from the you're-an-old-fashioned-rover-and-she's-a-modern-Mars dept.
China's Zhurong rover has found evidence of liquid water on present-day Mars, according to a team that reviewed data from the rover's cameras.
To be clear, the team claims they've collected evidence of liquid water on Mars—not the liquid water itself. Water was once plentiful on Mars. NASA, the European Space Agency, and others have found a plethora of evidence for ancient water on the planet; it's proving the recent presence of water that's trickier.
[...] "According to the measured meteorological data by Zhurong and other Mars rovers, we inferred that these dune surface characteristics were related to the involvement of liquid saline water formed by the subsequent melting of frost/snow falling on the salt-containing dune surfaces when cooling occurs," Qin Xiaoguang, a geophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an academy release.
Mars' atmosphere is only 1% the density of Earth's, making it difficult for liquid water to exist on Mars today. But frozen water crops up regularly, in the form of possible subsurface lakes and even relict glaciers on the planet's surface.
[...] Based on the age of the dunes, they may have been hydrated when water vapor moved from the planet's polar ice sheet to its equator, making the planet's lower latitudes more humid. Like the discovery of the glacial remnants on Mars, these findings boost humankind's hopes for water's ability to persist near Mars' relatively balmy equator, where potential human missions would be based.
Journal Reference:
Xiaoguang Qin, Xin Ren, Xu Wang, et al., Modern water at low latitudes on Mars: Potential evidence from dune surfaces [open], Sci. Adv., 2023. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add8868
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 05, @06:38PM (1 child)
Yeah, as well as not having breathable air, equatorial Mars is only slightly colder than Antarctica.
As for "humankind's hopes", that surely means hopes of someday colonizing Mars. I know many are hot to colonize other worlds. Such dreams are something to challenge us, something fun to work on, but I believe the expectations are far too high. Just a wild guess, but I figure the earliest we might be able to colonize Mars is the 24th century. Not going to be gallivanting around the galaxy at warp speed by then, nope. It's also quite possible our descendants will decide Mars is too much trouble and not colonize it at all despite it having become possible to do so.
One reason I've heard for colonizing Mars is to hedge against idiocy on Earth triggering a nuclear war. In that event, the people on Mars can keep our civilization and life itself alive, and thousands of years later when radioactivity has fallen sufficiently, one day perhaps reseed the Earth. I've never found that notion convincing. The Mars colony would have to be very well established to be able to do that. Otherwise, they might suffer a slow miserable slide into death as one by one, the lack of irreplaceable knowledge, problem solving, and items that were available only from Earth beats them down and down until they can't go on. Or, the insanity that lead to nuclear war on Earth might well be repeated on Mars, because we didn't work on dealing with the darker aspects of human nature before rushing off to colonize Mars, instead focusing too much on technical matters, and that would be that. And that brings me to another reason why Mars might not be colonized any time soon. What's the point of colonizing Mars until we've come up with good enough solutions to prevent insanity from leading to a breakdown in civil society, followed by a war of such utter devastation that no one survives? This reason is also why, even if we solve the technical issues of creating a generational spaceship, we couldn't use it.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday May 07, @02:45PM
There are some serious biological problems with that. Isn't there evidence to suggest that organisms grown in low gravity don't develop the same physical strength as their counterparts grown on Earth? Would it be impossible for someone who was conceived, born and raised on Mars to "return" to Earth?
Secondly, over several generations of Martians, wouldn't the human body evolve in other subtle ways?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].