scientific data they observe on extraterrestrial bodies really puzzles me. The finger pointing is so immature.

Originally posted by 1AnunnakiBastard
According to Richard Hoagland, Goro Adachi and Holger Isenberg, Mars has atmosphere and NASA has doctored the imagery database of Mars, for obtaining that reddish color.

According to all people that looked at Mars (even just at Mars photos), Mars has atmosphere, if it didn't how could there be dust storms and clouds?

Originally posted by Heyyo_yoyo
Martian water means these are really trees!

www.msss.com...

No, it doesn't.
Also, for those to be trees, they would need to have some height, but they are just ground features, with no noticeable third dimension.

Martian water means these are really lakes!

ida.wr.usgs.gov...

No, and if you look more at those photos you will see that they are, at most, inverted frozen lakes.

A long time ago when I was working on an aerospace engineering project for a class paper, I chose to work on some design calculations for a solar powered Martian aircraft. The information we had and I believe hasn't changed included the equivalent atmospheric pressure at ground level on Mars to be about the same as 100,000 feet on the Earth. As you go up the pressure would drop of course. Most of the clouds on Earth we see are below 50,000 feet. It wouldn't take a lot of water vapor to saturate the very thin atmosphere of Mars especially at higher elevations in my opinion. That also means there's not a lot of water volume to extract from that very thin atmosphere.

methane water every one always argues life no life on mars why is it no one sees the SMOKING GUN>
there is one element in mars air THAT can not be created by chemical means and would have been going LONG agaio if it wasn't renewed ,
Theres only ONE natrial way we know of to get oxygen starting with co2 a plant can take taht and split it into carbon and oxygen .
there is free oxygen in mars air the ONLY way it can be there that we know of is with plants .
Being mars is darn near dead the plants would probably be mosses or algae.
matter of fact even at the start mars would have had NO oxygen if you look at earths early history it did not .
methane argon ammonia co2 were the main elements . earth did not get oxygen UNTILL the first life forms started using CO2 .
mars probly had the same start as earth did .On a cosmic scale mars may as well be earths preme twin .
So mars MUST have like to have free oxygen as oxygen combins with darn near every thing and if isnt renewed would quickly even be going on earth as it turned to CO@ and iron oxide and a thousand other molicues

Most of you have seen this already, but here is what the Martian clouds look like from the ground (Phoenix lander).



I would be very surprised if we didn't find extremophiles under the martian surface. Maybe the new MSL lander can answer some questions next year, but I wish we could put boots on the ground there to investigate. The first man/woman to land on Mars may already be alive today.