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Plasma physicist and nuclear weapons specialist John Brandenburg has an out-of-left-field theory about two gigantic hydrogen bomb-type nuclear explosions that supposedly took place on Mars within last hundred million years. He points to overabundance of radioisotope Xenon 129 that results from fission of heavy nuclei as evidence. Xenon 129 is a signature of nuclear explosions and exists in Earth's atmosphere because of the atmospheric nuclear testing and plutonium production that had gone on in the twentieth century. It is also made in supernova explosions as a result of intense neutron bombardment and is therefore embedded in asteroids and meteoroids within the Solar System. John Brandenburg claims that the only way the amount of Xenon 129 that is inferred from 1976 Viking Mars mission data and verified by mass spectrometer on Curiosity rover could have been produced in the distant past is by the way of nuclear explosions. No meteor showers could explain this because meteors contain both Xenon 129 and 132 in equal quantities and the amount of Xenon 129 contained within them is tiny and gets released only at very high temperatures. Mars has 2.5 times more Xenon 129 than Earth's atmosphere prior to 1937 (no nuclear production) and the meteorites. He points to two sites on the Red Planet where the hypothetical explosions took place: in the Northern plains in Mare Acidalium at approximately 50N, 30W, near Cydonia Mensa and in Utopia Planum at approximately 50N 120W near Galaxias Chaos.
He was a recent guest on The Space Show, where he reiterated his theory. It's a long podcast and nukes on Mars talk starts at 47 minutes into the show.
Here is a link to his paper and his website.
He also gave a presentation to a packed auditorium at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) 2016 about a different theory of his:
Mars in one Month: The GEM theory of Energy and Momentum Exchange With Spacetime and Forces Observed in the Eaglework Q-V Thruster
Wacky, but interesting, no?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:30PM (4 children)
No. You are wrong. And you seem to be very confident of your wrong-ness.
His ONLY basis is not based upon meteors. I only skimmed his paper, and the very first paragraph in his "Evidence for Large Thermonuclear Explosions in Mars Past" is quoting in situ measurements by the Curiosity rover. And I know that isn't sufficient to convince you (because you apparently feel that not only are clean rooms not clean, but they somehow selectively permit noble gases that aren't in high abundance on Earth to dirty up quadropole mass spectrometers (because, you know, those argon and xenon molecules just stick to everything!)), but that paper also compares its results to Viking data as well as gamma ray spectrometer measurements from the Mars Odyssey orbits.
The paper with the measurements argue that the abundance of radiogenic argon to non-radiogenic argon is evidence "for significant loss of the primordial martian atmosphere early in the planet’s history, followed by partial degassing of Ar". Brandenburg argues that you also see these kind of mixing ratios for argon as well as xenon following fast-reacting nuclear events. You may not like his conclusions, but they look pretty scientific to me. They are just as compelling as "this must mean that the atmosphere selectively lost non-radiogenic isotopes to radiogenic".
He runs with his conclusion to a whole different level, but that is an entirely different argument.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:16AM
Frojack being put into his place by an AC is interesting:)
But you are right of course. There is a lot of evidence, certainly frojack did not a good job of addressing his argument.
To me, it looks suggestive, and even although the theory sounds wacky, we do need an explanation for the isotope distribution mentioned. However, although I regularly work with (lighter) isotopes, I am no geologist and cannot judge his theory in the background of what we know about isotope distributions on earth and other planets.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:42PM (2 children)
Back at you, let's look at the "evidence".
Mars is not an asteroid. It tells us nothing about the isotope distribution on the asteroids that impacted Mars.
So we have here an alternate explanation that doesn't involve "nuclear events". I'll note that excess xenon 129 can also come [sciencedirect.com] from the solar wind.
Also, how much xenon 129 are we speaking of? Even by assuming the lowest amounts, I still get tens of thousands of tons of it. That's a pretty big bang to produce that much (you would be converting a similar amount of mass to energy in the process), and way larger than anyone would need to sterilize the planet. Ten thousand tons converted to energy is somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion megatons of TNT in energy release - about ten times larger than the estimated energy release of the asteroid that is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 11 2017, @02:48PM (1 child)
Hard sci fi book plot (I love those things):
Aliens find it easy to generate antimatter using fission reactors in a gravity field. Perhaps an uninhabited planet. Because its easier to work in unpolluted location, than at the bottom of a sewer, they store all their fission waste for centuries, millennia maybe, in two waste storage facilities. The energy cost of launching antimatter is not ridiculous. Especially if you do the space elevator thing or some kind of mass driver launcher.
All goes well until the terrorists blow up both waste storage plants releasing tens of thousands of tons of Xenon and all kinds of crap. Just two little thermonuclear bombs smuggled into the radioactive waste facility with synchronized timers. I mean, its not like they can ban the incoming flow of radioactive material (like a miniaturized h-bomb) if the point of the facility is planetary scale fission waste repository.
Afterwards all the usual space opera stuff settles down and the aliens are like "F this solar system" and they take their ball and go home leaving nothing but an uninhabited industrial wasteland.
Its an interesting, plausible idea. Gravity is kinda handy for all kinds of engineering processes. Maybe its a species that can't live permanently multi-generationally in zero-gee (maybe humans are the same way... jury is still out). Fission is 24x7 and can be made inherently safe, or lets face it, its not the alien's planet and Mars is uninhabited (probably), so maybe its more convenient. Maybe anti-matter generation is an inherent power density issue, like the transmission cables to carry the power are the true limiter. I mean, take the gloves off, no Fs to give, whats the system-wide maximal power density of a "spare no expense or risk" complete fission plant? vs solar which will never get much above kilowatts per sq meter. Maybe if you're like screw the budget and screw ALAR radioactive safety, you could get gigawatts per sq meter out of a plant and maybe antimatter generation requires that kind of power density. Or manufacturing portable homemade black holes or WTF they thought would be fun and requires a high power density to operate. Maybe fusion reactors "just don't work". Or the aliens were too dumb, kinda like we've been so far, or maybe the "so far" is 100K years of industrial civ and they just abandoned their legacy fission plant planet once they got fusion.
Or maybe they just all died, or their civilization contracted and pulled back and never returned to the ruins which eventually leaked all over. Sure a nuclear waste repo that lasts 50Myrs is good, but if they built it 150Myrs ago and it puked its guts out 100Myrs ago, it looks like there was a massive attack 100Myrs ago, even though its just a landfill explosion of several Myrs of accumulated power plant trash. Imagine how awful the mess would have been if the repo failed in only 42Kyrs instead of lasting 50Myrs, I'm not claiming it was inadequately engineered...
Maybe there's a third waste repo that hasn't failed yet and hopefully some dumb excited scientist astronaut doesn't find it and accidentally set it off. Or some Bond movie villain wants to set it off unless he gets 10 million bitcoins ransom, after which he sets it off anyway because 007 is after all, fictional, and madmen are often jerks.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 11 2017, @02:50PM
I would further theorize on the above hard sci fi book plot, if someone would mass spectrometer the asteroid belt, they'd be like "Holy F we've been robbed of our U-235 that should be there" Its just a guess. Would make a hell of a book plot.