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Water on Mars: discovery of three buried lakes intrigues scientists
- calmworm 6y agoSpeaking as a non-scientist, I too am intrigued.
- ionwake 6y agoIve always loved this photo http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2006/10/residual_water_ice_in_vastitas_borealis_crater/9810168-3-eng-GB/Residual_water_ice_in_Vastitas_Borealis_Crater_pillars.jpg http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...
- heyitsguay 6y agoVery cool! What's the story there?
- blocked_again 6y agoResidual water ice in Vastitas Borealis Crater pillars :)
- isoprophlex 6y agoBeautiful! I guess it's mostly CO2 Edit: holy shit someone else commented that it's water ice. Amazing. I didn't know there was actual water on the surface!
- chuckwnelson 6y agoTIL as well. That's pretty cool.
- NortySpock 6y agoWouldn't it sublime away within months or weeks in the low-pressure atmosphere?
- correct_horse 6y agoIt won't sublimate if it is always in the shade/in a cold region. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water..... At martian surface pressures (close to 0) it needs to be warmer than ~ -60C to sublimate. Interestingly that's roughly the average temperature measured by rovers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Temperature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Temperature
- invalidusernam3 6y agoAny idea of the scale of that image? What is the diameter of the crater?
- Isinlor 6y ago2000 km, so I guess somewhere around the size of India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastitas_Borealis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastitas_Borealis @edit - 2000km is the size of the whole region, crater is 35 km wide. See below.
- ckarmann 6y ago2000km is the size of the whole Vastitas Borealis region. The photo depicts only a single unnamed crater inside it.
- Isinlor 6y agoIndeed, my bad. Seems to be easy to confuse since the crater seems to have the same name "Vastitas Borealis Crater" [0]. Do you know if it's actually called "Vastitas Borealis Crater" or is it just simply a crater in the region Vastitas Borealis? > The 35-kilometre-wide crater sits 70° north of the martian equator, in a low-lying region known as Vastitas Borealis. Previous orbiters have spotted ice deposits in craters, but the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board the European probe is the first to return a three-dimensional colour image of an icy spot. The ice may be up to 200 metres thick, and lies over a dune field that has formed in the sediment on the crater's floor. The data were collected on 2 February, and this image was created for Nature last week. [1] [0] http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2006/10/Residual_water_ice_in_Vastitas_Borealis_Crater http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2006/10/Residual_wa... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/435723b https://www.nature.com/articles/435723b
- ckarmann 6y agoI don't think this one has a specific name. There are a lot of unnamed craters on Mars, even much bigger than this one. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_craters_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_craters_on_Mars
- SEJeff 6y agoThat's going to make SpaceX's eventual ISRU methalox production massively easier. This is great news.
- azernik 6y agoUnfortunately it's at far too high of a latitude - in addition to the solar power problem, it's also far too cold to send affordable hardware. There's lots of water ice elsewhere on Mars in much more friendly latitudes (Arcadia Planitia is the region I've seen bandied about most often). At lower latitudes you pick a site where the ice is either not too far underground, or exposed through some exotic action like a calving cliff face (though the latter are usually less convenient for landing).
- jacobush 6y agoI wonder how the affordability equation would change with a nuclear power plant. It could be pretty light weight, there is no need for shielding, and the water could possibly be used to cool it.
- azernik 6y agoUnclear - NASA is currently working on the Kilopower reactor, which is probably lower-power than the enormous solar arrays SpaceX is considering. However, if they're expanded into the megawatt range they could be usable. Shielding is still required, as humans are not the only thing that's vulnerable - electronic and chemical systems are also vulnerable. Burying the reactor in Martian regolith is probably a more risky project than unrolling a massive solar array. The other problem is the cold. At low latitudes, the temperatures are at a relatively warm Antarctica-like level, sometimes getting to room temperature at the equator at noon. At high latitudes, though, we're talking cryogenics - lows of -150C, averages of perhaps -100C. Making machinery work at those temps is expensive.
- jacobush 6y agoI don't understand any of this. On Mars there's a lot of radiation anyway, and humans shouldn't go near the reactor after it's going critical. I don't know what you mean by chemical systems. The point is the reactor doesn't have to be buried, just put it so it's in a crater or behind a ridge (as seen from any settlement) and the radiation is not a problem. As for cryogenics, either make sure it never drops to cryogenic temperatures in the first place, or make something which can be stored at these temperatures. Once it's operational, the temperature should never drop ever again until it's decommisioned.
- Tepix 6y agoThe more we learn about our place in the universe, the more we realize how insignificant we are. I'm now expecting life to be ubiquitous and intelligent life to be rare, yet not unusual. If only 0.001% of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe contain intelligent life and moving from one galaxy to another is prohibitive, that would mean 1 million instances of intelligent life scattered across the universe. We wouldn't be special, but we could hardly detect or even interact with other intelligent life.
- thecopy 6y agoYou are looking only at one dimension: space. But you are forgetting time. Intelligent life on Earth has existed a minuscule amount of time in the span of the universe. You need also to take into the probabilities that we would overlap with another intelligent life on the timeline.
- Tepix 6y agoGood point. Perhaps we ourselves originated from von Neumann probes in the form of single cell organisms, flung into space in all directions by a long gone, highly developed civilization? We don't know how long intelligent life lasts on average. Looking at our current trajectory i'd say chances are that technical civilizations are rather short-lived. PS The Paleozoic began with the Cambrian explosion 541 million year ago, that's quite a long timespan with intelligent life (not a technical civilization, however) even in galactic timescales.
- EamonnMR 6y agoConsider how long life existed before the Cambrian explosion happened though. What are the chances that metazoans evolve from a given planet's microorganisms? One in eight per billion years?
- untog 6y agoI wouldn’t recommend it as an exploration of the topic but the movie Prometheus touches on this theory.
- BelleOfTheBall 6y ago> It’s thought that any underground lakes on Mars must have a reasonably high salt content for the water to remain liquid. This means that any lifeforms in that water are unlikely but is it possible that the water remains liquid through something other than salt? Because the other alternative would be a lifeform that isn't influenced by salt as much as any that we know.
- koeng 6y agoHalophiles are a thing on earth and they live in extremely high salt content areas
- qchris 6y agoI know halophiles typically refer to organisms like bacteria, but one of my personal favourites in that category is the Devil's Hole pupfish, a species found exclusively in Death Valley. They live in water so salty (4x the saline concentration as most other fish) that they actually have to drink the water around them and process the salt internally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_pupfish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_pupfish [2] https://travelnevada.com/wildlife/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-devils-hole-and-the-worlds-rarest-fish/ https://travelnevada.com/wildlife/10-things-you-need-to-know...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tectonic 6y agoSo much of astronomy and planetary science focuses on water right now. Here are some more recent results about water: - The bright, salty deposits that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spotted on Ceres likely come from briny water escaping from a 418 km across underground reservoir 48 km below the surface (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8). Two reservoirs were spotted by analyzing the dwarf planet’s gravitational field. The salt deposits are young, suggesting that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, is still an active world. Ceres joins the growing list of solar system bodies that likely host hidden oceans: Enceladus (now with recently detected fresh interior ice), Europa, Ganymede, Pluto, and subglacial lakes on Mars. - Some of Earth's water may have come from the breakdown of organic space-born molecules (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6), while the rest could have come from hydrogen locked up in enstatite chondrite meteorites (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110), instead of being delivered by comets and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that formed beyond the snow line, as has been previously assumed. - Juno took the first image of Ganymede’s north pole (https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-first-images-of-jovian-moon-ganymedes-north https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-first-...). Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury, is made mostly of water ice. The ice near its north pole appears to have been altered by Jupiter’s intense radiation to become an amorphous material without crystalline structure. Oh, and here's a recently-released mission poster for NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission to study the Jovian moon’s icy shell and liquid saltwater ocean: https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey-to-an-ocean-world-poster/ https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey... Our next issue of Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com) is coincidentally all about water.
- tectonic 6y agoAnd fresh geysers on Enceladus: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/saturns-moon-enceladus-shows-fresh-ice-more-geysers-on-the-tiny-iceworld https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/saturns-moon-enceladus-shows-f...
- reaperducer 6y agoNASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission As long as it stays in orbit. I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to land on Europa. Some monolith mentioned it.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI immediately thought of Dr. Who - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waters_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waters_of_Mars
- Shared404 6y agoI don't put anything past 2020 any more. Jokes aside, If there is any life on other celestial bodies, I wonder if there will be diseases that we carry/they have that would prove destructive to us/them. Or perhaps the biology would be different enough that there wouldn't be a risk.
- phoenixdblack 6y agoCame here to see if anyone had the same idea
- woeirua 6y agoIMO, I don't think it should be a surprise that we will eventually find signs of extraterrestial (but not necessarily intelligent) life in our solar system. The real question is: does it share any common building blocks with life on Earth or not? The answer to that question could dramatically change our understanding of our place in the universe as well as open up entire new fields of productive research in biochemistry.
- Ericson2314 6y agoYeah, if it's really similar it will blow brains for one reason, and if it's really different for another. I hope it's really different. I don't want to be that special.
- hnracer 6y agoI hope it's the same, because if it's different it suggests our impending extinction. At least according to the logic of Bostrom's Great Filter.
- klysm 6y agoConversely wouldn’t imply the other life’s impending extinction symmetrically?
- hnracer 6y agoIt would imply their extinction far into the future, after they've evolved to our level of intelligence, since our existence implies that the Great Filter exists ahead of us, not behind us
- pharke 6y agoI don't think we know enough to say that for sure. If you are defining the great filter as the cause of the Fermi Paradox then it very well could be in our past. For example, the conditions or specific mutation that gave rise to multi-cellular life could be the great filter meaning that single celled life could be incredibly common but multicellular life might be almost entirely non-existent.
- noncoml 6y agoWhen searching for extra-terrestrial life, why do we assume that it can only be based on organic chemistry? Wouldn't it be possible to have life that is not based on carbon, water, etc..?
- gameswithgo 6y agocarbon is unique among elements in the number of molecules it can form. silicon is a distant second and everything else is pretty much a non starter. water is less of a requirement but you need some kind of liquid for the reactions to occur in and their arent many candidate liquids at plausible temperatures
- DoctorOetker 6y agohogwash stability is not a strict function of molecular structure and atomic composition, it is also a function of environmental factors like temperature, pressure, acidity, ... The reason many of those inorganic polymers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inorganic_polymer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inorganic_polymer have a dangling string of "unprocessable" attached is because they're simply reactive with other chemical species (organic or inorganic) in our biosphere, or simply less or unstable at our earthly standard conditions... if humanity does ever make contact with alien species, we might get tempted to invite them in our Czochralsky crucible if they are rare enough, and vice versa
- x3n0ph3n3 6y agoPossible? Yes. Likely? No, especially given that most of the solar system is composed of material in similar quantities. It's possible we could find different forms of life-producing chemistry in star systems with different proportions of elements.
- samsari 6y agoWe assume that because literally all of the life we have ever observed is based on organic chemistry.
- carterklein13 6y ago
- hikerclimber 6y agotoo bad we are going to run out of water soon. such exciting times we live in... more war and famine. yes yes yes
- jula432vdf 6y agoIt would be the surprise of the millenia (till now at least), to find the novel coronavirus down there.
- bregma 6y agoSo they discover phosphenes in the clouds of Venus and suddenly they're discovering more water on Mars. See what a little competition in the space race can do?
- SCNP 6y agoIs anyone else concerned about the prime directive? I worry that our interference could inhibit the natural evolution process to the point that it doesn't happen. I guess that's not to say that some Prometheus-style, ancient alien civilization intervention didn't happen in our history; I don't think we'd ever know. But it seems to me that the genesis of mitochondria is an extremely rare and unlikely event and our interference on these extra-terrestrial bodies may put it all astray. Again, we'd never know... At least not for a few hundred million years.
- notsuoh 6y agoThe same Prime Directive from the fictional show Star Trek? No, I am not concerned.
- RhodesianHunter 6y agoI would be much more concerned about the 200-2000 species that we knowingly cause to go extinct right here on earth every year than I would be about the vanishingly remote possibility that we may be interfering with an evolutionary leap in a microorganism which may or may not exist.
- mordymoop 6y agoWhen they say "buried lakes" do they just mean region of sediment that is water saturated or brine saturated, like an aquifer? Or do they mean a volume of relatively pure continuous water? Very difficult to tell from the fuzzy language these releases use.
- WhompingWindows 6y agoIt's not sedimentary areas, I believe, the press release states these are lakes or regions of water (depth not stated). Numerous dissenting viewpoints were brought up about how it may not actually be liquid water, maybe it's slush or some intermediate form of water in these underground deposits.
- phoenixdblack 6y agoIf we ever plan to make a manned mission to that place, we better pack enough water filters and a nuclear reactor, else we solely rely on a mad man in a blue box.