11 ms·

Suddenly, It Seems, Water Is Everywhere in Solar System

200 points by brkumar 12y ago

bane 12y ago
It's not too much of a surprise, both elements that go into water are plentiful and not particularly heavy, and both want to bind to something.
- MoistDinosaur 12y ago
  college kids on spring break in Cancun?
- T-hawk 12y ago
  It's surprising (water is perceived to be scarce) because: - oxygen just as readily binds to everything else, to form metal oxides (the well-known rust on Mars) or silicates (rock) or just CO2 (Venus) - hydrogen is so light it readily escapes into space from anything smaller than Earth - H2O as solid ice is common anyway, but not as liquid water, which is more relevant for potential habitability and life. The conditions for the liquid phase of water are a remarkably narrow area on the phase diagram. That we have found in few locations, and it's news when a new such place is discovered.
  - crystaln 12y ago
    If there is both vapor and ice, there must always be at least some water. If water is plentiful, space is cold, and planets are hot, liquid water should be common, regardless of how narrow the temperature conditions for it are. All temperatures from cold space to molten rock are well represented on planets.
    - rthomas6 12y ago
      That's not true at all. It depends on the pressure. http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_education/equilibria/h2o_phase_diagram_-_color.v2.jpg http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_educati...
      - crystaln 12y ago
        Excuse me. As long as the pressure is at least 0.006 atm. Is that what your point is?
        rthomas6 12y ago
        Yes. The pressure of space is not sufficient for liquid water, regardless of how hot or cold it is. This means that regardless of how much ice or vapor exists on separate terrestrial bodies, we cannot assume that there is liquid somewhere in between. Now, if there was a single planet that had both ice and vapor water, and that planet had an atmospheric pressure of greater than 0.006 atm, then I agree that there must be some liquid water somewhere on that planet. But ice and vapor on a single planet with a sufficient atmosphere is a much higher bar to clear than two totally separate places that combined have both ice and water vapor.
        crystaln 12y ago
        If you actually read what I wrote, you would have understood I was referring to water on planets. Obviously there is not likely to be liquid water in the vacuum of space. The "space is cold" "planets are hot" might have been a pretty sure clue that I was referring to water between a planet's hot core and cold vacuous space.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  You're misunderstanding the relevance here. Water the molecule is common throughout the solar system, typically as ice. It makes up a significant fraction of the mass of many of the moons of outer planets. It's a common component of comets and other minor planetary bodies. Titan, for example, is about half water ice, but it is so cold there that it is effectively a rock. What we've been learning is that there is water ice in some places we didn't necessarily expect it before (such as in the form of permafrost underlying much of the Martian surface) and most importantly that liquid water is not as uncommon as we once thought. Liquid water is what's most interesting from the point of view of looking for environments that can support life forms. Previously we thought that the presence of liquid water required not only the presence of water as a material but also overall planetary temperatures in a temperate range, the so called "habitable zone". Which, as it turns out, is a fairly narrow zone. But we've learned that there seem to be numerous circumstances that allow the existence of substantial quantities of liquid water in conditions that otherwise would not support it. Europa, for example, has frigid surface temperatures (150 to 200 degrees C below freezing) but it has a sub-surface ocean due to tidal interactions with its neighbors. That sort of thing seems to be much more common than we knew previously.
bladedtoys 12y ago
Has anyone thought much about an (admittedly near impossible) probe to burrow and submarine around in the oceans of some of the juicier Galilean and Saturnian moons?
- Shivetya 12y ago
  I thought NASA was already planning for such to go to Europa
  - kchangnyt 12y ago
    Yes, NASA is working on Europa Clipper: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/ http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/ But that would just make multiple flybys of Europa, not land or tunnel into the water.
- V-2 12y ago
  For what it's worth, there's quite a decent s-f movie "Europa Report" about a manned mission to the Jupiter's moon. It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe.
  - ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
    Unless you've read Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series; in which case you are mostly infuriated by it.
  - xpinguin 12y ago
    >It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe. Yeah, by being fully made of those. [SPOILER ALERT] * lack of crew psychological cross-matching * some ludicrously exoggerated hydrazine drama * chloroplast-equipped organisms in the environment which ambient light spectrum is slightly inclined towards gamma radiation (not to mention the meat-packed space vessel itself, brightly shined up by very same light) * _one_ central computer with sole purpose to be heroically repaired on the _outer_ shell of the vessel (you see, no EVA - no drama) * (mentioned ending) transferring at least tens of gigabytes from Europe to Earth in a matter of seconds (via that special hero-driven central computer) despite being unable to establish uplink for past several months already due to the broken trasmitter (of course, unreserved) --- Well, I understand that this is just a movie, but look, why not to put it in agreement with some common sense?
tempodox 12y ago
Fascinating! However, I get the cringes every time an article about space exploration uses those atavistic units like Royal Hangnails (length), Princely Bladders (volume), Regal Farts (speed) and Fornicating Fever (temperature) for measurement. Hasn't the metric system arrived yet on planet USA?
- saucetenuto 12y ago
  Yes it has! It conquered our soda industry and then gave up.
  - RankingMember 12y ago
    "Yeah I'll have a quart of Coke" certainly sounds weird. It is strange now that I think about it that we have imperial measurements for milk but metric measurements for sugary drinks/beer.
    - RandallBrown 12y ago
      I usually buy/order sugary drinks and beer by the ounce or pint. Other than 1 and 2 liter bottles of pop, I can't really think of any time I would buy pop or beer using the metric system.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        Cans of soda are most commonly 330ml.
        RandallBrown 12y ago
        In the US, they're mostly 12 ounces.
    - vonmoltke 12y ago
      Beer and soda bottled or canned for individual servings still use imperial units (12oz/16oz/20oz). Oddly, water bottled for such has mostly moved over to metric. Keg beer also still uses imperial.
Mahn 12y ago
Does anyone else think NASA should reconsider their plans for a manned mission to Mars? With Europe, Ceres, Enceladus, Ganymede and many more promising moons out there it seems kind of a waste to spend time, effort and capital in Mars now.
- dfinninger 12y ago
  Mars would be the first long-term space based mission. If you've only made a pillow-fort (ISS), or stayed in a tent in your backyard (moon), wouldn't you try to camp in your local state park before backpacking into the wilderness?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- Symmetry 12y ago
  Europa is a lot further away than Mars [1]. Every extra 4600 m/s of delta V in the mission means another factor of e in the ratio of initial to payload mass. At least until we develop better high efficiency rockets. [1] http://i.imgur.com/AAGJvD1.png http://i.imgur.com/AAGJvD1.png
  - ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
    I'm simultaneously embarrassed and proud to say that the only time I've seen a subway map like this of a Solar system, it was of Kerbal.
  - throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
    In practice, the ΔV differences are actually way smaller than that chart suggests. Those figures are for direct transfers (per the legend). But if you allow indirect trajectories with gravity assists [0], that makes things drastically cheaper. To intercept Jupiter, you can steal much of the needed ΔV from flybys of the inner planets (at the tradeoff of time, waiting to go around the sun multiple times). And maneuvering within Jupiter's gravity well can be practically free, by flybys of the Galilean moons. The map tells you 8,890 m/s to intercept Europa, which would be horrifying, but none of that actually needs to be propulsion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
PhoenixWright 12y ago
Growing up this was a huge question that nobody knew the answer to. I don't remember the first discovery of water but I do remember reading one after another water finding. Back then water = life and if we found water it was very likely we would find some form of life. I've already read articles talking about microbial life but I think we will soon discover a variety of living forms. That being said I don't think our solar system contains a more advanced being than humans. But what life, in some form, demonstrates is that it is possible, in some place very far away, there are living beings as advanced or more than we are. I would really love to be alive to meet them.
- bostonpete 12y ago
  > That being said I don't think our solar system contains a more advanced being than humans. I can't imagine there would be any real debate over that point.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- Grazester 12y ago
  >But what life, in some form, demonstrates is that it is possible, in some place very far away, there are living beings as advanced or more than we are. I would really love to be alive to meet them. Assuming that they are benign and non threatening but I wouldn't take my chances. I dont hope for this.
  - ecobiker 12y ago
    I understand where this concern comes from. But what I'm unable to reconcile is if a life form can get more "advanced" or even survive long without knowing co-operation and in general being more civilized - Live and let live? Or to point the question inward, let's say humans continue(d) their indiscriminate slaughter of fellow humans and animals around us would we still survive long enough?
gulpahum 12y ago
Do those moons really have a flowing ocean under the icy surface or is it water trapped in rocks? Earth has a huge "ocean" deep in its mantle, but it's inside rocks. http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth....
- kchangnyt 12y ago
  Yes, these are flowing oceans. On Ganymede, it's an ocean between two layers of ice. On Enceladus, it's water below an icy crust and on top of a rocky core.
vortico 12y ago
Everywhere except California apparantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9198260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9198260
- moreproductive 12y ago
  I came here to post this exact post. Bravo. And sad face (I live in LA)
  - myblake 12y ago
    Heh also came to say the same thing. On reddit it would have obviously happened asap but I thought maybe there's less snarky humor on HN. Guess we couldn't resist this one though.
- curiously 12y ago
  well played sir, well played.
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
Suddenly, it seems water is everwhere... ... except California.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

200 points by brkumar 12y ago

bane 12y ago

It's not too much of a surprise, both elements that go into water are plentiful and not particularly heavy, and both want to bind to something.

MoistDinosaur 12y ago
college kids on spring break in Cancun?
T-hawk 12y ago
It's surprising (water is perceived to be scarce) because: - oxygen just as readily binds to everything else, to form metal oxides (the well-known rust on Mars) or silicates (rock) or just CO2 (Venus) - hydrogen is so light it readily escapes into space from anything smaller than Earth - H2O as solid ice is common anyway, but not as liquid water, which is more relevant for potential habitability and life. The conditions for the liquid phase of water are a remarkably narrow area on the phase diagram. That we have found in few locations, and it's news when a new such place is discovered.
- crystaln 12y ago
  If there is both vapor and ice, there must always be at least some water. If water is plentiful, space is cold, and planets are hot, liquid water should be common, regardless of how narrow the temperature conditions for it are. All temperatures from cold space to molten rock are well represented on planets.
  - rthomas6 12y ago
    That's not true at all. It depends on the pressure. http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_education/equilibria/h2o_phase_diagram_-_color.v2.jpg http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/research_educati...
    - crystaln 12y ago
      Excuse me. As long as the pressure is at least 0.006 atm. Is that what your point is?
      - rthomas6 12y ago
        Yes. The pressure of space is not sufficient for liquid water, regardless of how hot or cold it is. This means that regardless of how much ice or vapor exists on separate terrestrial bodies, we cannot assume that there is liquid somewhere in between. Now, if there was a single planet that had both ice and vapor water, and that planet had an atmospheric pressure of greater than 0.006 atm, then I agree that there must be some liquid water somewhere on that planet. But ice and vapor on a single planet with a sufficient atmosphere is a much higher bar to clear than two totally separate places that combined have both ice and water vapor.
        crystaln 12y ago
        If you actually read what I wrote, you would have understood I was referring to water on planets. Obviously there is not likely to be liquid water in the vacuum of space. The "space is cold" "planets are hot" might have been a pretty sure clue that I was referring to water between a planet's hot core and cold vacuous space.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
You're misunderstanding the relevance here. Water the molecule is common throughout the solar system, typically as ice. It makes up a significant fraction of the mass of many of the moons of outer planets. It's a common component of comets and other minor planetary bodies. Titan, for example, is about half water ice, but it is so cold there that it is effectively a rock. What we've been learning is that there is water ice in some places we didn't necessarily expect it before (such as in the form of permafrost underlying much of the Martian surface) and most importantly that liquid water is not as uncommon as we once thought. Liquid water is what's most interesting from the point of view of looking for environments that can support life forms. Previously we thought that the presence of liquid water required not only the presence of water as a material but also overall planetary temperatures in a temperate range, the so called "habitable zone". Which, as it turns out, is a fairly narrow zone. But we've learned that there seem to be numerous circumstances that allow the existence of substantial quantities of liquid water in conditions that otherwise would not support it. Europa, for example, has frigid surface temperatures (150 to 200 degrees C below freezing) but it has a sub-surface ocean due to tidal interactions with its neighbors. That sort of thing seems to be much more common than we knew previously.

bladedtoys 12y ago

Has anyone thought much about an (admittedly near impossible) probe to burrow and submarine around in the oceans of some of the juicier Galilean and Saturnian moons?

Shivetya 12y ago
I thought NASA was already planning for such to go to Europa
- kchangnyt 12y ago
  Yes, NASA is working on Europa Clipper: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/ http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/ But that would just make multiple flybys of Europa, not land or tunnel into the water.
V-2 12y ago
For what it's worth, there's quite a decent s-f movie "Europa Report" about a manned mission to the Jupiter's moon. It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  Unless you've read Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series; in which case you are mostly infuriated by it.
- xpinguin 12y ago
  >It avoids most genre cliches, apart from the very ending maybe. Yeah, by being fully made of those. [SPOILER ALERT] * lack of crew psychological cross-matching * some ludicrously exoggerated hydrazine drama * chloroplast-equipped organisms in the environment which ambient light spectrum is slightly inclined towards gamma radiation (not to mention the meat-packed space vessel itself, brightly shined up by very same light) * _one_ central computer with sole purpose to be heroically repaired on the _outer_ shell of the vessel (you see, no EVA - no drama) * (mentioned ending) transferring at least tens of gigabytes from Europe to Earth in a matter of seconds (via that special hero-driven central computer) despite being unable to establish uplink for past several months already due to the broken trasmitter (of course, unreserved) --- Well, I understand that this is just a movie, but look, why not to put it in agreement with some common sense?

tempodox 12y ago

Fascinating! However, I get the cringes every time an article about space exploration uses those atavistic units like Royal Hangnails (length), Princely Bladders (volume), Regal Farts (speed) and Fornicating Fever (temperature) for measurement. Hasn't the metric system arrived yet on planet USA?

saucetenuto 12y ago
Yes it has! It conquered our soda industry and then gave up.
- RankingMember 12y ago
  "Yeah I'll have a quart of Coke" certainly sounds weird. It is strange now that I think about it that we have imperial measurements for milk but metric measurements for sugary drinks/beer.
  - RandallBrown 12y ago
    I usually buy/order sugary drinks and beer by the ounce or pint. Other than 1 and 2 liter bottles of pop, I can't really think of any time I would buy pop or beer using the metric system.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      Cans of soda are most commonly 330ml.
      - RandallBrown 12y ago
        In the US, they're mostly 12 ounces.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Beer and soda bottled or canned for individual servings still use imperial units (12oz/16oz/20oz). Oddly, water bottled for such has mostly moved over to metric. Keg beer also still uses imperial.

Mahn 12y ago

Does anyone else think NASA should reconsider their plans for a manned mission to Mars? With Europe, Ceres, Enceladus, Ganymede and many more promising moons out there it seems kind of a waste to spend time, effort and capital in Mars now.

dfinninger 12y ago
Mars would be the first long-term space based mission. If you've only made a pillow-fort (ISS), or stayed in a tent in your backyard (moon), wouldn't you try to camp in your local state park before backpacking into the wilderness?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
Symmetry 12y ago
Europa is a lot further away than Mars [1]. Every extra 4600 m/s of delta V in the mission means another factor of e in the ratio of initial to payload mass. At least until we develop better high efficiency rockets. [1] http://i.imgur.com/AAGJvD1.png http://i.imgur.com/AAGJvD1.png
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  I'm simultaneously embarrassed and proud to say that the only time I've seen a subway map like this of a Solar system, it was of Kerbal.
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
  In practice, the ΔV differences are actually way smaller than that chart suggests. Those figures are for direct transfers (per the legend). But if you allow indirect trajectories with gravity assists [0], that makes things drastically cheaper. To intercept Jupiter, you can steal much of the needed ΔV from flybys of the inner planets (at the tradeoff of time, waiting to go around the sun multiple times). And maneuvering within Jupiter's gravity well can be practically free, by flybys of the Galilean moons. The map tells you 8,890 m/s to intercept Europa, which would be horrifying, but none of that actually needs to be propulsion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist

PhoenixWright 12y ago

Growing up this was a huge question that nobody knew the answer to. I don't remember the first discovery of water but I do remember reading one after another water finding. Back then water = life and if we found water it was very likely we would find some form of life. I've already read articles talking about microbial life but I think we will soon discover a variety of living forms. That being said I don't think our solar system contains a more advanced being than humans. But what life, in some form, demonstrates is that it is possible, in some place very far away, there are living beings as advanced or more than we are. I would really love to be alive to meet them.

bostonpete 12y ago
> That being said I don't think our solar system contains a more advanced being than humans. I can't imagine there would be any real debate over that point.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
Grazester 12y ago
>But what life, in some form, demonstrates is that it is possible, in some place very far away, there are living beings as advanced or more than we are. I would really love to be alive to meet them. Assuming that they are benign and non threatening but I wouldn't take my chances. I dont hope for this.
- ecobiker 12y ago
  I understand where this concern comes from. But what I'm unable to reconcile is if a life form can get more "advanced" or even survive long without knowing co-operation and in general being more civilized - Live and let live? Or to point the question inward, let's say humans continue(d) their indiscriminate slaughter of fellow humans and animals around us would we still survive long enough?

gulpahum 12y ago

Do those moons really have a flowing ocean under the icy surface or is it water trapped in rocks? Earth has a huge "ocean" deep in its mantle, but it's inside rocks. http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth....

kchangnyt 12y ago
Yes, these are flowing oceans. On Ganymede, it's an ocean between two layers of ice. On Enceladus, it's water below an icy crust and on top of a rocky core.

vortico 12y ago

Everywhere except California apparantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9198260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9198260

moreproductive 12y ago
I came here to post this exact post. Bravo. And sad face (I live in LA)
- myblake 12y ago
  Heh also came to say the same thing. On reddit it would have obviously happened asap but I thought maybe there's less snarky humor on HN. Guess we couldn't resist this one though.
curiously 12y ago
well played sir, well played.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

Suddenly, it seems water is everwhere... ... except California.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]