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Water on Mars

19:52 / 27.05.02

Wow, Nasa has found huge quantities of water under the martian surface.
BBC:Water on Mars

Add this to the fact that China is looking very seriously at space exploration and colonisation and all of a sudden space is sexy, and not just for National Missile Defence.

I've always through Space was cool and that going to Mars would happen, but bloody hell here it is, we can live on mars if we want to, there's enough water to cover mars with a 500m deep ocean. Thats a lot of water.Might even find some life up there once we have a good poke round.

Yet at the same time, all those old sci-fi books come back to me, you know with the cold war in spaaaace. Wonder if this will make Bush take a look at the night sky if there are 'slanty eyed foreigners' up there looking down on him.

But still gave me a bit of cheer to see that as a race its not all bigger bombs and we can actually use missiles for cool stuff. Who knows might even get that jetpac I was expecting in 2001

20:13 / 27.05.02

Yeah, this is cool. I'm not sure that anyone is really prepared to spend the money required for a manned expedition to Mars, but that could change and this makes it look a lot more likely.

08:21 / 28.05.02

I don't think it will be one country...if a Mars landing goes ahead, it will probably end up being a collaborative effort, like the international space station.

Of course, if the chinese announce their intention to claim the red planet, I'm sure Dubya's speech-writers and spin-doctors will whip up a Kennedy-esque Mars-landing speech in no time. Who knows, this could be the very thing the world economy needs: A new space-technology race.

16:39 / 28.05.02

I dont think most of the world has their ecomony in the least bit intersted in the space race. Especially the third world looking for food types.

I too had the flashback to the sci-fi stuff when I heard that..But I tought: "great, now all we need is wormsign and fremen to deal with."

Harold Washington died for you

01:34 / 29.05.02

The way things are going here on earth I think we need a good space exploration binge to take our mind off our problems. At any rate it would be an excellent reason to make Alpha more than a tourist spot for rich white men.

On a different note, I found it interesting so many sci fi writers predicted there were massive aquifers under the Martian regolith years ago.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

12:45 / 01.06.02

of course dubya would manage to mis-pronounce "Martian" in the speech

02:31 / 20.02.03

It appears that there might be snow on Mars via images from a monitoring satellite. Seems that the presence of water there is more and more likely...

The Photographer in Blowup

18:45 / 20.02.03

Water on Mars? And it's confirmed?

They should have discovered that ten years ago - now is not the time to go adventuring into outer space.

19:02 / 20.02.03

Well, not to dampen yer enthusiasm, but the discovery of water on Mars instead of frozen C02 does set back terraforming plans, which involved freeing the C02 first, greenhousing the planet to boost temperature, then adding in a bunch of green plants.

So there's that.

“If you wanted to make Mars warm and wet again, you’d need carbon dioxide, but there isn’t nearly enough if the polar caps are made of water,” Ingersoll said. “Of course, terraforming Mars is wild stuff and is way in the future.”
Regardless, Ingersoll said, it is questionable whether even a tiny fraction of the necessary carbon dioxide is present on the Red Planet.

On the other hand, I suppose the Martian colonists could just throw on a couple extra sweaters (or nearest reasonable equivalent).

Foust is SO authentic

23:56 / 21.02.03

Damn you and your bubble-bursting ways, Grant. I was getting all excited over this.

I'd love to see a manned mission to Mars. I'd vote for any politician who suggested one - even Bush.

13:10 / 02.04.03

Nature says there's more water on the moon.

Five times more than suspected, possibly.

The Moon may harbour five times more water than we thought, reckon researchers in the United States who have doubled previous estimates of how much of the lunar surface is permanently dark. This is encouraging news for those in favour of human colonization of the Moon.

Any ice that accumulated in sunless pits on the Moon billions of years ago would still be frozen there, having never sublimed and floated free of the tenuous gravity, explain Ben Bussey, of the University of Hawaii, and his colleagues.

...NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft first spotted signs of huge quantities of ice - perhaps hundreds of millions of tonnes - in 1998, in dark craters at the Moon's poles. This finding seemed to confirm the tentative indications of a layer of ice in the deep crater basin of the South Pole reported by the Clementine lunar mission in 1996.

Bussey's group suggests that there could be closer to a billion tonnes of water on the Moon.

Closed for Business Time

11:36 / 07.12.06

This Guardian article surely belongs here.

Closed for Business Time

11:37 / 07.12.06

Just a quick quote from above-linked-to article -

Scientists have discovered tantalising evidence of water gushing down gullies on Mars, dramatically boosting the chances that regions of the planet might still be capable of harbouring life.

Surf's up!

13:41 / 07.12.06

I also read this recently and I find it very exciting. Not only for what it means in terms of terraforming, which is still a ways away, but because it will allow us to "live of the land" once we get there, which is a big part of NASA's strategy (at least it was in the 90s). The prospect that life could exist in these aquifers is also fantastic and reason enough to go.

There are some scientists who think this isn’t water at all though, but avalanches of dust. I hope they’re wrong.

Too bad we aren’t going to Mars for another couple of decades or more. I really want people to start poking around over there making great discoveries.