32 ms·

Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

1104 points by yawz 8y ago

mFixman 8y ago
20 years ago it would have been unthinkable to find water in any other planet in the solar system. Mark my words: in 20 years, we'll find extremely simple proto-bacterial life in Mars and in many other planets.
- actsasbuffoon 8y ago
  Or even on moons. There are several moons that have a non-zero chance of having life on them.
  - smpetrey 8y ago
    I'm betting on Europa. Lovely little moon, so many mysteries. Can't wait to see what we uncover from there.
    - larkeith 8y ago
      Heck, even if it ends up being completely lifeless, IMO Europa is still one of the most exciting bodies in the solar system in terms of future potential - Between abundant energy from the Jupiter-Io flux tube, methane fuel from Titan, hydrogen and helium from Jupiter herself, and water from Europa, colonization of the Jupiter system may well be the key to the outer solar system, and potentially even interstellar efforts. More immediately, it could be an essential stepping stone to enable largescale harvesting of the Jupiter Trojans. Even if you'll never see a Jupiter-rise, I for one love the idea of living on Europa.
      - b_b 8y ago
        I know HN is not one for jokes, but colonizing 'Europa' seems like a hilarious irony in name.
      - gambiting 8y ago
        Isn't the issue with exploring Europa that Jupiter throws a stupid amount of radiation around itself, so spending any time on its surface(or close proximity) is actually a very very bad idea for human life? Sure, beneath the ice you'd be safe as you can be - but you need to get there and then drill through the ice first.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  We have already established that microbes live on the exterior of the ISS. They may have come from Earth originally but it does show that life can exist in conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Isn't life thought to have started in "conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable".
    - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
      Yes, but to quote the annoyingly semi-reasonable creationist Ken Ham: “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” (Note: I am not a creationist, I do agree with the logic of that argument, but I also see no scientific basis for any religious origin story of life to have more scientific basis than others). We have recreated the conditions that predate life and found that organic molecules were formed, but we’ve never observed the leap from organic molecules to organic life. So the best we can do barring the invention of a time machine is look for life elsewhere from Earth to try to fill in the blanks.
      - bvc35 8y ago
        You see a man lying still on the ground, blood pooling around his body, and a woman standing close by gripping a knife with bloody hands. What happened? “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.”
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        That only works because humans have killed each other, not to mention animals, many times in the past, so all of us are familiar with the process. We're yet to observe any instance of abiogenesis at all, anywhere.
- melling 8y ago
  Not exactly true. Water on Mars has been thinkable for quite some time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_discoveries_of_water_on_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_discoveries_of...
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    And there has been speculation about water on Jupiter's moons since at least the 1960's. Probably longer.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    Yeah well, in the 19th century it was believed there were supposed to be canals up there :).
- cmrdporcupine 8y ago
  I fully expect us to find something like a bacterium somewhere else. They might even be very common anywhere where there's hydrothermal activity. Prokaryotes seem to have evolved _twice_ on earth (archaea and bacteria), albeit from some common proto-cell thing. So there's some chemiosmotic 'recipe' which can make them. What I don't expect is anything like a eukaryote and certainly not like multicelular life. I think that kind of life is either vanishingly rare or non-existent elsewhere. There was almost 3 billion years of life on this planet before eukaryotes arrived, and they arrived only once and in a form likely almost identical to what we see today. So it's really really 'flukey' and not something that 'just happens' in some necessary teleological fashion. Nick Lane gets into this in his book "The Vital Question" -- it's quite convincing. And maybe depressing if you grew up on sci-fi like myself.
- zackmorris 8y ago
  Ya my feeling at this point is that there is likely primitive life on every planet having liquid water, which means at least one moon around every gas giant, which means nearly every star which has gas giants (not even counting planets in habitable zones). So that part of the Drake equation is covered, but intelligent life could still be rare. I just imagine the odds of a planet-sized petri dish not evolving life in billions of years, and I certainly wouldn't take that bet!
  - opportune 8y ago
    I don't think liquid water is sufficient by itself - first, aside from water, life as we know it requires some source of energy. Since surface water seems much less common than subsurface water, that means life will need to get energy from some sort of chemical process similar to the bacteria that live around hydrothermal vents. That means those vents need to exist in the first place, and need to expel sufficient chemicals for energy creation. There also may need to be some source of extremely high bursts of energy such as lightning, to create the compounds that are precursors to life (amino acids, RNA, etc.), and those bursts must also not be so frequent/widespread that they kill all life.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  I doubt we'll see it in many other planets. Mars is by far the most likely planet in our solar system to harbor life, outside of Earth obviously. If you talk of moons, however, then we get into many, many more candidates that could potentially harbor some kind of microbe or multi-cellular water creature.
- pera 8y ago
  https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/why.html https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/why.html
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  You have to keep in mind we're teetering on the edge of an exponential explosion in knowledge. What's been done in decades with all of our rovers and probes on Mars could have been accomplished in a matter of days by a single human on the planet. That's not an exaggeration. For instance we're coming up on Curiosity 6th year on Mars in a couple of weeks. It's traveled, in this entire time, a bit less than 13.3 miles. There's an ongoing odometer available here [1]. And it's had some major instrumentation errors (such as with its drill) that a human could have trivially repaired on site. Only question is how long is it going to take us to get those feet on the planet. From there? I'd expect major discoveries will be a matter of months. [1] - http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html
jlebrech 8y ago
would this be enough to create an viable atmosphere or should a dome be put over it?
- nacnud 8y ago
  Given that any previous water in the atmosphere has mostly escaped over time, the dome seems like a better bet.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    Mars lost its atmosphere on a geological time scale. You just need to raise the average temperature 5C to create a runaway greenhouse effect (and that gas release from the polar regions would far outpace the solar winds stripping atmosphere away and once it leveled off would take millions of years to get back to the state it is in now). The very thin atmosphere it has now, will take another 2 billion years or so to be stripped away entirely.
    - jlebrech 8y ago
      maybe we should let Elon Musk nuke mars https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear-bomb-colbert-feat/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear...
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Water escapes from Mars' atmosphere over periods of millions of years. It's unlikely that domes would help very much. They'd crumble long before they protected any meaningful amounts of water.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, and 0.03% carbon dioxide, so no. If you want to create an atmospheric pressure that humans could survive without a suit, the dry ice in the polar regions is more than enough, the trick with Mars is raising the average temperature 5C at which point you'd create a runaway greenhouse. As for just water needs, the polar regions are lousy with water ice (the northern cap alone has more than 800k cubic kilometers of water ice and a cubic meter of ice is about 917L so yeah, a LOT of water). There's also suspected to be considerable amounts in the regolith all around the planet and given there might be this underground lake there could possibly be many more.
apo 8y ago
Here's the original paper (no paywall, and apparently not linked in the BBC article): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/science.aar7268 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/scien... A couple of highlights: My first thought was why couldn't this be some other liquid like CO2: We examined other possible explanations for the bright area below the SPLD (supplementary text). For example, a CO2 ice layer at the top or the bottom of the SPLD, or a very low temperature of the H2O ice throughout the SPLD, could enhance basal echo power compared with surface reflections. We reject these explanations (supplementary text), either because of the very specific and unlikely physical conditions required, or because they do not cause sufficiently strong basal reflections (figs. S5 and S6). Although the pressure and the temperature at the base of the SPLD would be compatible with the presence of liquid CO2, its relative dielectric permittivity is much lower (about 1.6) (28) than that of liquid water (about 80), so it does not produce bright reflections. Why liquid and not solid water? ... Perchlorates can form through different physical and/or chemical mechanisms (30, 31) and have been detected in different areas of Mars. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they are also present at the base of the SPLD. Because the temperature at the base of the polar deposits is estimated to be around 205 K (32), and because perchlorates strongly suppress the freezing point of water (to a minimum of 204 and 198 K for magnesium and calcium perchlorates, respectively) (29), we therefore find it plausible that a layer of perchlorate brine could be present at the base of the polar deposits. ... This is a similar principle (freezing point depression) to that used in de-icing roads. And maybe the best part of all - there may be other smaller but currently undetectable pools: ... The limited raw-data coverage of the SPLD (a few percent of the area of Planum Australe) and the large size required for a meltwater patch to be detectable by MARSIS (several kilometers in diameter and several tens of centimeters in thickness) limit the possibility of identifying small bodies of liquid water or the existence of any hydraulic connection between them. Because of this, there is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location. ...
- black_puppydog 8y ago
  thanks for the link. I find it staggering that science reporters in these big outlets barely ever link to the original source and often don't even name the exact publication. This kind of writing could easily get students into trouble, why is it acceptable in post-graduate journalism? Links never hurt or confused anyone, and they make the page so much richer.
tzfld 8y ago
>an area of high reflectivity which is thought to be water This not seems to be entirely = to 'water revealed on Mars'
- dekhn 8y ago
  Scientists have excellent language to describe these sorts of things (ambiguity and confidence in guess). For example, from the actual paper's abstract: """Quantitative analysis of the radar signals shows that this bright feature has high relative dielectric permittivity (>15), matching that of water-bearing materials. We interpret this feature as a stable body of liquid water on Mars.""" It's absolutely true that we can't call this a strong positive siting, it's more of a "good evidence which is not completely unambiguous".
  - mjburgess 8y ago
    > """ Python? Scala?
    - dekhn 8y ago
      I use triple quotes when quoting, because many things I copy-paste have subquotes (either "..." or '...') or contractions (don't).
      - 5thbootloader 8y ago
        If someone quotes your triple quote, would they have to use quadruple quotes?
        dekhn 8y ago
        We just don't do that.
dekhn 8y ago
I'm told Elon Musk is currently planning a Mars retrieval mission so he can "drink Mars Power juice" and "live forever"
- liberte82 8y ago
  In other news, he accuses journalist asking questions of him being a serial rapist.
  - dev_north_east 8y ago
    I thought it was a cave diver and called him a paedo?
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      Musk has been... sensitive to criticism on more than one occasion.
      - flopdrol 8y ago
        Maybe he should skip one of his 6000 hour workweeks, or stop reading ten books a day, or stop taking bailouts from taxpayers and cloistered billionaires for all his unprofitable dreamscape startups. You know, just chill.
    - zipwitch 8y ago
      So, you're saying that the technology focused billionare is facing criticism from a journalist and a man who rescues people from mortal danger underwater? Are a forensic scientist and an exotic female ambassador inexplicably involved as well?
brlewis 8y ago
For those, like me, wondering how this is even possible: In order to remain liquid in such cold conditions (the research team estimate between -10 and -30 Celsius where it meets the ice above), the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  It is also quite possible Mars still has 'hot spots' as geologically it was very 'recently' volcanically active. Every now and then there's little anomalies that possibly hint at subsurface hot spots that might allow for hot springs and similar. In Robert Zubrin's fictional (but hard-science) book "First Landing" on the first manned Mars mission they actually find a hot spot and drill into it resulting in a geyser (which obviously, the water instantly freezes creating a snow-like effect). All of Zubrin's books are worth reading if you are at all interested in manned missions to Mars. He has some non-fiction looks (that are a bit outdated now due to scientific discoveries, like finding the polar caps are lousy with water ice) but he goes into the math and gets you in the right mindset. The fiction book is similar in nature to The Martian (came out well before The Martian) and he also has a short little fiction book meant to be sold to future colonists called 'How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet' which also takes a hard-science fiction approach to the subject.
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    "that are a bit outdated now due to scientific discoveries, like finding the polar caps are lousy with water ice" They are? The north cap has more than 800,000 cubic kilometers of water in it. Not much compared to Earth, but in space terms that seems pretty abundant to me.
    - Quinner 8y ago
      Lousy is used in this sense to mean "full of".
      - asavadatti 8y ago
liberte82 8y ago
Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
- elorant 8y ago
  Because it takes ages to plan a new mission and the vehicle we send is related to the goals of each mission. It's not like they have a rover stand-by and then decide where to land it. The equipment of the vehicle and the research it has to carry very much determine the way it will be build. So what we've send so far depends on the data we had years ago.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Histor... Curiosity landed 8 years after the call for proposal. If I recall, the landing site (Gale Crater rim) was considered extremely interesting at the time.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Building a rover that can drill more than a few inches deep is presently a huge technical challenge. If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    See: Armageddon, the movie. Maybe we just need to go full Bruce Willis. Somebody get Ben Affleck to sing Leaving on a Jet Plane. In seriousness, it sounds like a fascinating problem. If anyone has seen the drills they use to make holes for piles for new condo/office towers—they're probably wider than needed in this case (not actually sure of that)— the drill (bit?) is extendable, but the rig itself is enormous. Those are mobile units. Otherwise something like a semi-permanent or permanent unfolding oil-rig type machine would be needed? None of this helps with the weight problem. I wonder if there's a more clever option.
lerie82 8y ago
I don't see how they can call it water, at best it's just a liquid.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Nice. An "easier" source of water is a huge bonus for the first people landing no Mars.
- jpmoyn 8y ago
  Haha that was your first thought?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    I know right? There is so much literature and speculation on what it will take to live on Mars that "source of liquid water in quantity" is a greatly simplifying step that knocks a dozen different failure scenarios off the decision tree. I'm guessing that people aren't seeing how big a deal this is for future colonists.
    - andygates 8y ago
      Yeah, but first you've got to drill a mile through the ice cap. Then you've got to fight off the scientific community who are having none of this Conquistador nonsense with your nasty infectious human microbiome wiping out the scientific find of the century. Melting ice is easier _and_ less evil.
- phyzome 8y ago
  « the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it » Might be easier to get less saline ice and melt that than to desalinate saltwater.
gbugniot 8y ago
A note slightly related: Mars reaches perihelic opposition with the sun on July 27, 2018, which means observers on Earth will have their closest view of the planet since 2003. Great time to borrow a telescope.
- colemannugent 8y ago
  Being able to see the red of Mars at night is strange. Since I (and probably most of us on HN) live in the worst area for light pollution it's not too often you can see other planets like this unaided.
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    You should be able to see all five inner planets with the naked eye, even in a city.
    - scrumper 8y ago
      Indeed. It was seeing the moons of Jupiter from a New York City apartment window* that rekindled my dormant childhood interest in astronomy. I felt like Galileo. I had no idea what to expect when I pointed the binoculars at Jupiter. I thought they were stars at first.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    Jupiter and Venus are incredibly bright, you'll be able to see them with the naked eye at night even if you're in a city.
    - colemannugent 8y ago
      I should clarify: I have seen the planets before, but I can't remember being able to see this much detail without a telescope or binoculars. Jupiter and Venus look like regular, although very bright, stars. Mars is currently a very visible red circle that is unmistakably a planet.
- 8y ago
Digitalunbox 8y ago
wow that's cool!!
pwaai 8y ago
I've been saying this for years. This is such an amazing news. I know there's lot of skeptics but just gonna put this out there in 2018. Our solar system has intelligent beings greater than our civilization. There has to be if water can be easily found so close to Earth. I don't know what they do but the theory is they are mining for resources. Pretty sure they would wipe out Earth if they wanted to but they choose not to? What do they want!!!?
scardine 8y ago
Just finished "Red Mars", the book aged quite well for the scifi genre. SPOILER ALERT: The book ends with a dissident faction of Mars settlers living in a hidden water ice dome under the polar cap.
- mos_basik 8y ago
  Haaaaah, same here. Inhaled Red Mars and Green Mars last week. Putting off starting Blue Mars for a few days yet so I can actually get some work done.
- lihaciudaniel 8y ago
  Why the down votes? Fun fact: Mars flag is made from the three books: Red Mars, green Mars, blue Mars
Foggydog 8y ago
It's a lake in the sense that mud is a lake. According to the research paper, it's composed of water ice with 10% to 20% admixed dust and seasonally covered by a very thin layer of CO2 ice that does not exceed 1m in thickness.
perseusprime11 8y ago
Soon they will find fish and potentially mermaids and mermans in that water.
henryaj 8y ago
Per the Great Filter[0], this is really bad news, right? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- azernik 8y ago
  No, whatever happened on Mars has to do with issues of planetary geology and natural climate change that aren't issues for us. i.e. it's a term in the Fermi equation that doesn't apply to us anymore.
  - brainpool 8y ago
    What happens on Mars stays on Mars
  - henryaj 8y ago
    Sure, but a large body of water makes finding life much more likely. And if we find life on our doorstep, we ought to reduce our estimates of how unlikely abiogenesis is – suggesting the Great Filter is ahead of us, not behind us.
    - 3rdAccount 8y ago
      Still not sure how many planets can form life. We think you need water, certain gases, a stable temperature, magnetosphere to block solar radiation, planet like Jupiter to absorb asteroid like impacts...etc. I'm not sure if Mars ever had all that.
      - vinniejames 8y ago
        That predicate falsey assumes "life" can only survive in earth like conditions
        3rdAccount 8y ago
        Nope. I said we "think". So far we have only one data point. No idea if right or wrong :).
eagsalazar2 8y ago
Why is "lake" in quotes? Seems like it is a real lake right?
- andygates 8y ago
  It could also be a body of non-free water - very wet slurry would fit.
alifpunk 8y ago
Have a little more faith in the people running these missions than that. The landing spots for any missions we send over are chosn very carefully and with a lot of thought. There are specific goals for any mission and the landing sites are chosen based on those in mind.
throwawaymanbot 8y ago
I bet this has been known about for a while, but kept quiet in case there was a cold war space race...
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sidcool 8y ago
The little kid inside me is jumping up and down, like I have seen Santa. My belief in Mars hosting simple life forms is stronger than ever now. May be NASA already has data for it, but hasn't finished yet sifting through it. Amazing news!
donnywds 8y ago
sounds scary! lol
wytian 8y ago
If I really wanted mankind to invest more money into exploring Mars, I wonder what the best approach would be. What do y'all think? 1. Make enough money to invest your own capital/start your own company. (Ex: Elon Musk) AKA Do it yourself. 2. Go into politics and get enough support to start a campaign? AKA Get the government to do it. 3. Other?

1104 points by yawz 8y ago

20 years ago it would have been unthinkable to find water in any other planet in the solar system. Mark my words: in 20 years, we'll find extremely simple proto-bacterial life in Mars and in many other planets.

actsasbuffoon 8y ago
Or even on moons. There are several moons that have a non-zero chance of having life on them.
- smpetrey 8y ago
  I'm betting on Europa. Lovely little moon, so many mysteries. Can't wait to see what we uncover from there.
  - larkeith 8y ago
    Heck, even if it ends up being completely lifeless, IMO Europa is still one of the most exciting bodies in the solar system in terms of future potential - Between abundant energy from the Jupiter-Io flux tube, methane fuel from Titan, hydrogen and helium from Jupiter herself, and water from Europa, colonization of the Jupiter system may well be the key to the outer solar system, and potentially even interstellar efforts. More immediately, it could be an essential stepping stone to enable largescale harvesting of the Jupiter Trojans. Even if you'll never see a Jupiter-rise, I for one love the idea of living on Europa.
    - b_b 8y ago
      I know HN is not one for jokes, but colonizing 'Europa' seems like a hilarious irony in name.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      Isn't the issue with exploring Europa that Jupiter throws a stupid amount of radiation around itself, so spending any time on its surface(or close proximity) is actually a very very bad idea for human life? Sure, beneath the ice you'd be safe as you can be - but you need to get there and then drill through the ice first.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
We have already established that microbes live on the exterior of the ISS. They may have come from Earth originally but it does show that life can exist in conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable.
- collyw 8y ago
  Isn't life thought to have started in "conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable".
  - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
    Yes, but to quote the annoyingly semi-reasonable creationist Ken Ham: “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” (Note: I am not a creationist, I do agree with the logic of that argument, but I also see no scientific basis for any religious origin story of life to have more scientific basis than others). We have recreated the conditions that predate life and found that organic molecules were formed, but we’ve never observed the leap from organic molecules to organic life. So the best we can do barring the invention of a time machine is look for life elsewhere from Earth to try to fill in the blanks.
    - bvc35 8y ago
      You see a man lying still on the ground, blood pooling around his body, and a woman standing close by gripping a knife with bloody hands. What happened? “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.”
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        That only works because humans have killed each other, not to mention animals, many times in the past, so all of us are familiar with the process. We're yet to observe any instance of abiogenesis at all, anywhere.
melling 8y ago
Not exactly true. Water on Mars has been thinkable for quite some time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_discoveries_of_water_on_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_discoveries_of...
- reaperducer 8y ago
  And there has been speculation about water on Jupiter's moons since at least the 1960's. Probably longer.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  Yeah well, in the 19th century it was believed there were supposed to be canals up there :).
cmrdporcupine 8y ago
I fully expect us to find something like a bacterium somewhere else. They might even be very common anywhere where there's hydrothermal activity. Prokaryotes seem to have evolved _twice_ on earth (archaea and bacteria), albeit from some common proto-cell thing. So there's some chemiosmotic 'recipe' which can make them. What I don't expect is anything like a eukaryote and certainly not like multicelular life. I think that kind of life is either vanishingly rare or non-existent elsewhere. There was almost 3 billion years of life on this planet before eukaryotes arrived, and they arrived only once and in a form likely almost identical to what we see today. So it's really really 'flukey' and not something that 'just happens' in some necessary teleological fashion. Nick Lane gets into this in his book "The Vital Question" -- it's quite convincing. And maybe depressing if you grew up on sci-fi like myself.
zackmorris 8y ago
Ya my feeling at this point is that there is likely primitive life on every planet having liquid water, which means at least one moon around every gas giant, which means nearly every star which has gas giants (not even counting planets in habitable zones). So that part of the Drake equation is covered, but intelligent life could still be rare. I just imagine the odds of a planet-sized petri dish not evolving life in billions of years, and I certainly wouldn't take that bet!
- opportune 8y ago
  I don't think liquid water is sufficient by itself - first, aside from water, life as we know it requires some source of energy. Since surface water seems much less common than subsurface water, that means life will need to get energy from some sort of chemical process similar to the bacteria that live around hydrothermal vents. That means those vents need to exist in the first place, and need to expel sufficient chemicals for energy creation. There also may need to be some source of extremely high bursts of energy such as lightning, to create the compounds that are precursors to life (amino acids, RNA, etc.), and those bursts must also not be so frequent/widespread that they kill all life.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I doubt we'll see it in many other planets. Mars is by far the most likely planet in our solar system to harbor life, outside of Earth obviously. If you talk of moons, however, then we get into many, many more candidates that could potentially harbor some kind of microbe or multi-cellular water creature.
pera 8y ago
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/why.html https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/why.html
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You have to keep in mind we're teetering on the edge of an exponential explosion in knowledge. What's been done in decades with all of our rovers and probes on Mars could have been accomplished in a matter of days by a single human on the planet. That's not an exaggeration. For instance we're coming up on Curiosity 6th year on Mars in a couple of weeks. It's traveled, in this entire time, a bit less than 13.3 miles. There's an ongoing odometer available here [1]. And it's had some major instrumentation errors (such as with its drill) that a human could have trivially repaired on site. Only question is how long is it going to take us to get those feet on the planet. From there? I'd expect major discoveries will be a matter of months. [1] - http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html

jlebrech 8y ago

would this be enough to create an viable atmosphere or should a dome be put over it?

nacnud 8y ago
Given that any previous water in the atmosphere has mostly escaped over time, the dome seems like a better bet.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Mars lost its atmosphere on a geological time scale. You just need to raise the average temperature 5C to create a runaway greenhouse effect (and that gas release from the polar regions would far outpace the solar winds stripping atmosphere away and once it leveled off would take millions of years to get back to the state it is in now). The very thin atmosphere it has now, will take another 2 billion years or so to be stripped away entirely.
  - jlebrech 8y ago
    maybe we should let Elon Musk nuke mars https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear-bomb-colbert-feat/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear...
- adrianN 8y ago
  Water escapes from Mars' atmosphere over periods of millions of years. It's unlikely that domes would help very much. They'd crumble long before they protected any meaningful amounts of water.
ryanmercer 8y ago
Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, and 0.03% carbon dioxide, so no. If you want to create an atmospheric pressure that humans could survive without a suit, the dry ice in the polar regions is more than enough, the trick with Mars is raising the average temperature 5C at which point you'd create a runaway greenhouse. As for just water needs, the polar regions are lousy with water ice (the northern cap alone has more than 800k cubic kilometers of water ice and a cubic meter of ice is about 917L so yeah, a LOT of water). There's also suspected to be considerable amounts in the regolith all around the planet and given there might be this underground lake there could possibly be many more.

apo 8y ago

Here's the original paper (no paywall, and apparently not linked in the BBC article): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/science.aar7268 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/scien... A couple of highlights: My first thought was why couldn't this be some other liquid like CO2: We examined other possible explanations for the bright area below the SPLD (supplementary text). For example, a CO2 ice layer at the top or the bottom of the SPLD, or a very low temperature of the H2O ice throughout the SPLD, could enhance basal echo power compared with surface reflections. We reject these explanations (supplementary text), either because of the very specific and unlikely physical conditions required, or because they do not cause sufficiently strong basal reflections (figs. S5 and S6). Although the pressure and the temperature at the base of the SPLD would be compatible with the presence of liquid CO2, its relative dielectric permittivity is much lower (about 1.6) (28) than that of liquid water (about 80), so it does not produce bright reflections. Why liquid and not solid water? ... Perchlorates can form through different physical and/or chemical mechanisms (30, 31) and have been detected in different areas of Mars. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they are also present at the base of the SPLD. Because the temperature at the base of the polar deposits is estimated to be around 205 K (32), and because perchlorates strongly suppress the freezing point of water (to a minimum of 204 and 198 K for magnesium and calcium perchlorates, respectively) (29), we therefore find it plausible that a layer of perchlorate brine could be present at the base of the polar deposits. ... This is a similar principle (freezing point depression) to that used in de-icing roads. And maybe the best part of all - there may be other smaller but currently undetectable pools: ... The limited raw-data coverage of the SPLD (a few percent of the area of Planum Australe) and the large size required for a meltwater patch to be detectable by MARSIS (several kilometers in diameter and several tens of centimeters in thickness) limit the possibility of identifying small bodies of liquid water or the existence of any hydraulic connection between them. Because of this, there is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location. ...

black_puppydog 8y ago
thanks for the link. I find it staggering that science reporters in these big outlets barely ever link to the original source and often don't even name the exact publication. This kind of writing could easily get students into trouble, why is it acceptable in post-graduate journalism? Links never hurt or confused anyone, and they make the page so much richer.

tzfld 8y ago

>an area of high reflectivity which is thought to be water This not seems to be entirely = to 'water revealed on Mars'

dekhn 8y ago
Scientists have excellent language to describe these sorts of things (ambiguity and confidence in guess). For example, from the actual paper's abstract: """Quantitative analysis of the radar signals shows that this bright feature has high relative dielectric permittivity (>15), matching that of water-bearing materials. We interpret this feature as a stable body of liquid water on Mars.""" It's absolutely true that we can't call this a strong positive siting, it's more of a "good evidence which is not completely unambiguous".
- mjburgess 8y ago
  > """ Python? Scala?
  - dekhn 8y ago
    I use triple quotes when quoting, because many things I copy-paste have subquotes (either "..." or '...') or contractions (don't).
    - 5thbootloader 8y ago
      If someone quotes your triple quote, would they have to use quadruple quotes?
      - dekhn 8y ago
        We just don't do that.

dekhn 8y ago

I'm told Elon Musk is currently planning a Mars retrieval mission so he can "drink Mars Power juice" and "live forever"

liberte82 8y ago
In other news, he accuses journalist asking questions of him being a serial rapist.
- dev_north_east 8y ago
  I thought it was a cave diver and called him a paedo?
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    Musk has been... sensitive to criticism on more than one occasion.
    - flopdrol 8y ago
      Maybe he should skip one of his 6000 hour workweeks, or stop reading ten books a day, or stop taking bailouts from taxpayers and cloistered billionaires for all his unprofitable dreamscape startups. You know, just chill.
  - zipwitch 8y ago
    So, you're saying that the technology focused billionare is facing criticism from a journalist and a man who rescues people from mortal danger underwater? Are a forensic scientist and an exotic female ambassador inexplicably involved as well?

brlewis 8y ago

For those, like me, wondering how this is even possible: In order to remain liquid in such cold conditions (the research team estimate between -10 and -30 Celsius where it meets the ice above), the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it.

ryanmercer 8y ago
It is also quite possible Mars still has 'hot spots' as geologically it was very 'recently' volcanically active. Every now and then there's little anomalies that possibly hint at subsurface hot spots that might allow for hot springs and similar. In Robert Zubrin's fictional (but hard-science) book "First Landing" on the first manned Mars mission they actually find a hot spot and drill into it resulting in a geyser (which obviously, the water instantly freezes creating a snow-like effect). All of Zubrin's books are worth reading if you are at all interested in manned missions to Mars. He has some non-fiction looks (that are a bit outdated now due to scientific discoveries, like finding the polar caps are lousy with water ice) but he goes into the math and gets you in the right mindset. The fiction book is similar in nature to The Martian (came out well before The Martian) and he also has a short little fiction book meant to be sold to future colonists called 'How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet' which also takes a hard-science fiction approach to the subject.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  "that are a bit outdated now due to scientific discoveries, like finding the polar caps are lousy with water ice" They are? The north cap has more than 800,000 cubic kilometers of water in it. Not much compared to Earth, but in space terms that seems pretty abundant to me.
  - Quinner 8y ago
    Lousy is used in this sense to mean "full of".
    - asavadatti 8y ago

liberte82 8y ago

Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.

elorant 8y ago
Because it takes ages to plan a new mission and the vehicle we send is related to the goals of each mission. It's not like they have a rover stand-by and then decide where to land it. The equipment of the vehicle and the research it has to carry very much determine the way it will be build. So what we've send so far depends on the data we had years ago.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Histor... Curiosity landed 8 years after the call for proposal. If I recall, the landing site (Gale Crater rim) was considered extremely interesting at the time.
walrus01 8y ago
Building a rover that can drill more than a few inches deep is presently a huge technical challenge. If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  See: Armageddon, the movie. Maybe we just need to go full Bruce Willis. Somebody get Ben Affleck to sing Leaving on a Jet Plane. In seriousness, it sounds like a fascinating problem. If anyone has seen the drills they use to make holes for piles for new condo/office towers—they're probably wider than needed in this case (not actually sure of that)— the drill (bit?) is extendable, but the rig itself is enormous. Those are mobile units. Otherwise something like a semi-permanent or permanent unfolding oil-rig type machine would be needed? None of this helps with the weight problem. I wonder if there's a more clever option.

lerie82 8y ago

I don't see how they can call it water, at best it's just a liquid.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Nice. An "easier" source of water is a huge bonus for the first people landing no Mars.

jpmoyn 8y ago
Haha that was your first thought?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I know right? There is so much literature and speculation on what it will take to live on Mars that "source of liquid water in quantity" is a greatly simplifying step that knocks a dozen different failure scenarios off the decision tree. I'm guessing that people aren't seeing how big a deal this is for future colonists.
  - andygates 8y ago
    Yeah, but first you've got to drill a mile through the ice cap. Then you've got to fight off the scientific community who are having none of this Conquistador nonsense with your nasty infectious human microbiome wiping out the scientific find of the century. Melting ice is easier _and_ less evil.
phyzome 8y ago
« the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it » Might be easier to get less saline ice and melt that than to desalinate saltwater.

gbugniot 8y ago

A note slightly related: Mars reaches perihelic opposition with the sun on July 27, 2018, which means observers on Earth will have their closest view of the planet since 2003. Great time to borrow a telescope.

colemannugent 8y ago
Being able to see the red of Mars at night is strange. Since I (and probably most of us on HN) live in the worst area for light pollution it's not too often you can see other planets like this unaided.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  You should be able to see all five inner planets with the naked eye, even in a city.
  - scrumper 8y ago
    Indeed. It was seeing the moons of Jupiter from a New York City apartment window* that rekindled my dormant childhood interest in astronomy. I felt like Galileo. I had no idea what to expect when I pointed the binoculars at Jupiter. I thought they were stars at first.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  Jupiter and Venus are incredibly bright, you'll be able to see them with the naked eye at night even if you're in a city.
  - colemannugent 8y ago
    I should clarify: I have seen the planets before, but I can't remember being able to see this much detail without a telescope or binoculars. Jupiter and Venus look like regular, although very bright, stars. Mars is currently a very visible red circle that is unmistakably a planet.
8y ago

Digitalunbox 8y ago

wow that's cool!!

pwaai 8y ago

I've been saying this for years. This is such an amazing news. I know there's lot of skeptics but just gonna put this out there in 2018. Our solar system has intelligent beings greater than our civilization. There has to be if water can be easily found so close to Earth. I don't know what they do but the theory is they are mining for resources. Pretty sure they would wipe out Earth if they wanted to but they choose not to? What do they want!!!?

scardine 8y ago

Just finished "Red Mars", the book aged quite well for the scifi genre. SPOILER ALERT: The book ends with a dissident faction of Mars settlers living in a hidden water ice dome under the polar cap.

mos_basik 8y ago
Haaaaah, same here. Inhaled Red Mars and Green Mars last week. Putting off starting Blue Mars for a few days yet so I can actually get some work done.
lihaciudaniel 8y ago
Why the down votes? Fun fact: Mars flag is made from the three books: Red Mars, green Mars, blue Mars

Foggydog 8y ago

It's a lake in the sense that mud is a lake. According to the research paper, it's composed of water ice with 10% to 20% admixed dust and seasonally covered by a very thin layer of CO2 ice that does not exceed 1m in thickness.

perseusprime11 8y ago

Soon they will find fish and potentially mermaids and mermans in that water.

henryaj 8y ago

Per the Great Filter[0], this is really bad news, right? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

azernik 8y ago
No, whatever happened on Mars has to do with issues of planetary geology and natural climate change that aren't issues for us. i.e. it's a term in the Fermi equation that doesn't apply to us anymore.
- brainpool 8y ago
  What happens on Mars stays on Mars
- henryaj 8y ago
  Sure, but a large body of water makes finding life much more likely. And if we find life on our doorstep, we ought to reduce our estimates of how unlikely abiogenesis is – suggesting the Great Filter is ahead of us, not behind us.
  - 3rdAccount 8y ago
    Still not sure how many planets can form life. We think you need water, certain gases, a stable temperature, magnetosphere to block solar radiation, planet like Jupiter to absorb asteroid like impacts...etc. I'm not sure if Mars ever had all that.
    - vinniejames 8y ago
      That predicate falsey assumes "life" can only survive in earth like conditions
      - 3rdAccount 8y ago
        Nope. I said we "think". So far we have only one data point. No idea if right or wrong :).

eagsalazar2 8y ago

Why is "lake" in quotes? Seems like it is a real lake right?

andygates 8y ago
It could also be a body of non-free water - very wet slurry would fit.

alifpunk 8y ago

Have a little more faith in the people running these missions than that. The landing spots for any missions we send over are chosn very carefully and with a lot of thought. There are specific goals for any mission and the landing sites are chosen based on those in mind.

throwawaymanbot 8y ago

I bet this has been known about for a while, but kept quiet in case there was a cold war space race...

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sidcool 8y ago

The little kid inside me is jumping up and down, like I have seen Santa. My belief in Mars hosting simple life forms is stronger than ever now. May be NASA already has data for it, but hasn't finished yet sifting through it. Amazing news!

donnywds 8y ago

sounds scary! lol

wytian 8y ago

If I really wanted mankind to invest more money into exploring Mars, I wonder what the best approach would be. What do y'all think? 1. Make enough money to invest your own capital/start your own company. (Ex: Elon Musk) AKA Do it yourself. 2. Go into politics and get enough support to start a campaign? AKA Get the government to do it. 3. Other?