New Mars Forums

hahaha

Thanks for the correction!

I agree.  One of the best I've ever heard.  Hoagland seems to have new clout and increased confidence now that he's got his movie deal.

Well....

Hoagland goes over the top sometimes.  He's a bit of an entertainer, imo.  It does not help his standing with the "mainstream".  He's kind of like the VW Bug was back in the 60's.  Some people love him.  Some people hate him.  Not too many are neutral.

He is the most visible person associated with the Face on Mars.  Has written at least one book on the topic.  His hypothesis is that we are the Martians.  He thinks the early Martians built the Face but had to leave their planet a long time ago and head for Earth due to a major disaster.

He was a mainstream person, worked with Cronkite in the past, but got shoved into the fringe due to his interest in the Face.  At least that is how I see it.  Now he is coming back into the mainstream and has been hired (I don't know the exact capacity or title) by a big studio to do a movie based on Mars and his theories.  I think it's supposed to be out in 2003, but I might be wrong on that point.

He is very enthusiastic about Mars.  I don't know what the format of the show will be, but with Hoagland on it will be interesting and probably also informative.

06/25/02 - Tue/Wed
Host: George Noory
Guest: Richard Hoagland

1) Richard C. Hoagland, is the founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of the Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of "The Monuments of Mars", co-creator of the "Pioneer Plaque", originator of the "Europa Proposal", and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission...

Book: The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever
Website: www.enterprisemission.com

Guest: Dr. Robert Zubrin
Dr. Robert Zubrin, Pioneer Astronautics, Astronautical Engineer, USA, Commander. Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin has been selected as the winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award for "lifetime achievement in promoting the goal of a free spacefaring civilization." The previous 8 winners of the award were Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, Sir Arthur Clarke, Dr. Werner Von Braun, Gene Roddenberry, Dr. Robert Goddard, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Carl Sagan, and Neil Armstrong. Zubrin is the 9th person to win the award.

Book: The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet
Book: Entering Space: Creating a Space-Faring Civilization
Book: Islands in the Sky: Bold New Ideas for Colonizing Space
Website: www.marssociety.org

http://artbell.com/schedule.html

You're right.  It is wide open.  You can reach any conclusion you want with it.  It is part of what I see as a conditioning program that is designed to get the public to accept "aliens".  Recent polls show that over half of American adults believe in intelligent aliens.  I conclude that the conditioning is working.

hahaha

How ironic.

Whoa....

Better stick with the decaf.

http://space.com/science....30.html

Breaking the Surface: How Scientists Could Use Mars' Water-Ice

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 09:15 am ET
30 May 2002   

On Mars, water ice may be both biological buried treasure and a rich resource for future Mars explorers.

NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft has found enormous quantities of subsurface water ice. Scientists using the spacecraft's gamma ray spectrometer instrument have detected hydrogen in the upper three feet (one-meter) of soil. That hydrogen is believed likely to be in the form of water ice.

The spacecraft spotted enough Mars water ice to fill Lake Michigan twice over in what may be a "splash" of data, with the deluge yet to come.

Odyssey scientists were ready to report their findings on Thursday at a NASA Space Science Update briefing in Washington, D.C. However, over eager reporters hijacked the announcement, breaking embargoed information, thereby forcing the space agency to cancel the briefing.

More than a month ago, one early science result from Odyssey was a tantalizing detection of frozen water on Mars, surrounding the planet's south pole. The signature of buried hydrogen has also been found in the north, but not in the areas close to the pole.

"What's important now is that we don't have use terms like 'gobs' and 'whopping huge' amounts of subsurface water ice," said William Boynton, principal investigator for Odyssey's gamma ray spectrometer suite at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

"I'd have to give the instrument an A-plus. It's doing everything we expected, and more so," Boynton told SPACE.com.

Researchers have concluded the hydrogen detected is not distributed uniformly over the upper 3 feet (one-meter). Rather, it is much more concentrated in a lower layer beneath the top-most surface.

Boynton said that the amount of hydrogen detected indicates 20 to 50 percent ice by mass in the lower layer. Because rock has a greater density than ice, this amount is more than 50 percent water ice by volume.

Heating a full bucket of this ice-rich polar soil would yield more than half a bucket of water, Boynton said.

"There's really an awful lot of water that's in there when you melt it," he said.

Priming the pump

Boynton said there's much more work needed before dispatching astronauts to the red planet. But knowing an ample supply of underground water ice exists on Mars ahead of time clearly primes the pump, so to speak, he said.

"There's enough water there that astronauts don't have to worry about bringing water along with them," Boynton said.

"All you have to do is heat it up and the water is going to run out. You just put it through a filter?nothing any more elaborate than the kind of filter you'd use on your coffee pot," Boynton said. "My guess is that it would be clean enough to drink right like that," he said.

Boynton added, however, that astronauts would have to be on their guard not to drink contaminated water. "If you melted the ice and you found too much bacteria?.well, actually that would be great news. It means you've got life on Mars," he said.

"They could always boil the water and not have to worry about bacteria. My guess is, based on everything we know at Mars is that water would be pretty pure, with no organic matter in it at all," Boynton said.

Designing a future Mars lander to dig down and sample the ice layer, heat it up, and measure its organic content would be a straightforward experiment, Boynton said. "Obviously, it would be very useful to bring some of this ice back to Earth labs and study it in detail," he said.

Climate story

Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said the Odyssey data points to a climate story, rather than a biology tale. "The big thing is that the water ice detected in the regolith [the top layer of Mars] appears to be most consistent with it being deposited via vapor exchange with the atmosphere," he said.

Odyssey is "telling us more about climate and climate history than about biology, Jakosky said. "At present, there is no way to warm this water ice enough to get even trace amounts of liquid. The ice is in equilibrium with atmospheric vapor," he said.

Given Mars temperature, this is way below the melting point under any reasonable or realistic conditions, Jakosky said. The new Mars data is spelling out an important climate story, he said.

"It tells us about the atmospheric water cycle and, by implication, the polar water cycle and the history of climate over the last few hundred thousand or million years. It's one more very important piece of the puzzle that we are putting together on how water behaves on all time-scales and what the nature of the climate is," he said.

Unseen planet

"Mars never fails to surprise," said Jim Garvin, Mars Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Odyssey's observations show the strength of NASA's Mars strategy of "follow the water," Garvin said. "Our 'science catch phrase' has proven amazingly resilient and has maintained its relevance. Finding gobs of hydrogen-bearing stuff, which Boynton and team are interpreting as water ice, in new places and at new concentrations?bolsters our approach," he said.

Garvin said that Odyssey also shows that as measurement perspectives on Mars change -- from imaging to the infrared and now neutrons and the like -- "we see yet more of the 'previously unseen' planet," he said.

Finding water ice in abundance today on Mars means that follow-up spacecraft are going to be busy.

For instance, a U.S.-Italian-built radar onboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express will look deep below Mars' surface. Mars Express is now being readied for a June 2003 liftoff.

In addition, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to be rocketed toward the red planet in 2005, totes along a subsurface sounding radar to probe at shallow depths and a high-tech hyperspectral imager too.

Something amazing

"It's my own view that the Odyssey findings that Boynton and team have given us further strengthens the possibilities that Mars is hiding something amazing," Garvin said.

"I'll bet that we have not seen anything yet.... and just wait till those Mars Exploration Rovers start ambling around in early 2004," Garvin said.

Odyssey's revelations, Garvin said, will not alter NASA's step-by-step plan to explore Mars.

Garvin said that NASA's Mars Exploration Program strategy is both vindicated and re-affirmed with Odyssey's results. Moreover, the probe has much more to offer in months to come.

"Mars will not let us down," Garvin concluded.

Richard Hoagland claims finding all this water/ice on Mars will greatly reduce the cost of a round trip manned mission.  We can now break down the water over there and refuel.

How much of a savings will that bring?

Will this discovery of water speed up a manned mission?  I don't feel like waiting another 20 years!

Yes, it sounds mare than a little far fetched.  And it doesn't meet the Occam's Razor test that skeptics like to trot out whenever it suits their purposes.

I guess you won't be impressed then.

I can't do anything with raw PDS data, but it would surprise me a little to hear that nobody has that capability....

Okay.