Water seems to flow freely on Mars

http://www.nature.com/news/water-seems-to-flow-freely-on-mars-1.14343?

by cryptoz • 13 years ago

275 161 13 years ago

nature.com

Nicholas_C• 13 years ago

Oh how I wish Mars had a thicker atmosphere.

throwaway_yy2Di2• 13 years ago

You'll love this!

http://wikitravel.org/en/South_Pole

Rocks, water ice, and a thick atmosphere with oxygen. For only 0.00001% the price of a Mars vacation.

throwaway_yy2Di2• 13 years ago

I'm half joking, but I'm worried someone will try to sell spaceplane trips to some inhospitable alien desert like Namibia and market it as "the interplanetary experience"...

edit: Actually that could be interesting..

GotAnyMegadeth• 13 years ago

"Drink

As the Pole is entirely covered by a massive ice sheet, those with the ability to melt ice should not worry about lack of water."

a1a• 13 years ago

Some time and funds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars.

I strongly suggest we start a kickstarter.

yawz• 13 years ago

You've my 10 bucks.

stefantalpalaru• 13 years ago

This link (without the trailing '?') was submitted 5 days ago and it was ignored: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884527

jds375• 13 years ago

So, how legitimate is this claim? I feel like we hear about this all of the time, only to be disappointed later after further analysis.

rlpb2• 13 years ago

As far as I can tell, this is not a claim at all. It is an observed phenomenon, for which the presence of water is one possible explanation.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

As far as I can see, shadows being the other one. Depending on the time of day / position of the sun of course, so it should be easy enough to rule that one out.

cygwin986• 13 years ago

Why not send a drone plane together with the Curiosity? It sounds more efficient doing exploration from sky than land. I get that the weather could be a problem. Anyway, just food for thought.

ortusdux• 13 years ago

Not enough atmosphere to generate lift. Same reason we can't fly satellites into orbit.

artmageddon2• 13 years ago

Silly question, but why is it that we can't fly a satellite into the orbit of Mars? What is it about the space 300 miles up from Earth that differs from Mars? (unless we also want to discuss geosynchronous orbit)

Edit: I should have written "launch" a satellite into Orbit from Earth to Mars

cygwin986• 13 years ago

The pressure on the surface of Mars (0.6 kilopascals or 0.087 psi) is about one tenth of the pressure at the height of 20KM from surface of Earth (Armstrong limit 6.25 kilopascals or 0.906 psi). Of course, the structure of the "Martian" plane has to be designed accordingly. But definitely not impossible though.

eudox• 13 years ago

Why not a drone dirigible?

el_zorro5• 13 years ago

A drone plane has been considered, although the technical feasibility isn't really there. Mars has less than 1% of the atmospheric pressure that Earth does, so a drone would have to fly very fast to get to proper lift. This comes at a high energy cost, which would be hard to provide in a lightweight package. Additionally, the plane would have to land at night and do so autonomously.

Even if all of this was achieved (and it is by no means impossible), the drone wouldn't really provide more data than the satellites in orbit already do. Aerial survey is pretty much taken care of, what is needed are actual samples of minerals on the ground.

However, if people were able to go to Mars, some sort of drone would be ideal for real-time surveys and control. The explorers would be able to recharge the drone at will so power isn't too much of an issue. There are ideas floating around that talk about a drone that kind of acts like a grasshopper: it takes in Martian atmosphere, and uses it to 'jump' around the surface. It then lands and takes samples, and recharges its energy for the next hop.

amelim• 13 years ago

I believe that most UAV designs for extra-terrestrial missions are designed around the use of airships rather than more traditional airplane or quadrotor designs. An example of initial research in the area is the Titan Aerobot [1]

[1] https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/research/facilitie...

cygwin986• 13 years ago

Thanks for the detailed explanation, very informative. Could a big Zeppelin-like airship filled with hydrogen make more sense on Mars?

kyork• 13 years ago

They had a mission to do so, but it was cancelled. http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/

The video of the drop test is pretty neat.

pantalaimon• 13 years ago

You will enjoy this what-if

http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

cygwin986• 13 years ago

Thanks. A surprisingly fun read. It does get me interested in Venus, which is like a twin of Earth except the hellish atmosphere.

drcode• 13 years ago

I know this is an unpopular opinion here but:

NASA needs to stop milking the "water on mars" thing. Every few months it seems their PR department lazily says to themselves "Hey! let's do another water on mars story!" (I know, NASA doesn't do PR and these are just completely objective releases of scientific papers... believe what you will.)

I hope within my lifetime we have some disruption in this space and NASA stops constantly taking blatant advantage of its near monopoly on space exploration.

krapp• 13 years ago

How would a private company "milking" science be any better?

Havoc3• 13 years ago

NASA needs to stop milking the "water on mars" thing.

Perhaps. I'm inclined to cut NASA some slack though - they are in a tricky catch 22 position: To get spectacular results they need funding and to get funding they need spectacular results. So I'm all for them milking whatever seems viable.

its near monopoly on space exploration.

When it comes to space exploration I tend to agree with Nike & their slogan. I really don't care whether the US or the Chinese does it as long as someone acts. Same thing with costs...humanity as a whole needs to get off this rock to have any hope of long term survival. If it takes X billion USD...who cares? Raise some notional debt ceiling if you must...

genwin2• 13 years ago

humanity as a whole needs to get off this rock to have any hope of long term survival

Or, people could have <= 2 kids on average. Seems more achievable to me than terraforming another planet.

Crito13• 13 years ago

It is highly uncontroversial that there is water on Mars. NASA does press releases for the discoveries they make in general, the "Mars/water" stories are not really given special treatment by NASA above and beyond their other interesting stories.

The difference is the media and general public, who for some bizarre reason have decided to cling to the idea that there is no water on Mars but NASA is desperately trying to find it. Therefore, whenever NASA talks about water and Mars they all go ape-shit, like when a university announces that a drug one of their researchers is working on that is suppose to slow the growth of one particular type of cancer completes one stage of animal testing.

Complain about the people that are actually the problem here.

kamakazizuru4• 13 years ago

I think they put out regular press releases of anything interesting they find. HN just has a taste for certain types of articles is all..

mikro2nd• 13 years ago

I hope within my lifetime we have some disruption in this space and NASA stops constantly taking blatant advantage of its near monopoly on space exploration.

I think that with Mangalyaan well on its way to Mars we can probably - barring a mission-crippling accident - say that the disruption is in progress.

jboggan2• 13 years ago

Is anyone else tired of hearing about the dangers of interplanetary contamination, particularly from the Earth to Mars? I want to see the whole place terraformed and I can't imagine that we'd be so successful in our lifetimes that we'd wipe out whatever scientifically interesting traces of extant Martian flora there are. Whether or not there was life on Mars is a fascinating question, but I think the more important one is when will we expand life on Mars?

kamakazizuru4• 13 years ago

right, this is pretty much the attitude with which colonial powers approached new continents. The universe was not built for humans alone - if there is life there - which in its current form is unable to protect itself - it is our duty to protect it and leave it untouched - not kill it in hordes and put the remaining few in reserves and allow them to open casinos as a consolation prize.

EDIT: On the other hand - if it is life that can protect itself - i.e. - attack human explorers or cause unintentional harm to them - then we also need to be able to understand that in an isolated environment before we just touchdown and put up our IKEA stuff..

mattzito• 13 years ago

Though if we do put martian bacteria in reservations en masse, I call dibs on teaching them how craps works.

JoeAltmaier5• 13 years ago

We're not talking indigenous tribes here; its maybe some (unsuccessful) bacteria. You willfully destroy these every time you use mouthwash.

Lets not get all PC about some stains on some dirt on a rock somewhere.

tomp• 13 years ago

I agree 100% with you, but it would be pretty embarrassing for top NASA scientists to report they have "found life on mars", only to later realize that it was life that the spacecraft brought from earth...

Better to decontaminate the spacecraft, have it take samples/perform measurements, then it can open a can of "life-from-earth" microbes and release them to the Mars surface.

pron• 13 years ago

Why terraform, then? Why not mine the hell out of the place right away? Are you really in such a hurry to get off this planet? Isn't it much more important to learn a bit about the world before we start shaping it in our image?

angersock2• 13 years ago

"Isn't it much more important to learn a bit about the world before we start shaping it in our image?"

Gonna have to go with, no.

There are over 6 billion monkeys on this planet, and the clock is ticking on what's left of our resources. Either we move some of the monkeys, or we remove some of the monkeys.

Crito13• 13 years ago

We basically have one shot, per body in the solar system, to find an example of life with an independent abiogenesis point. Right now biology only gets to work with a single example; the impact that finding another would have on the field really cannot be understated^W overstated.

Now, you may not be particularly interested in biology, preferring space travel, but you should be. Any realistic attempt to terraform Mars will require a lot of skill with genetic engineering. Furthermore, the discovery of life that can only be properly studied on Mars would provide a major boost to any colonization effort. The more 'kinds of science we use to justify the initial expenditure, the better.

danielweber• 13 years ago

The one shot for Mars may have been missed, millennia ago, when rocks blasted from Earth landed on Mars.

On the geologic scale things get knocked around a lot.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

You're both right. Yes, we should check very carefully, but as you point out we have more than one body to play with. We should have a clearly defined cutoff point at which we stop looking for something that may not be there in the first place and do other things instead. Otherwise we're never going to get off the planet.

As these things go, Mars is far less interesting to me than Europa. That moon of Jupiter seems to have massive amounts of liquid water, geysers, ice quakes and plate tectonics, (presumably due to) tidal forces from Jupiter, and a thin oxygen atmosphere. Along with Saturn's moon Enceladus, it's the most promising place to look for other forms of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_(moon)

pavelrub4• 13 years ago

That's just begging the question. The whole point here is that we shouldn't need "science" to somehow "justify" the colonization of Mars. Saying that it's a good thing because it "justifies" expenditure, is like saying that it was good for Hitler to continue WW2 because that's what incentivised the US to invade Europe: pragmatically it's correct, but pragmatism is really not what's debated here.

Personally I would like to see the priorities of "colonization vs science" reversed.

jboggan2• 13 years ago

There's no reason to assume that we are currently working with a single independent abiogenesis point on this planet, that is one plausible hypothesis among many and not one I particularly favor.

I am particularly interested in biology, enough to know that the chances of an Earth-adapted microbe or lichen running roughshod over any Mars-adapted life are roughly on the order of the LHC spawning a black hole when it was switched on. Analogies to organisms crossing between the continents and human populations of Earth (which you have not made but several posters have) are incredibly far off the mark. Whatever life has tenuously held to Mars, if it exists, will not be disturbed by our minuscule presence, and it will be sufficiently novel at the biochemical and sequence (will it even have sequences?) level to be readily recognizable, even if it is cultured from the 22nd equivalent of a Starbucks parking lot on Olympus Mons.

nicholas73• 13 years ago

I'd prefer the safe approach be taken as well, but I imagine even if there were contamination we would still be able to identify original Martian life by DNA or whatever.

simias• 13 years ago

Before we terraform the planet don't you think it might be interesting to learn about martian history before it cannot be recovered?

If you dig the foundation of a parking lot and you find the vestiges of an ancient civilisation don't you take the time to study what you've found before your send the steamrollers in?

Xdes• 13 years ago

No, you usually just steamroll the dirt.

pavelrub4• 13 years ago

I think we will learn MUCH quicker and MUCH more and about the history of Mars once we'll get serious about colonizing it, and not "exploring" it at the the crawling pace it's currently happening at.

mongol2• 13 years ago

Why the hurry? Let's explore it for 100 years before terraforming it. I am not tired of it all, it is much more valuable to figure out what is there first before changing it.

EDIT. Terraforming it in a hurry feels like building a shopping mall on top of the remains of an ancient civilization before it has been properly researched

billmalarky• 13 years ago

There is a strong argument to be made that there is a deadline at some point where we will need to have colonized other planets before we extinct ourselves through war.

Though sadly interplanetary warfare seems much easier than extraterrestrial colonization.

coldtea• 13 years ago

but I think the more important one is when will we expand life on Mars?

Because we've done so well with Earth it's time to take our success to another planet?

jakobsen• 13 years ago

Basically, yes.

wrongc0ntinent5• 13 years ago

This is very shortsighted. What is "interesting"? With all the knowledge Alexander Flemming had about bacteria in the 1920's, it was an accident that he discovered penicillin (by contamination from a neighboring lab, while on vacation). Assuming you know the absolute value, or even the best case scenario when it comes to biology is one way to only rely on accidents for important discoveries. Probably not the smartest thing to do.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I think it amusing that the one place where we would most likely find life on Mars, we may be specifically forbidden from going to. Kinda puts a crimp in the 'seek out new life' mission doesn't it :-)

algorias• 13 years ago

While I have no strong opinion on this, it's interesting from a game theoretical perspective that the only way Mars doesn't get contaminated requires the consent of pretty much all of humanity, as a single entity deciding to send some antarctic lichens (or whatever) can't easily be stopped by the others.

An entity interested in this could be the space program of a country or even a privately backed kickstarter project; such an undertaking doesn't take nearly as much resources as one would initially estimate.

CWuestefeld• 13 years ago

send some antarctic lichens

I know what novel you read - and I recommend the series

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

a8da6b0c91d• 13 years ago

My understanding is Mars can never host earth-like life because it doesn't have a magnetic field. There's too much radiation.

Crito13• 13 years ago

If you teleported an earth-like atmosphere to Mars, it would last somewhere in the neighborhood of upper thousands, low millions of years. That would give us a good chunk of time to figure out the whole "create a magnetosphere" problem.

Of course we don't get to just magic an atmosphere out of thin air, but there are a few more realistic proposals.

Houshalter2• 13 years ago

The fear is pointless in the first place. Life that has been living on mars for millions of years is going to be far more adapted to the climate than anything from Earth.

colanderman• 13 years ago

sigh human memory is so short. It was only a few hundred years ago we last managed to wipe out several advanced civilizations due to inadvertent organic contamination.

While Mars likely doesn't host sentient life, we ought at least show restraint exploring this new frontier until we are able to investigate and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is no such life existing in these regions of Mars.

saraid216• 13 years ago

Pft. Which part of "manifest destiny" was unclear about Mars?

Havoc3• 13 years ago

Is anyone else tired of hearing about the dangers of interplanetary contamination

The risk is real - humanity is still learning to deal with it though - people overreacting & under-reacting is inevitable. Damage will be done - such is life. At this stage I think that space exploration as a whole should take priority. Perhaps we screw over a planet. So be it. Mistakes are inevitable & I can deal with that. Space exploration & humanity's long term survival being screwed with by republican vs democrats debates...that is a serious problem for me...and I'm not even an American. Humanity as a whole suffers.

qq66• 13 years ago

What? Don't you think that any life existing on Mars has the most to teach us about how to successfully live on Mars?

jotm2• 13 years ago

I say we just dump a few tons of various vegetation all over Mars and see what happens :-). There's plenty of space to do archaeological research, it's not like Mars is the size of Machu Picchu or something...

wheels• 13 years ago

This comment really makes no sense.

We have no idea where we'd start on terraforming or if it's even possible. It'd probably take a century or two just to come up with a tenable plan if we started throwing an unlimited amount of money into it now. And then it would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

Terraforming is, at best, a game for those with impossibly long attention spans, not those who become impatient on the time scale of decades.

yodsanklai• 13 years ago

Why do you want to see mars terraformed? I agree it sounds cool, but what would be the point? if we want more comfort, it would be much much easier to control our population growth and preserve our resources.

epaladin• 13 years ago

I'd be okay with just having a colony there. In the long term, the sun will go boom and we're not going to want to be there when that happens. Of course that's super-mega-long-term, but the only way we'll ever be able to move from Earth is if we start taking small steps in developing what we'll need for that. Creating a colony on one of our closer neighbors seems like a pretty good next step to me. Why not start sooner rather than later? I agree it would be great to fix the problems we have on this planet first, but even with adequate allocation of resources, it might take less time to put humans on Mars than it will to eradicate poverty, end war, and reduce population growth.

justncase804• 13 years ago

Discovering life on another planet would be an incredibly significant historic event. Frankly, it would change everything. It may be the most important first goal as well. I believe that we would find that answering that question would usher in a whole new era of science and exploration.

sidcool• 13 years ago

If true, this is huge.

feelthepain• 13 years ago

I think the key part of this research is that this adds significantly to the evidence that there's liquid water deep in the crust of Mars. We know that there is water in the form of ice in lots of places on Mars but the idea of subsurface liquid water is exciting because there might be life in there! If it's gushing up to the surface periodically, we might even be able to sample it and see if there's signs of life! There's been previous evidence of these streaks before - but researchers had generally thought that was due to ice melting during the planet's warm season. Now they've found "streaks near the equator, including in the gargantuan Valles Marineris canyon". Any subsurface ice here would likely have sublimated. So it's looking pretty likely that this is subsurface liquid water that is leaking out from time to time. An alternative explanation - dust avalanches - was offered when the same scientists unveiled their initial results back in 2011. With the observation of so many streaks at the equator now the simplest explanation appears to be groundwater welling up to the surface. Similar streaks on Antarctica are known to be caused by water.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

Let's suppose there is water there and we could somehow take advantage of it. Why would human's be inclined to spend any time on Mars?

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

Hunting for liquid water on mars is mostly about trying to find life. If there's anything living on Mars, it'll be in the water.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

Can you imagine what it would be like finding some sort of living organism observable by the human eye? That would be the most profound moment ever.

alixaxel• 13 years ago

So Curiosity and all the other rovers are not sterilized?!

sebnukem2• 13 years ago

Actually I was thinking: wouldn't the exposure of hardware in the cold space vacuum sterilize everything?

vignesh_vs_in• 13 years ago

Apparently not http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1998/a...

ondross• 13 years ago

If this water evaporates so quickly, there must be a ton of it. Or else wouldn't it have run out by now?

andyhmltn3• 13 years ago

I'm by no means an expert but wouldn't it work the same way as earth as in the evaporated water would make it back down to the surface and repeaet?

thret• 13 years ago

"spacecraft will probably have to steer clear of them unless the craft are carefully sterilized"

Question: How could they still be carrying live earth bacteria after the trip? What kind of sterilization is going to be more effective than interplanetary travel?

gdw2• 13 years ago

There was a post on HN a little while back about the possibility of a large earth impact event sending debris into space which would take life from earth to Saturn's moon. I guess some single-celled organisms are very resilient.

rms• 13 years ago

Mars really doesn't seem that bad; it's just too cold and you can't breathe the air.

babby• 13 years ago

Actually the major issues are; low atmospheric pressure and radiation (which is related to atmosphere density, as is temperature).

So live underground in air-tight domes, at least in the beginning before industry takes off.

To actually fix the cold, pressure and breath-ability? My bet is on either a heavily optimized artificially created vegetation that exploits Mar's soils enough to generate greenhouse gases, or, more realistically, shit loads of (or massive) machines doing that same thing. Here's to hoping 3D printing-esque evolutions in technology and automation permit this to happen within 150 years instead of 500.

Water seems to flow freely on Mars

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