Lots of Water on Mars

The top image shows the radar imaging of underground structures on Mars, below that is the typography of that same region and the radar swath is represented by the white line that cuts through it.

In the radar image, the point at which the traces or “layers” split into two (on the left side) is where it is thought that the materials change and so the radar is echoing again off that lower subsurface. They also add that “the strength of the lower echo suggests that the intervening material is nearly pure water ice”, which apparently may translate into a depth of 3.5 kilometres of ice. This image is not alone, additional radar scans have suggested ice that runs to a depth of 1.5km in other places with surely many more to come.

It would seem that the intended purpose of finding where, or if, water exists on Mars has more or less been satisfied. I don’t think that anyone expected to find this much evidence of water on Mars between the recently discovered water flows and now a nearly planetwide (theoretical) underground reservior of pure water ice. Future astronauts on Mars will not go thirsty!

Wallpaper: Mars Sunset Over Husband Hill

This is another fine example of freelance imagers at work. Many of whom spend time at unmannedspaceflight.com. 

Rosetta at Mars

This gorgeous true color full globe of Mars may become the definitive Mars portrait image for the planet. For those may not have noticed, I have tried to apply a “portrait” label on at least one image per body as being the best representative full globe image of that world. The image I currently have tagged for Mars is that great image of Valles Marineris cutting across a near full disc of Mars taken by Viking.

Also worth posting is this semi-color image of Mars seen from behind the solar panels of the probe itself. It was taken by the lander attached to Rosetta which will one day detach itself from the parent probe and make an attempt to actually land on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. It looks as if it was originally a black and white image and someone at ESA just applied a color tone to the Mars globe, although I could be wrong.

2 Missions Swing by 2 Planets

The month of February is treating us to two gravity-assists and a chance to do some observations on the way to their primary objectives. On the 25th the ESA Rosetta probe, on its way to a comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko landing in 2014, will swing by Mars and momentarily join the gaggle of various probes currently studying Mars. Still a small disk in its view, this is how Mars looks to Rosetta set against the Milky Way.

Then on the 28th, New Horizons on its way to Pluto will swing by Jupiter and conduct the first up close observations of the gas giant since the demise of Galileo. Jupiter at current already fills New Horizon’s full view.

Phoenix: Failure Avoided

The above image was returned to the team assigned the task of selecting a landing spot for this summer’s launch of the Phoenix lander. This has been considered for years and once the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was placed in orbit around Mars, one of it’s highest priority tasks was the image this proposed area. As you can see, what was previously thought to be a fairly flat safe place to put down a lander has turned out instead to be littered with boulders that compare in size to the lander itself. Many missions to Mars in human history have ended in failure, especially when including the many Russian probes which were lost to various problems. Attempting to touch down in this area could certainly have spelled doom for the Phoenix lander and we would never have known without the high resolution eyes of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Maybe NASA would have gotten lucky again, but this looks to many as a disaster avoided.

Wallpaper: Martian Water Ice

Trying to think of the best image to post for Christmas, I figured this snowy looking crater on Mars would do. Not nearly as exciting as the recently discovered flowing water on Mars, but for an alien winter scene… it’ll do.

Another Amazing Animation from Maas Digital

If you have never seen the incredibly real animation of landing a Mars rover on Mars made by the people at MAAS Digital, you have to see this. Normally these computer generated animations are hardly real not only in look, but the physics usually feel quite fake as well. NASA finally got around to finding someone who could turn around a truly real animation of what landing on Mars actually looks and feels like. When stages drop and seperate you really get a sense of it. When the MER air bags inflate and bounce to a resting stop, you would swear there was a camera on the ground to capture the process.

Now the same masters at MAAS Digital give us a preview of what the Mars Phoenix Lander will hopefully be successfully executing in May of 2008 when it lands on the Martian surface. I didn’t get a chance to see the incredible MER animation until well after the mission was already operating at Mars, so it’s nice to see this well before the mission is even launched to get a sense of what is to come.

Life in the Hood: Mars

While most scientists are more excited by some of the possibilities that Europa may offer, the next most likely place to find some kind of life is still Mars. Even after all the landers, rovers and orbiting observers, Mars still keeps dropping hints that there may still be some kind of rare environs in a few places where any life that may have once flourished could still have survived these many millions of years since the planet dried up. Just last week the first direct evidence of liquid water moving across its surface was presented at a special news conference based upon the observations of the now defunct Mars Global Surveyor (see wallpaper image below). Perhaps whatever small amount of underground water still exists on Mars still plays host to some simple forms of life which have adapted and learned to also go to where the water went, which seems to be underground.

Most expect that if we ever find anything hopeful on Mars it will be in the form of a fossilized record. Many doubt that life on Mars is current and the assumption is that the odds are highly in favor of Mars having once been a habitable place many, many years ago when it was much wetter. There is a huge amount of evidence on that presents us with what looks like a once saturated landscape of rivers, lakes and even oceans. Had this been the case, it seems very likely that Mars may have once given rise to life on its surface and if it did – there would likely be a vast geological record of these organisms left behind.

In a related story… once in a while an Antarctic meteorite remnant is found that turns out to be one of a very rare kind which scientists are now sure are of Martian origin (they have 12 of these actually). They know this because when they drill into these meteors and find small bubbles of gas exist (as they do in most rocks) that contain almost the same exact composition of gasses that are found in the atmosphere on Mars. Leaving us with the conclusion that they must be of Martian origin as the coincidental likelihood of a rock left over from the formation of the Solar System having trapped gasses which exactly match that of the Martian atmosphere is extremely thin – if not impossible. The theory goes that some colossal impacts took place on Mars which scattered debris largely on the surface, but left a few chunks flying so fast and furious at the right speeds that they not only escaped the Martian atmosphere, but even the gravitational pull of Mars itself. Whereas they are left to wander the solar system for potentially millions of years until a chance encounter with the Earth results in an all-natural cosmic sample return mission from Mars.

In the 90’s a paper was published in Science magazine that proposed the discovery of the first organic compounds to be found in a Martian meteorite. Furthermore, the authors of this paper observed that there may be mineralogical features that may be fossil evidence of ancient Martian organisms (see left). Excitement on this finding was high and the impact of its meaning went as high as the President of The United States making a specific statement on it at a news briefing, after all, it would be the first evidence of life outside of Earth to have ever been detected. Since that exciting time, many scientists have come out to refute each of the individual findings and have stated that they each could have each come from processes which were non-biological. However, the paper’s authors still contend that circumstances are far too coincidental and that “when considered collectively… we conclude that [these phenomena] are evidence for primitive life on early Mars”.

The jury is still out.

Life in the Hood: Europa

There are two schools of thought in the world on extra-terrestrial life coming from people who think seriously of such things. One is that the universe is teeming with life, yes… teeming. A good majority of folks these days think the universe is lousy with life forms. The second theory is that here on Earth life is a rare and possibly singular event. Either of these conclusions are quite a leap of faith for lack not only of evidence, but for opportunities to even discover any of the evidence needed to support either assertion. You see, the universe is spread out in a big way. It takes light from Earth a bit over 4 years to reach the nearest star to our sun Alpha Centauri, meaning that any astronomers at Centauri who might be peering out in our general direction see us as we were 4 years ago. So if it takes light that long to get to our nearest neighbor, you can imagine how long it would take our fastest, newest spacecraft to reach there. Using technologies not even mature enough to consider actually using, it still could take us 40+ years just to reach that nearest star… and that’s probably a liberal estimate. So apart from someone developing a hyper-warp drive which can surpass the speed of light (which they tell me is not only impossible but pose an awful lot of other difficult circumstances) or someone at SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) picks up a faint and 25 year old signal coming from Vega (see the film Contact for reference), it would seem for the time being we are stuck having to search our own neighborhood.

About 30 years ago the outlook for life in our own solar system seemed bleak. The moon was as desolate as one could imagine and Mars when spied by Mariner 4 for the first time, up-close (see above), shocked and disappointed many with a surface that seemed more akin to our moon than with Earth. Gone were all the dreams of Martians directing canals to their great cities or even the hope of a Mars rat scurrying across the red dunes. In addition to this, the assumption was that the rest of the Solar System was hopelessly cold and unworthy of hosting even the smallest of microbes. The gas giants were surface-less hostile environs, most bodies lacked breathable air of any kind and Venus was so hot it would immediately fry anything hoping to eek out a living on its surface. Finally, after the Viking landers determined Mars to be lifeless in the 70’s (in what many now call a flawed experiment) most gave up hope and began seeing the Solar System as nothing more than a place filled with mostly cold lonely destinations offering mankind little more than an ultimate challenge of survival away from home. That was until Voyager sped by Jupiter and its moons a few years later and a small world most have never even heard of, named Europa, held out a glimmer of hope to those in the know.

After returning the first images of Europa’s surface riddled with ridges, cracks and what looked like considerable geological activity (see above wallpaper, actually taken by the Galileo not Voyager) many began to speculate these features must be the result of a vast underground ocean which causes stress on the outer “shell” and causes it to crack. This theory was propped up further when Galileo arrived at Jupiter in the 90’s. Much better resolution images revealed much greater detail including what appeared to be “icebergs” in a large region that from a distance appeared to look like shattered glass. You could easily see where one “berg” broke off from another and floated a distance away by some means (see below). This makes many as sure of the underground ocean on Europa as you can get without actually drilling down through the icy crust and plunking down into the wet core.

So if we have a moon made largely of water ice, who is being internally heated by tidal forces coming from Jupiter, we can almost assume that much of this body would be melted ice as you move down from the rock-hard frozen surface toward the warm center… and… one can assume that somewhere in between hot in the middle and cold on the surface, there may be a large zone of warm waters as cool and warm as that found on any Hawaiian beach. Meanwhile here on Earth, we have found that life survives nearly any hostile environment from 200 degree heat vents of acid water on the ocean floor to microbes found frozen in Antarctica. The theory goes, if life survives in hell on Earth why not a comparable heaven on Europa?

Present Day Water Flows on Mars

There seem to be 2 new “gully” sites with light toned markings on the surface that suggest that liquid water has flowed as recently as within the past 7 years on Mars. The smoking gun is revealed in earlier images taken of the same region with these details not present and this is what gives NASA the time frame of 7 years.

Here is a before and after image which illustrates this: More to be found at www.msss.com.

An interesting footnote is that they also discovered recent impact craters that fell within the last 10 years as well… which is also a first in the Solar System.

Big News from The Red Planet?

There is a buzz about a 1PM impromptu news conference at NASA today about some “significant” finds on Mars from the Mars Global Surveyor. Word has it it may be about water currently existing on the surface, I was under the impression that they knew ice water exists on the surface, so perhaps this is liquid moving water?! Link to a news story.

More Landers on Mars from Orbit

Some new images of Mars landers taken by MRO. The first is the Viking 1 and 2 landers which landed on Mars some 30 years ago. The third is the Spirit rover’s current position. Viking 2 Viking 1 Spirit Rover

Wallpaper: Opportunity at Victoria Crater

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a look at The Opportunity Rover as it approached Victoria Crater and returned these incredible images. The highest resolution images of Mars that came from any previous mission could make out details as big as a large truck. Now with MRO details as small as a sofa can be seen and to illustrate this, download the hires of this wallpaper and take a look at the tiny rover at the crater’s edge.

Wallpaper: Mars Portrait

Mars is historically the most popular planet in our system. It has been the subject of many science-fiction stories as well as legitimate scientific investigation in the search for life outside of our own home. Recent missions to Mars have all but confirmed the idea that Mars was at one time a wet Earthlike place, covered rivers, seas and even oceans. Where all that water has gone is the subject of great interest and many have not given up the idea that we may one day still find some kind of life there if not the remains of life that had at one time thrived on the surface.The below wallpaper was the previous “portrait” image of Mars, but I have decided that the new Rosetta image of Mars captured during its gravity assist in 2007 is a better full globe image of the red planet. Notice the color variation… which is true? Well, the newer one from 2007 looks closer to Hubble views as seen from Earth orbit and unless they are manipulating colors from Hubble it would lead me to think that the Rosetta image is more honest.