There's News From Mars Too

I don't think there was any conspiracy to hold moon data back

though, is a last minute mars event held immediately after a planned moon event a strange coincidence

"If the Viking lander (1976) had dug a few more inches (it dug 4-6 inches, so if it had dug a foot) it would have found solid water ice"

Holy shit. That is the most profound statement of the whole thing. The god damn Viking probe almost killed the whole program because it said there was no water.

RC, this has happened before, I think this sort of competition is good, really. Trying to find the audio recording, NASAs site isn't very good at directing you to archives. Guess I'll call the telecon archive line...

What modifications will be done to the MSL to take advantage of these findings?

There should not bee too many modifications that need to be done to send it to the lunar polar regions.

:)

Really great news. This, coupled with very probable residual geothermal activity, has just increased the possibility of life by several orders of magnitude and a follow-on MSL-2 mission. I was really getting worried with the endless pictures of red dunes and very limited attention span from the public.

@adam: my two cents would be figuring out how to put a lightweight drill capable of drilling deep and taking samples from various depths and, with some luck, even hitting an acquifer. At this stage I don't think it's possible on MSL without a major (and costly) redesign at a time costs are already way over the limit, but definitively an MSL-2 mission.

Time to invent deeper space drills.

How is this new relative to last year's news of exposed ice in small, recent Martian impact craters?

> What modifications will be done to the MSL to take advantage of these findings?

Really? After all the MSL-bashing that goes on in the commentary on Nasawatch?

Modifications to MSL would up the cost considerably, especially if one had to add the ability to dig down to some ice (like Phoenix did).

The current design is to go to a landing site between about 27-deg North and 27-deg South, which is too close to the equator for this ice to be present. They have 4 landing sites being considered, and each one addresses questions about water and environments that existed on Mars long, long ago, as opposed to addressing the Mars that Phoenix and today's story address, which is the Mars of now and the very, very recent past.

To address today's new Mars results, you'd need to design a mission focused on that topic, and find someone to pay for it.

A key point here is that this ice was found at mid-latitudes. It's been known for a while that there was ice at the poles, but this finding suggests significant water beneath the Martian crust in much wider areas. It bodes well for eventual human exploration if ice is below the surface in areas other than the poles.

What I also find interesting is that the spacecraft has observed five impact events that had enough energy to create craters deep enough to be seen from space. Any info on the size of the impact objects?

aubskibob, Viking orbiters found water vapor over the poles and "summer ice caps" were definitively decided to be water ice. Wasn't Mars exploration kinda shafted due to the whole STS program?

adam, no clue, maybe choosing a different landing spot, somewhere closer to these impact craters?

Water litters the entire Solar System. What does this portend? The realization that the stuff of life-and life itself-is common throughout the Milky Way. This is the beginning of the end of the myth of human centrisim, of our limited view of everything through the filter of human eyes alone. We are but one species on one small planet in a galaxy filled with life-billions of Earth-like planets with intelligent advanced life, IMHO. All of this should humble us and make us value our home world-fragile as it is-even more, and help prepare us to become a true spacefaring species-a future multi-planet species. Perhaps not us, not our children-but our grandchildren? Ad Astra per Aspera!!!

"A key point here is that this ice was found at mid-latitudes. It's been known for a while that there was ice at the poles, but this finding suggests significant water beneath the Martian crust in much wider areas. It bodes well for eventual human exploration if ice is below the surface in areas other than the poles."

Actually, this is all consistent with what's been known from the Odyssey orbiter neutron data from circa 2002, and also from simple thermal / vapor diffusion models. Both suggest water at increasing (few cm to meters) depth from the high into the mid latitudes. It's a nice "second-method" verification of stuff that's been known for a while.

"What modifications will be done to the MSL to take advantage of these findings?"

Hmm, gonna go with "nothing" for two reasons. First, MSL was designed to go after the geochemistry and geology of ancient sedimentary deposits that might be possible sites for retention of bio-signatures of early life. This has no baring on that. Second, what ya gonna do - prove the white stuff is actually, yes, water, just like the images, thermal models, thermal data, spectroscopy, and neutron data say it is?

@Lowly Contractor

>This, coupled with very probable residual geothermal activity,

Huh? What geothermal activity? What Mars have you been looking at? Not the one Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and Mars Recon Orbiter have been looking at.

@GoMarsGo!

>How is this new relative to last year's news of exposed ice in small, recent Martian impact craters?

This *is* last year's news of exposed ice in small, recent Martian impact craters.

The finding was reported in a talk at the Fall AGU meeting in December 2008, and again at the Lunar and Planetary Conference in March 2009.

But it takes a while to get all the analysis done, get the paper written, and get it through the peer-review process. And it would have taken even longer if it was sent to a "lesser" journal than SCIENCE (with a few exceptions).

Some scientists choose to tell their story at conferences before the work is completed and submitted for publication. That was the case here. Other scientists choose to hold off on talking about a result until the paper is submitted or even until it is published, if you're going to one of the two journals that the newsmedia pay any attention to (Science and Nature, which have embargoes).

@ Thomas Matula

> I also find interesting is that the spacecraft has observed five impact events that had enough energy to create craters deep enough to be seen from space.

Not just 5. The NASA/JPL press release says they have found over 100. Only 5 of the 100 had ice when they were imaged by the CTX, HiRISE and CRISM.

The first ones were found by Mars Global Surveyor and reported in Dec 2006... the paper about those craters, and some papers that others wrote afterwards, address the issues of the size of the meteors (a few inches to tens of inches in most cases) and size of the "explosions" and so forth.

@ Mark

> this is all consistent with what's been known from the Odyssey orbiter neutron data from circa 2002, and also from simple thermal / vapor diffusion models.

Actually, where 4 of these 5 craters occur are areas where the hydrogen in this ice cold not be detected by the neutron instruments on Odyssey. They ar farther south than the area where the ice was thought to be. This is one of the reasons the MRO team found these ice exposures to be so surprising and had to work out their own models to understand what is going on. So, this is really not a verification of something people already thought they knew. Well, unless you consider that some of these ice exposures were in terrain that has arctic-like polygons... but the question about these polygons that has been around since Viking 2 landed among some of them is whether they are relicts of an earlier time when there was more ice, and that the ice is gone today, or whether the ice is still there. Ta-da, it is still there. Cool.

Regarding MSL, another thing to keep in mind is the notion of "special regions". MSL was classified as a spacecraft that will not be cleaned and sterilized *enough* to be permitted to go to a place that has abundant water, whether in liquid or solid form -- so mid-latitutude gullies are not permitted, nor are shallow deposits of ground ice like what this week's story is about. The classification of MSL according to cleanliness and planetary protection was a matter of cost ... the cost to be clean enough to go to a "special region" was too prohibitive, and this was determined long before all the cost over-runs took place.

Glaciers and frozen seas versus a molecule-thin veneer. Go where the water is.

@J05H:

Why make a choice?
Just plan to go to both destinations and go for the sake of going regardless of what the data suggests is there.

...I say this because of the fact there aren't very many places to go that we can reach in space. So to say one destination is superior to another (when there are only two, maybe three, options) is silly.
If we had conducted a proper exploration of Mars and the Moon, as initially planned, we would now know the truth about water resources at both destinations.

Its not like even if we knew for sure there was water, they would send an astronaut out with an empty canteen depending on it. Nothing changes so far as the difficulty.

>>This *is* last year's news of exposed ice in small, recent Martian impact craters.

So why was it circulated the exact same day when the news about lunar water were announced ??

>> So why was it circulated the exact same day when the news about lunar water were announced ??

Because the paper was published in Science, and so in both cases there was an embargo until Thursday. End of story.

@reader: It was circulated the same day as the lunar water results since the two were published in the same issue of Science magazine that came out today.

@ reader
> >>This *is* last year's news of exposed ice in small, recent Martian impact craters.
> So why was it circulated the exact same day when the news about lunar water were announced ??

Coincidence.

Well, maybe not-- that would depend entirely on choices made by the editors of SCIENCE, nothing more, nothing less. NASA and the authors of the papers had nothing to do with the coincidence.

The stories were not actually published in the same magazine at the same time, though. The Mars paper was published in the 25 Sept 2009 issue of the Magazine. The Lunar papers were published in "Science Express" which provides early publication -- those papers won't be in the hardcopy magazine for several more weeks, probably a month from now.

Glaciers and frozen seas versus a molecule-thin veneer. Go where the water is.

There is no problem going to Mars vs the Moon, just fork over 10x the money.

You should write a check.

The amount of material you need to process to get water isn't really that bad if you have water recycling - assuming you're using the water for humans.

Besides, isn't this produced daily? If you processed material and dumped it back on the ground, should it have more water the next lunar day?

So, they found ice! Hoorah! One more place to screw up! I wonder if the water (read: ice) is a non renewable resource?

Doesn't this make a bit of a mockery of Phoenix? After a few months work it was annoucned that yes, there very possibly maybe might be some ice around. Perhaps.
Now an orbiting probe shows that actually there is quite a bit and has a photo to prove it.

It's great news and it'll be interesting to see how various politicans react.

Mockery of Phoenix?

Didn't Phoenix land on ice, dig some up, and then spot liquid water on its leg?

Also I believe one of the current rovers saw ice form in its tracks. The only really news is that its found at lower latitudes.

But what this also does is makes any construction on Mars much more difficult. Think of the problems of permafrost in the Arctic. The current landers are at least two small and generate too little heat for it to be a problem, but that won't be the case for modules for a human base. Imagine a habitat placed over a layer of liquid water melting it from waster heat and tipping over. Or the greenhouse for growing food sinking into the ground. It also adds to the problems of tunneling underground to shield humans from solar radiation.

Not show stoppers, but one more challenge for human habitats on Mars.

"But what this also does is makes any construction on Mars much more difficult."
Posted by: Thomas Matula

Good point! Have you ever flown into Minneapolis in February? Think about Mars like Minnesota...how do you spot the 10,000 lakes when everything is covered by a fresh blanket of snow? Easy...follow the tree lines.
But Mars doesn't have trees, so we have to figure out another way to find and map the 10,000 lakes lest we inadvertantly attempt to build or land on one.

"This is the beginning of the end of the myth of human centrisim..."
Posted by: Frank Sietzen

Frank, you reminded me of Star Trek's Quark when he complained about the Federation being a "homo-sapiens only" club. We "hew-mons" are but one species.

This news isn't changing anything for the general public, sorry to say. Even if they suddenly started showing things from Enterprisemission.com, with today's photo technology people would conclude that it was a lame attempt by NASA to attempt to wrest more funding from the taxpayers.

It would be interesting to look at "The Day The Earth Stood Still" with today's politically polarized light. Would the news of a decidedly alien craft landing on the White House lawn bring calls of "liberal conspiracy" from the conservative pundits? "What a coincidence to happen during a Democratic administration", they would rail.

I'd give it two news cycles at most...