New Mars Forums

Cindy: "*Methinks thou art being mysterious or clever .."
    Maybe mysterious but certainly not clever.
    One can't be mystified by something one didn't even know existed!   

    "That looks weird.  "
    Hmmm, looks ill-mannered to me. Now if I'd caught my kids spitting like that ...   :rant:

'Petals around the rose'.
    More by luck than judgment, no doubt, I thought of the correct interpretation of the phrase immediately. But, because of the perverse and contrary way my mind works, I tried two other possibilities first!
    Realizing those two trial-and-errors were producing .. surprise, surprise .. errors(! ), I then went back to my first thought, which worked.

    I suppose a good psychiatrist would be able to solve all my problems just from the above information about how my brain works ( ... all right, all right .. doesn't work!     )

Very good points, as usual, Rob.   :up:
    The sublimation problem's been nagging away at my subconscious, as well, but you've put it into words all too clearly!

    As a biased pro-water enthusiast(! ),the best defence I can offer for the existence of this frozen sea is the fact that Michael Carr finds it plausible!   
    If he thinks it's possible, ...   

Bill:-

    Interesting idea.

    I was reading somewhere that it's possible the Mars Express radar won't pick up water-ice right there on the surface, unless the ice is thick and deep enough. I think they said something about the radar being designed for deeper detection - kilometres rather than metres(?).

    If that proves to be correct (hope not! ), then Bill's cheap and nasty "masonry nail", funded by the World Wrestling Federation, might be the way to go! 

Yes, I remember your detailed analyses of granular behaviour some time back, CM. (I can't quite recall in what context now, though. Was it the blueberries?) You obviously put a great deal of thought into it and I believe it was very much in the same vein as this link you've provided.
    Maybe you missed your vocation!   

Well, those 'tadpoles' were never a mystery to me at all. 

    I'll leave it to you to figure out why not!     
[I'm not mocking by the way; just admitting one more aspect of my ignorance.]

    What really caught my eye was the little white Earth included in the picture for size-comparison purposes ... it makes you stop and think, doesn't it?! 

I only just realized your cat has vanished, Cindy.
    I'd like to second what CC said: "Hope the cat turns up soon and in good health."
    I know what it's like to lose a well-loved pet and I know it's painful. Very sorry to hear it.   

I don't think we really know, Ian, just how much uranium exists in the crusts of the other rocky planets - except by extrapolating from known terrestrial concentrations.   ???

    By the by, according to a Dr. J. Marvin Herndon, the planets have accumulations of uranium in their cores. He maintains that these accumulations are some kilometres in diameter and actually undergo intermittent fission, producing energy.

    There's a very interesting recent article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c … 5.DTL]THIS SITE, which mentions attempts to conduct an experiment to prove or disprove Dr. Herndon's hypothesis.

    I was sad to learn that Dr. Herndon has now abandoned scientific research because his work doesn't agree with the mainstream of geophysics and he feels he has been largely ostracized by the scientific community.

    And this:-

    This strikes a chord with me because of a similar situation that I believe has affected the career of a Dr. Gilbert Levin, who designed the Labeled Release Experiment (LRE) for the Viking probes. He maintains to this day that his experiment discovered microbial activity in the Martian soil but the scientific community decried his results on the grounds that the Martian regolith has no organic material in it. This conclusion was based on the since discredited results of the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) readings, which were taken at the same time.

    Although the results of the GCMS have never been officially refuted, as they should have been, NASA is now sending the Mars Science Laboratory to Mars in 2009 to find and analyze the very carbon compounds it says don't exist!

    The scientific establishment is an interesting beast, don't you think?   ???

So, what's the plan?
    Land the first cargo shipment on the shoreline of this frozen sea, including a 100 kWe nuclear reactor, a drill, and plenty of pipe. The first crew can then use the reactor's waste heat to melt many thousands of litres of water and electrolyze some of it to obtain hydrogen and oxygen.

    The Mars Direct plan to bring tonnes of cryogenically stored hydrogen, as feedstock for in-situ fuel production, is no longer necessary - at least after the first expedition.
    We can even reduce the water budget for the trip, provide plenty of water for bathing, drinking, and raising crops, and produce high-Isp hydrogen/oxygen propellant for the return journey instead of lower-Isp methane/oxygen.

    Hell, we can even have a swimming pool and a fish-farm for the astronauts - all the comforts of home!!
                                                       
[Assuming this really is a frozen sea, that is!   :;):  ]

By the time we get to the stage CC mentions, with living skinsuits technologically possible, maybe we'd do better to genetically engineer our own skin to cope with Martian conditions.   ???

    Such skin would need much stronger elastin, thicker subcutaneous fat for thermal insulation, better-sealing sweat glands, and a thicker, scalier, stratified, squamous epithelial, outer cell layer - perhaps even reptilian in texture.
    Our sphincters would need to be stronger and we could even engineer protective nictitating membranes for our eyes.

    Then, all we'd need to go 'outside' would be a strap on rebreather with mouthpiece. Simple!   

Here's http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc20 … 41.pdf]THE LINK.
[Ooops! Sorry. Just repeating what No Life linked already. Guess I'm over-excited!]
    No life on Mars linked it for us over at 'Mars Express' in 'Unmanned Probes' a couple of days ago. (Well spotted, No Life! ) It's the best news we've had in a long time.
    The pictures comparing Antarctic pack-ice with the purported frozen sea on Mars are very persuasive on their own.   :up:   

Graeme:-

    Well, exactly!
    Evidently, according to Richard Hoagland, the artificial moon was steered into orbit around Saturn billions of years ago, before the end of the major cratering epochs of the early Solar System.
    This creates many questions. Who built it? Where did they come from? Why did they choose to settle in a dangerous and unstable young star system, where enormous chunks of rock were careering around in all directions? Why choose a frozen gas giant like Saturn instead of one of the more amenable, rocky inner planets? How did they tolerate the incredible noise and vibration of impactors smashing into the hull of their vessel? Where are the builders of this massive object now?

    This is usually the trouble with R.H.'s amazing hypotheses; when you look for background logic, 10 times out of 9 there isn't any. His revelations, while often intricately constructed in themselves, have to stand alone, without a corroborating evidential framework of any kind.
    I'm on record as finding the human/leonine features of the Face on Mars intriguing, especially since Hoagland predicted that duality before the later images were released. But that certainly doesn't mean I think the mesa was deliberately carved by alien intelligences. It's just an intriguing shape, that's all - at least to me personally.
    But the Face on Mars is it! That's all there is. There are no roads, no 'other buildings', no other corroborating mega-structures which might provide support to the 'alien civilization' theory. And, in general, the better the imaging resolution, the less artificial-looking R.H.'s structures start to appear.

    No. I don't have much time for Mr. Hoagland's fantasies. I just thought I'd show whoever might be interested what he's been up to lately and how much effort he puts into these things. I think it's good entertainment value!