China's Mars rover finds signs of 'modern' water
Story by Simon Sharwood • 4h ago
Interesting, but it is getting late.
Done.
]]>So this could suggest that aquifers could be being charged from the south pole of Mars, and just maybe it would be possible to open arteasian wells in Hellas or the Mariner Rift Valley, if you could punch though the permafrost.
Done.
]]>This is about the 2 stage Terran-R and the Impulse lander.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Te … &FORM=VIRE
This collection of stages, 1st, 2nd, and the Impulse lander, seem to work a bit different than Starship. The entry of the 2nd stage starts like Starship, but then seems to change over to the method of Neutron/(Rocket Lab). The orbit of the 2nd stage seems to be depicted as being more elliptical than for the LEO of Starship. This depiction does not involve orbital refilling, I suppose someday Terran-R might have that, to extend its capabilities.
I have read that the science community is becoming excited about the potential of the Starship system. I am wondering if a version of Starship could host a larger sized space probe like the impulse lander. There is something to be said for having a 3rd stage for the Starship, which would not be likely to be typically reused or repurposed. It could be carried to orbit like the impulse, or like Neutron might do. The potential to refill in orbit might be reserved as a potential for the future.
Of course, what I want is a lander(s) that can land on the polar ice caps or near them, and which would have prolonged life by perhaps including a Kilowatt reactor. But I understand that landing large devices to even low altitude surfaces is very hard. All I can say is that a Starship supported mission might have the luxury of lots of mass. Perhaps it might host retrorockets on steroids, and get away with it?
Perhaps it would not even bother with Parachutes, just an aeroshell, and retrorockets? That might allow for a more high-altitude landing???
While it is rather romantic to think of having a Starship or Starship mini that could hop around Mars to explore such things, bringing humans with it, I think that for a mission like this that would not be optimal. Rather, some kind of lander hosted by Starship with robotics and instrumentation might be the more effective way to discover more of about some locations on Mars.
Done.
]]>I have some notions about this. They say it has to have geothermal energy, and perhaps it will be geothermal energy. I also suggest electrical currents, perhaps generated by dust storms and other factors.
I do think that it might be some other odd mix of fluids, maybe liquid CO2 and/or water, with salts. Maybe Hydrogen Peroxide also included.
A mix like that could be liquid at lower temps.
It would be hard to land a probe with the ability to pick up Mars quakes, and impacts, but with Starship or some other on coming capabilities, I would think it could be done. Perhaps add a small, modified reactor to keep it powered and warm. Maybe Kilo power?
Perhaps give it the ability to ping like a sonar?
To me that would be a much faster and sooner attainable source of additional data.
I do not understand how the ice movements occur. If it is like Greenland, and Antarctica, there would be under ice rivers. But I don't think it possible to have seas to drain into. Maybe, but I don' t think so.
Could there be aquifers, and even ancient, formed cave systems for water to drain into? But I don't know if the polar cap gets enough precipitation to feed such a thing.
If the flows are significant then I wonder if some of the ice sheets are formed by flooding, a sort of cryovolcanic activity???
For the North Cap, I don't think that there would be a flow, just static water with ice over it. Not that there is necessarily any heat for that north cap either. Again, I don't know.
Done.
]]>NASA Reveals MAJOR NEW Discovery On Mars!
YouTube · 3,000+ views · 6 hr ago · by The Space Race
It sounds fairly real, strangely enough.
They think geothermal heat, I also speculate ground currents.
For instance, the Solar wind creates a Proton Aurora. Also, the dust storms and dust devils have electric properties.
A liquid solution including water can be conductive, particularly if it has salt/ions.
But it seems that we are looking for how a liquid could exist, they seem to think a liquid does exist.
Done
]]>The sun started in a planetary disk long before the planets form which the later is in 5 billion time frame but then again in another 5 billion we are going to be inside a red giant.
I am under the impression that the inner planets are cast offs from both saturn and jupiter during the period of time when they were much closer to the sun. They both have planet sized moons that could have become to large for saturn an n jupiter to hold onto while being closer to the sun.
Like you indicated mars became a freeze dried planet while mercury became the sun ripened with only earth and venus falling into that near just right zone.
each of the planets show the history of the suns growth.
Did our ancient sun go on a diet? Bands of martian rock could solve the ‘faint young sun' paradox; New study suggests rocks on Mars could hold a hidden record of the sun’s weight
I will suggest this though for my 2 cents.
We don't know that much about out sun's behaviors in the past. We only know it's present behaviors, and we also have information about other stars that are thought to have been similar and are aging, so we can speculate on the future.
The sun may have been very active magnetically in it's youth. But so was volcanism for Mars. Even possibly a global magnetic field. But we don't know.
It might also have been possible that an impactor(s) may have splashed a great deal of Martian atmosphere off of the planet.
But is seems likely to me at this time that the presence of exposed ice, determining the amount of high clouds is currently a factor. This would be influenced by the amount of geothermal heat for the planet. The cooler the underground becomes the longer ice can be buried under sediments. Sediments could include volcanic materials, particularly explosive volcanism, crater ejecta, fluvial sediments, and air borne sediments as possibilities.
Also the amount of Hydrogen the planet was "Born" with. Hydrogen would most likely leak out of the planet at a faster rate earlier in it's history. If there we a process, that allowed the creation of Methane in the subsurface, then upwelling Hydrogen might be intercepted, perhaps by microbes, and then that consumed along with CO2.
Earlier in it's life then Methane would leak to the atmosphere at a faster rate, then in the now, where the permafrost is so thick and deep.
Where does the Martian dust come from?
https://releases.jhu.edu/2018/07/24/whe … ve%20found.
Quote:
The dust that coats much of the surface of Mars originates largely from a single thousand-kilometer-long geological formation near the Red Planet’s equator, scientists have found.
Quote:
Wind-carved ridges known as yardangs are the remnants of erosion. By calculating how much of the MFF has been lost over the past 3 billion years, the scientists could approximate the current quantity of dust on Mars, enough to form a 2 to 12 meters thick global layer.
Dust particles can also affect Martian climate by absorbing solar radiation, resulting in lower temperatures at the ground level and higher ones in the atmosphere. This temperature contrast can create stronger winds, leading to more dust being lifted from the surface.
While seasonal dust storms happen every Martian year (twice as long as an Earth year), global dust storms can form, happening about every 10 or so years.
“It just explains, potentially, one big piece of how Mars got to its current state,” said Lewis.
Other co-authors of the paper were Suniti Karunatillake of Louisiana State University and Mariek Schmidt of Brock University in Canada.
Lujendra Ojha was supported by the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Suniti Karunatillake was supported by NASA-MDAP grant NNX13AI98G and the Louisiana Space Consortium grant NNX15AH82H.
The process of Mars cooling off would allow more and more water to be trapped as subsurface ice, which the dust layer and other sediments could cover. This would reduce the amount of exposed ice, and therefore the amount of water vapor that could get into the upper atmosphere.
The question of post #21 Quote:
"Why Did Mars Dry Out? New Study Points To Unusual Answers"
, is perhaps the wrong question. It should be more "How did Mars get Freeze-Dried?".
It is highly likely that certain atmospheric gasses have been absorbed into the ground by moisture, to be then bonded to regolith or even perhaps become clathrates. Even now it is believed that there are briny droplets in the regolith, and it is said that Hellas may have conditions for liquid water to some degree.
The mean atmospheric pressure of Mars being so close to that of the Tripple point of water, it seem suspicious of the possibility that the pressure is regulated by the withdrawal of atmosphere by that mechanism.
Certain gasses may have lives that I will try to speculate on. It is indeed speculation though.
Hydrogen: Free Hydrogen very likely leaves the planet easily if it is in the upper atmosphere. The deeps of Mars may still have a reservoir of Hydrogen that leaks to atmosphere however, but likely not at as fast a rate as was perhaps true in the beginning 1/2 Billion years. The asteroid belt started as behind the snow line for water, and there is still water ice in some of the objects, and also hydrated minerals. It seems likely that the asteroid belt and comets will have added Hydrogen from Water to the planet Mars over the history of the solar system. It may be possible that at times the solar wind pushes Hydrogen into the Martian atmosphere. That is an unknown.
Carbon: It seems reasonable to me that the Asteroid belt and other impactors may still add Carbon to Mars. Also there may still be occasional volcanism that may add it to the atmosphere. Perhaps some major impacts may also dig substances out of the ground, (But might also splash atmosphere away).
Oxygen: I am going to guess that the major contributor of Oxygen will be from water where it is split to Oxygen and Hydrogen, and likely the Hydrogen drifts off to space. But keep in mind that the asteroid belt and other impactors may still be adding water to Mars.
Nitrogen: Being a small component I guess it seems obvious that it gets removed more, and then stays removed. It is lighter than CO2 so that is logical that it might drift off of the planet, but the asteroids would add back much less as they have much more water and Carbon then Nitrogen I think, at least in this age. I suppose I could speculate further but it may be more accurate to say "I don't know". But it seems likely that it once captured into the ground does not much go back to the atmosphere.
Argon? I really don't know enough to speculate with any hope of accuracy.
As for the portion of atmospheric loss that was to space, it seems to me that we do not know.
Done.
]]>Mars once ran red with rivers. The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet. But about three billion years ago, they all dried up - and no one knows why.
"People have put forward different ideas, but we're not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically," said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite. "We'd really like to understand, especially because it's the only planet we definitely know changed from habitable to uninhabitable."
Kite is the first author of a new study that examines the tracks of Martian rivers to see what they can reveal about the history of the planet's water and atmosphere.
Previously, many scientists had assumed that losing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helped to keep Mars warm, caused the trouble. But the new findings, published May 25 in Science Advances, suggest that the change was caused by the loss of some other important ingredient that maintained the planet warm enough for running water.
But we still don't know what it is.
...ite and his collaborators ran many different combinations of these factors in their simulations, looking for conditions that could cause the planet to be warm enough for at least some liquid water to exist in rivers for more than billion years - but then abruptly lose it.
But as they compared different simulations, they saw something surprising. Changing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere didn't change the outcome. That is, the driving force of the change didn't seem to be carbon dioxide.
"Carbon dioxide is a strong greenhouse gas, so it really was the leading candidate to explain the drying out of Mars," said Kite, an expert on the climates of other worlds. "But these results suggest it's not so simple."
There are several alternative options. The new evidence fits nicely with a scenario, suggested in a 2021 study from Kite, where a layer of thin, icy clouds high in Mars' atmosphere acts like translucent greenhouse glass, trapping heat. Other scientists have suggested that if hydrogen was released from the planet's interior, it could have interacted with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb infrared light and warm the planet.
"We don't know what this factor is, but we need a lot of it to have existed to explain the results," Kite said.
They do not say where, but they say that there are lots of these features.
In the video, it is disclosed that these may not be liquid water but they look like they should be, however they are
puzzled as to how they stay liquid.
Possibilities I can think of:
1) They are not liquid water. I wonder if a mix of water and Hydrogen Peroxide, with CO2 and salts in the mix. A
mixture of water and Hydrogen Peroxide can have a freezing temperature as low as -55 Degrees C. Adding CO2 and
salts? I don't know if that would drop it some more. There is a notion that dust storms may generate Hydrogen
Peroxide on Mars. Interestingly, there is some notion that early life on Earth may have been adapted to such a mix.
https://biox.stanford.edu/highlight/sta … osynthesis.
Quote:
Zare speculates that this ancient and widespread chemical reaction could have even provided a source of oxygen for early life (since hydrogen peroxide breaks down into water and oxygen molecules) before the appearance of organisms that could produce oxygen themselves through photosynthesis.
2) They may be heated by geothermal heat. Anton's video does indicate that for the south pole there does not seem to be
volcanism. However I "Speculate" that the Martian crust is much more deeply fractured than the Earth, and it may have
old cave/aquifer systems that go deep down where there could be heat. In such a case, the lakes would be fed by springs
of fluid welling up from deep below with heat.
3) Ground Currents. If there is a network of fluid ducts under the Martian surface, I speculate that at times electrical
ground currents flow through them and heat them up. Perhaps particularly during dust storm activities, and flares from
the sun.
Yes, a great deal of what I have placed here is very tentative, but by putting such speculations out there, perhaps
someone can think of how to find evidence for any of the above, or combinations of the above.
Done.
]]>No reason to have a pricey piece of cutting edge technology...
Add to the units a future beacon ready to go for when we try to do percise landings and leave a cube sat or two in orbit to test out gps...
Since we need it to work long term then its going to be nuclear powered most likely.
]]>Water, water everywhere and now we have the tools for man to use in finding it.
ScanMars Demonstrates Water Detection Device for Astronauts on Mars
Analogue astronauts have successfully trialed a radar that could help future Mars explorers identify where to dig for water.
ScanMars is an Italian experiment that was used to identify subsurface water features in the Mars-like Dhofar region of Oman during the AMADEE-18 analogue mission in February 2018.
AMADEE-18 mission aimed to prepare for future human exploration of Mars by conducting experiments in different fields ranging from engineering to astrobiology and from geophysics to life sciences. After being trained on how to use ScanMars at the Austrian Space Forum's facilities in Innsbruck, analogue astronauts tested the radar over four areas in Dhofar with different geologic characteristics. In total, they collected a total of about 70,0000 radar echoes and 1.4 kilometres of profiles to a depth of 5 metres.
Also, 68 degrees is pretty far south - there will be a downside in terms of PV energy generation. And the further south you go the colder the operating temperatures, which could impact on a mission.
Now all we need is the means to get there...
http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/imag … mage_2.png
south-facing rim of a pit crater at 68°S in the Sisyphi Planum region of Mars