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Wow, that was some really great atmospheric data!
We experienced a martian convection cell.
This is the sort of real hard data that can eventually help streamline terraforming simulations and calculations...
-Matt
Here goes...
-Matt
Umm, this interview with the ISS crew is wearing rather thin...are they delaying the conference
-Matt
I heard Hoagland on Coast to Coast last night.
He was blabberin on about this dot over the horizon. This guy ruins his credibility more and more everyday. (although what hurts his credibility to the legitimate science community, boosts it for his followers)
He says that there's probably one person somewhere along the line that is distorting the information and nobody's watching him/her. That the missions have been comprimised. He believes that dot is something intelligent in origin. And he is angry at the mission team for not investigating it. He also mentioned how the team decided to pass up other sites to investigate, like the magic carpet, and so on. Hes upset that now the engineers have moved the rover away from the "scene of the crime" regarding the speck in that navcam image. First of all how do you suppose we could investigate that any further, even if action were taken as soon as someone noticed the speck? Secondly, if we were to drive the rover like Hoagland would prefer, the poor thing would be fried out permanently not 10 feet from the lander after examining 100 + rocks that he thinks are collaborating with NASAs great evil conspiracy...
"A whole planet is being stolen from us," Hoagland stated last night. Its hard to understand how a man who was once so respected can have turned into a looney. He has given up science for wild speculation. Hes gotten to the point where even Percival Lowell would say "hey relax, you're seeing things."
-Matt
Doesn't look much like bedrock to me, more like the type of bedding that occurs with windblown sediments. If you were to cut out a piece perpendicular to the bedding planes you would probably see excellent cross-bedding indicative of lithified duneforms.
Now, whether these sediments pre or post date the crater is, at this point, still up in air. It could be that the crater punched a hole in the sediment and later it was scoured by the wind revealing the layers (the layers in that outcrop look an awful lot like the sand dunes and sandstone formed around here in the desert southwest) Or, seeing as the outcrop is only on one side of the crater, it could be argued that it is only the lithified remnants of a duneform that formerly filled that corner of the crater.
Now how do previous, potentially watery, conditions tie in with these possibilities?
In the bedrock before crater scenario, water in this region's past is probably occured long prior to the crater's formation. The reasoning behind this is that if these are indeed wind blown sediments exhumed by the crater, that would mean that the area has been desert for a very long time, depending how old the crater is (which doesn't look too fresh).
However, if the crater came before the bedrock, the potential for more recent water at the site increases. If these sediments blew in to the crater and lithified, they could be no more than a few hundred thousand years or even tens of years old. (Indeed, depending on how consolidated this sediment is it could be on the order of a couple of years old) However in this scenario the potential of recent water only increases because there is no evidence against it.
Any thoughts?
-Matt
As for the "leaf", it did catch my eye in the mission success pan, the fact that it cast a shadow caught my eye. Indeed it is probably only a shred of airbag. But playing devils advocate with myself, it could be said that there are no prints immediately around this "shred" so how'd it get there?
(correct me if i'm wrong about that because its been about an hour since i looked at the pan, and i did mainly look at the outcrop, might not have noticed nearby print.)
sounds interesting, i wondered what accounted for the clumpyness of the sand. I found it hard to see individual grains however i could tell that the clumps were made of smaller particles. I knew that for this to be possible there would have to be some sort of adhesive in there, possibly moisture related, evaporating salt water seems to fit the bill.
There are similar tubular structures seen in death valley caused by saltwater evaporation...
-Matt
Man, I forgot it was a holiday weekend. No offense to my african brothers and sisters. Dr. King did more for the civil rights movement than any other single man, and it is shameful of me to forget his memorial.
In my blind forgetfulness I faithfully check in at the MER homepage only to find the same images from 16 Jan. And in my mind I was beginning to dread that something happened to the rover and they were trying to figure it out before releasing any info to the press...heh heh major brain fart,
-Matt
I do think the US is doing this in response to foreign activity. The US doesn't do anything unless it is in its own interest. In the 60s it was in the US's interest to beat Russia to the moon to prove our superiority in rocket technology. (the moon race proved that we can do anything we want with our rockets within the earth moon system, and with that proven we burned the fleet of man-rated rockets and killed apollo to make room in the budget for the thousands of ICBMs needed to deliver nuclear payloads using all that nifty experience we gained shipping men here and there.)
Once again, and this is China's doing, the US finds it in its interest to send people to the moon, and not only to plant a flag and pick up rocks either. We are matching China in their bid to establish a settlement.
One thing you can count on is the paranoia and reactionary attitude of the USA...
-Matt
I think the current Idea is that the "Great Escarpment" is receding in most places. This is supported by the mesa fields along the escarpment. (Cydonia happens to be in this geologic setting which supports the face as a natural feature theory)<~~sorry had to throw that in
The Highlands around the border of the northern plains seem to be collapsing so that the net effect is the expansion of the northern plains. (could be why there's no or little evidence remaining of a shoreline, most of it may have crumbled away by now) This could be facilitated by the stress introduced by the emtying of the ocean basin either by freezing and sublimation or by seeping into the ground.
-Matt
by the way, this is my first post in more than 6 months, good to be back
A model of what, Mars itself or a potential colony layout, or what?, I can send you a template to make a mars miniglobe out of a tennis ball if thats alright.
-Matt
The conference is supposed to happen 1:00 Eastern
15 minutes from the time i write this...
-Matt
My only hope at this point it this...
Let them not have died in vain...
-Matt
Official,
"No hope for shuttle or crew"
-senior US official
source Dan Rather CBS news 9:59
-Matt
Ummm...what are these exotic fuels that would be toxic?
-Matt
I'm not saying they should kill the space program, I"m just saying we have to accept that as a very real possibility...
Am I sounding better?
Despite that mission control and kennedy space center just lowered their flags to half mast..
-Matt
Yeah, and we sure got hard-core determined when we tragically lost polar lander and climate orbiter.
Forgive the sarcasm
True no humans died, but I'm afraid that when it comes to the space program, its all the same to them. IMHO
Remember, something like 99% of americans are probably apathetic to space, and because of that, they care only for the human life lost or the cost (sounds bad for us, but you got to admit that the human loss wasn't the only major loss here)
Those americans would probably see the risk of catastrophic failure as a reason to stop the space program (manned one anyway)
-Matt
Oh I remember challenger, its one of my earliest memories, I remember it because I was the only one who cried (most of my family is non-passionate to the space program)
But times were different then. Apollo 13, was the third mission of a program that didn't have a definate "final mission" yet; Challenger was also towards the beginning of the program (at the worst part of all, when it just started getting routine) and there was also a lot of support in Washington for a reusable orbiter at that time.
Now, Congress is likely eager to pull the plug on ISS and the shuttle fleet, i've heard the shuttle is roughly 100 mill per launch, and the ISS never stopped increasing in final cost estimate (last i heard, not sure its reliable, admittedly, $400 billion dollars, sound familiar, it should, its the cost that was cooked up when Bush Sr said lets go to Mars) You can't tell me the current pres and congress wouldn't rather use that money for the war, or even worse, a roughly 50 billion per, you could have quite a few new weapons R & D programs with that, (and of course use a few shavings to feed some publically popular govt programs to keep everyone off their back)
I sincerely hope I am being pessimistic, and not realistic...
-Matt
Its 7:49, and I'm sobbing like a baby...
I am so angered by NASA
They shouldve retired those quater-century year old space craft 10 years ago
And now, thanks to that, and a president who can give a flying F*&*K about the space program, 7 decent folks are DEAD, and we who have been hoping against hope that the manned space program would soon pick up momentum, have had our hopes dashed in a FU***NG instant
Forgive my language, but its over for us, at most we can hope is that the MERs still fly
-Matt
Anyone have any figures regarding how much they found and where specifically.
The maps i find only show concentrations, it doesn't give units however. Like how much water per cubic meter of regolith is there in the areas of greatest concentrations.
Anyone else notice what crap luck we've had with the landers that returned data. Viking 1 and Pathfinder landed in places where there is virtually no water, and Viking 2 landed on the dry side of a region that borders wet from dry (maybe why we saw frost at Utopia and not at Chryse)
Also, there seems to be more wet areas than dry areas, I took the liberty of translating the data (more or less) to my Mars globe by outlining areas of particular wetness and particular dryness, leaving the middle ground un outlined.
Doing this it has become apparent that Mars isn't actually a desert world, it is only so cold that the atmosphere cannot hold humidity.
If anyone knows how, and can do the math, we should find out if Mars has more or less water than earth proportionally.
These are all tremendous findings and it makes me sick to see how they are ignored, remember when clinton was pres and they practically stopped the presses to announce that they found some TRACES of water SEEPAGE on VERY FEW locations on Mars. And now they've found oceans worth of water a meter or less below most of the surface, but it gets no major press WHATSOEVER. Well, it looks like we have to go without a major press conference this time (but even if I was ignorant to Mars, as an american I'd like to see the results of what we as taxpayers payed for)
People have claimed that they have seen pools of standing liquid (possibly hyper saline) water in craters south of -60*S.
This was backed up by finding all that water last year in the south at just those latitudes.
I myself have seen many features whos simplest explaination is pools of standing water with something floating in it, and the "defrosting sand dunes" designation for some of these images in the MSSS MOC gallery isn't cutting it for me.
Maybe we can find some of these features in the north and make a hard correlation between water concentrations and the locations of these "pools"
I will post again with an image number or link for one of these southern "pools" I am talking about.
I myself am not convinced that these are pools, however that would be the simplest explaination for those features...
-Matt
Well seeing as how this thread is about Martian Oceans lets get down to some geologic evidence.
Anyone want to do some looking on the MSSS MOC gallery and look for evidence of a present sea?
The gallery divides the thousands of images by date and mars chart.
Any takers? Write back telling us all what area or timeperiod you are going to focus on, so others can search other areas. This, I think, will help spread out our search a little.
By the way,
I recently read an article describing many dendritic drainage patterns in the region between Schiaperelli and Flaugergue Basins. This is very VERY strong indication of prolonged periods of rainfall. I have yet to learn much about how atmospheres behave, but I have trouble imagining cloudy rainstorms without oceans to evaporate enough moisture into the air to supply it.
Also many of the craters in this region appear filled with sediment that is not windborne, indicating that they may have contained lakes in the past.
So keep that in mind when searching for evidence of a previous sea.
Odyssey found copious amounts of water, more in the north than in the south, anyone have a figure on that? I heard its somewhere around volume of the indian ocean, and most of it a meter below the surface.
I'm sure that this lends support to an ancient sea. And it also may give us no choice when it comes to a future sea on Areoformed Mars. We would probably have to go through a tremendous amount of trouble to hold back all this water.
Besides, when it starts raining there, ocean or no ocean initially, the water has got to drain somewhere...
-Matt
So basically they turbo-pump hydrogen through a "hot" reactor core and direct it out the back?
Seems that those would be dirty rockets to me, unless theres some way that they can find a shielding that lets infrared energy through but not harmful radiation, or theres a clean "burning" nuclear fuel...
-Matt
Now that I think about it, I've never seen an NTR beyond that little silohuette behind the great jet of fire shown in the pictures taken during the tests at White Sands.
Do NTRs or for that matter, VSMIRs (forgot the acronym if thats wrong) even have engine bells?
-Matt
The only limiting factor to the temperatures/exhaust velocities which can be achieved are the temperatures the materials of which the engine is made can endure without melting.
Well I remember that in the engines that powered the Saturn V's first stage (and I think the subsequent stages as well, and the shuttles main eniges too i believe) ran the fuel first through tubes around the engine bells to keep them cool enough to stay solid, I read that the engines actually burned hotter than the melting point of the materials used to build them, and that the fuel-as-coolant method was neccesary.
-Matt
Perhaps intelligent species eventually augment themselves using whatever procedures to become free-existing energy entities
Undying things with no needs other than experience to be gained by existing.
Maybe
Maybe something else, Alls I know is that we aren't ever going to get a chance to find out if we stay on Earth forever...
-Matt
I just visited the Cassini-Huygens website and here's the instrument that will make images during the decent into Titan's atmosphere:Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer
(DISR):
This instrument will make a range of imaging and spectral observations using several sensors and fields of view. By measuring the upward and downward flow of radiation, the radiation balance (or imbalance) of the thick Titan atmosphere will be measured. Solar sensors will measure the light intensity around the Sun due to scattering by aerosols in the atmosphere. This will permit the calculation of the size and number density of the suspended particles. Two imagers (one visible, one infrared) will observe the surface during the latter stages of the descent and, as the probe slowly spins, build up a mosaic of pictures around the landing site. There will also be a side-view visible imager to get a horizontal view of the horizon and the underside of the cloud deck. For spectral measurements of the surface, a lamp that will switch on shortly before landing will augment the weak sunlight.
We may get some panoramas afterall...
-Matt