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Mars has a layer of molten rock inside
- throwaway4736 3y ago[flagged]
- jakey_bakey 3y agolol
- user3939382 3y agoGuys guys. Haven’t you read the rules? No sense of humor allowed! Limit your comments to complaints about scroll hijacking and nitpicks.
- hutzlibu 3y agoThe rules don't say that. They say no shallow comments. Humor can be shallow, or not. Judge for yourself the comments in question.
- deely3 3y agoDownvotes of different opinion. Heh. Reminds me of reddit.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoTo be fair, this is at least a step above Reddit where stepping out of line is an instant permaban I can handle the complaining np
- jimnotgym 3y agoWe need to go there so we can study it properly. What would the Victorians, or Columbus, think of us if they saw how we gave up after going to the moon a few times.
- mcv 3y agoI think they would first want to know if there were any natives worth enslaving there. I kid. I agree we should go there. But not because of Columbus specifically.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoIt's actually an interesting comparison. If the Queen of Spain circa 1500 had today's technology she wouldn't care nearly as much about Mars as she did then about India (sic) because extracting anything from Mars can't possibly be profitable yet. She wasn't in it for the science; she was in it for god, glory and gold, and not necessarily in that order.
- jimnotgym 3y agoOn the other hand both Spanish capital and Columbus personally took a huge risk. They knew less about what lay ahead than we know about Mars. They new the rewards were high, but the risks were enormous.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoColombus and his band of scoundrels certainly took a huge risk. He was hell-bent on joining the aristocracy, and it seems to have made him willing to believe and argue things that a less motivated person might not have done. Google says his whole expedition cost about 1.5 million maravedis. I'm not finding what fraction of the Spanish crown's budget that was. Do you know?
- gosub100 3y agoAnd in 600 years, modern society might consider _us_ slaves for having to work under duress for the wealthy elite.
- yieldcrv 3y ago“there must not have been any gold”
- 3y ago
- phkahler 3y agoI thought the "reason" mars has no magnetic field is that its core solidified a long time ago. How does this new finding affect understanding of Mars magnetics?
- pixl97 3y agoEarths core spins slightly faster than its surface. If Mars core is locked with its surface speed because it is more viscous then this may kill the field generation ability.
- jpitz 3y agoRecently, it has come to light that the relative rotational speed of Earth's core seems to have a decades long cycle of leading and lagging the surface. https://www.space.com/earth-inner-core-slowing-study https://www.space.com/earth-inner-core-slowing-study
- tomrod 3y agoOof. Does that mean it could lock in at any time? Internal dynamics are weeeeird. Wonder if the moon affects this.
- coderenegade 3y agoI mean the moon has to have some effect, right? Given the effect it has on the oceans, it must have some effect on a liquid core as well. It's actually surprising that it's not the number one suspect for causing/ generating Earth's magnetic field (whatever the mechanism) when you consider that Earth is the planet with both the relative largest magnetic field in the solar system, and the relative largest moon. Not to mention, most of the planet's surface is covered by an electrolyte. If both Mars and Venus have liquid cores and not much in the way of a magnetic field, it seems like there must be more to it, and it's likely to be one (or a combination) of factors that makes Earth unique in the solar system.
- bell-cot 3y ago
- robg 3y agoThe push for humans on Mars is deeply misguided. The same resources should be used to send many more probes and for far longer durations. After 100 years of deeply mapping all available resources, then maybe send humans if a long-term colony is self-sustainable and necessary for deep space exploration with better propulsion technologies. Edit: Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die lonely deaths. Surprised people seem confused on the necessary and sufficient conditions. Show me that robots can set up a self-sustaining colony with self-generating resources to get to other worlds, and that’s a legit “backup” plan. Otherwise we’re just arguing about edge cases with no viable solutions. You don’t need humans on Mars to show what’s possible.
- baq 3y agoYou're missing that a man with a shovel can find out in a day what a robotic probe cannot find out in a year, unless you're talking serious AI.
- robg 3y agoYou’re telling me we can’t send, in the next 100 years, a fleet of remote controlled backhoes with the same sensors and assays the human would use?
- runeofdoom 3y agoWith no buried fiber to feed on, the backhoes will starve.
- macNchz 3y agoI don’t really see what a person with a shovel could accomplish that a robot can’t, other than consuming the vast majority of the project budget on life support systems.
- tomrod 3y agoEyes.
- throw1234651234 3y agoI have to ask the stupid question: Geothermal heating and energy production is still impossible in a practical sense, right?
- mr_toad 3y agoDepends how deep you want to dig. Digging really deep holes to harness geothermal energy is a popular idea in SF.
- kaycebasques 3y agoThe ingenuity (and accumulated knowledge) of people never stops amazing me. "Well, we can't actually drill into Mars to see what it's made of, so let's slap a marsquake detector on the surface and we'll measure seismic energy from meteor impacts to figure out what this bad boy's guts are made of." Of course no NASA person actually talks like this; I have been reading too much Heinlein. Also, they use the term "marsquake". Never stopped to think about how geocentric the term "earthquake" is!
- KingLancelot 3y agoIt’ll blown your mind when you realize what “Geo” means. (Geo is the Greek word for Earth)
- qiine 3y agomoonquake exist too ! https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/14/world/moonquakes-apollo-17-scn/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/14/world/moonquakes-apollo-1...
- kaycebasques 3y ago[flagged]
- wongarsu 3y agoAs the article shortly touches on, it's how we know what the earth is made out of too. Our deepest borehole reaches 0.2% of the distance to the middle of the earth, most of what we know is instead from measuring seismic waves from earthquakes.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoMy question is, if we were to dig a hole to the centre and carve out a sphere there, would the very central point have no gravity? My thinking is that the mass is in all directions so the gravity would cancel out in the middle. You’d then have an inside surface you could run around on which would have gravity.
- ojosilva 3y agoOff-topic nitpicking: I find it intriguing to encounter the term "marsquake" in scientific articles, or anywhere outside science fiction. Replacing the prefix "earth" with the nomenclature of a celestial body is somewhat perplexing and unnecessary. This practice is more plausible when applied to "Earth," our own planet with that capitalized "E" - for instance, the transformation from "earthling" to "marsling" is linguistically sound. Are we going to now "unmars" new data from these studies? Will potatoes grown on Mars have a "marsy" taste to them? Will this practice scale when we finally colonize the Solar System and have to replace these words for each and every planet or moon? Should "colonize" be called "elonize" the Solar System since Columbus is controversially bound to Earth history alone? /s
- AnIrishDuck 3y ago> Will potatoes grown on Mars have a "marsy" taste to them? Probably will depend on whether there is a difference you can taste from earthy to "marsy" potatoes. Some experimental trials [1] have indicated that growing potatoes on Mars will be difficult, but possible. Google is telling me Geosmin is the chemical typically associated with earthy odor and taste [2]. The mars regolith is apparently quite salty, so it's completely possible that "marsy" taste may become associated with some similar common chemical product of martian agriculture? 1. https://cipotato.org/annualreport2016/stories/mars-potatoes/ https://cipotato.org/annualreport2016/stories/mars-potatoes/ 2. https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/g/geosmin.html https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/g/geosmin.h...
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Should "colonize" be called "elonize" the Solar System since Columbus is controversially bound to Earth history alone? There isn't a relationship between the word "colonize" and Columbus.
- ojosilva 3y agoYou're absolutely right! I've always thought it came from the Spanish "Colon" (Columbus), but it's from the Latin colonus ("tiller of the soil, farmer"). Elonize still makes, ahem, a great neologism.
- bilsbie 3y agoWhy no magnetic field then?
- bell-cot 3y agoSpoiler: The "surprise" layer is (relatively) quite thin, and just outside Mars' molten core. That Mars has a molten interior is not a surprise at all, and evidence for very recent (relatively) volcanic activity on the Martian surface has been piling up for a century or more.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RadixDLT 3y agothere is a reason most planets are round in shape
- devoutsalsa 3y agoHydrostatic equilibrium! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_equilibrium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_equilibrium
- spandextwins 3y agoNeed to accelerate spacex. Get to mars now!
- p5a0u9l 3y agoAmazing to me that this billion dollar plus mission (InSight) is now offline because of dust on solar panels. We’ve had solar panels more than four decades now. I don’t assume the challenge is easy, and know that dust is endemic to Mars, but think of the impact from solving this problem on longevity of future missions! After establishing a habitat, Mars visitors need to revive all the offline experiments with a hanky.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThat’s why nuclear is the meta. They’re too scared to use it regularly but it’s perfect. No maintenance and guaranteed power for decades. The problem with solar is it’s really easy if you have a settler there, they just wipe it. But trying to get a robot to wipe itself means dealing with all kinds of edge cases. What if it’s windy and the wiper snaps off, what if the wiper gets jammed with dust, what if the wiper scratches up the panels.