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posted by mrpg on Friday January 12 2018, @01:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the cold-as-ice dept.

Buried glaciers have been spotted on Mars, offering new hints about how much water may be accessible on the Red Planet and where it is located, researchers said Thursday.

Although ice has long been known to exist on Mars, a better understanding of its depth and location could be vital to future human explorers, said the report in the US journal Science.

[...] Scientists have not determined how these particular scarps initially form. However, once the buried ice becomes exposed to Mars' atmosphere, a scarp likely grows wider and taller as it "retreats," due to sublimation of the ice directly from solid form into water vapor. At some of them, the exposed deposit of water ice is more than 100 yards, or meter[sic], thick. Examination of some of the scarps with MRO's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) confirmed that the bright material is frozen water. A check of the surface temperature using Odyssey's Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera helped researchers determine they're not seeing just thin frost covering the ground.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @01:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @01:27AM (#621218)

    "You were raped? And? What are you doing here, at this police station!? A man was gracious enough to utilize your body, and you have the audacity to complain!? Do you want me to rape you, too!? Get out of here, you filthy whore!"

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Friday January 12 2018, @01:39AM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Friday January 12 2018, @01:39AM (#621220) Journal

    Trouble is, if we use that water in any useful way, we will surely end up letting it all sublimate away, by carelessness or accident.

    Liquid water is not expected to be found until you drill down to depths of 4 km in equatorial regions, deepening to 5-6 km in
    temperate zones before plunging to over 15 km in polar regions.

    There's no way to pump water back underground for natural filtration as happens here on earth. It will freeze, first.
    If left on the surface it will sublimate into space.

    Once we touch ice and melt it, we have to take care of it forever.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday January 12 2018, @01:47AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday January 12 2018, @01:47AM (#621223)

      Well, the people at NASA have a better track record at being careful with finite resources than your average Taliban. And they current track record is to leave more stuff on other bodies than they take.
      But then again Musk is the kind to chuck a perfectly functional car out in space just for giggles ...

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @03:55AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @03:55AM (#621248)

      Once we touch ice and melt it, we have to take care of it forever.

      Are we talking about ice, or is this a metaphor for Milo Youdontouchmystuffious?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @02:54AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @02:54AM (#621233)

    Gravity is just 0.38 Earth gravity. It's inherently not hospitable; humans are stuck on Earth until they transcend their biological forms.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @03:11AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @03:11AM (#621239)

      How are people supposed to live on the ISS? Oh wait they did.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @03:40AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @03:40AM (#621243)

        Long-term low-gravity habitation is increasingly looking to be very hazardous to one's health.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Friday January 12 2018, @04:04AM (1 child)

          by tftp (806) on Friday January 12 2018, @04:04AM (#621251) Homepage

          Medical problems is nothing compared to psychological ones. It's very hard to maintain psychological health of tens of people. Many will be disenchanted, depressed, suicidal. Who will guard the airlock and other essential systems? For some it's hard to keep sanity even on Earth, where one can take many avenues. On Mars it's the gray wall in front of you, until you die[*]. If you expect the crew to be evaluated before the flight, it will be certainly done - but will their minds survive the hardships?

          [*] Mars Direct assumes 1.5 years per shift.

          • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday January 12 2018, @01:48PM

            by RamiK (1813) on Friday January 12 2018, @01:48PM (#621361)

            Nomadic life is nothing unusual to the human condition. Worse case scenario NASA will just have to follow the Inuit example and send crews off with their families.

            --
            compiling...
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @02:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @02:07PM (#621371)

          It's not "increasingly" looking like anything, because we aren't collecting increasing amounts of data on life in low gravity. It's two thousand fucking eighteen and we still don't have a centrifugal space station, a moon base, or any other way to collect data on anything but 0g and 1g. We have no fucking idea whether (say) 0.5g is as good as 1g, as bad as 0g, or exactly halfway in between, and I guess we're just okay with that.

    • (Score: 2) by arslan on Friday January 12 2018, @06:18AM (1 child)

      by arslan (3462) on Friday January 12 2018, @06:18AM (#621284)

      Very heavy shoes? I hear Kanye's adidas yeezys has all the weight of his ego in it... we should send those folks that buy em there to test out my theory...

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 12 2018, @09:23AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 12 2018, @09:23AM (#621320) Journal

        I am not quite sure what you suggest, a heavier shoe will fall in Mars gravity as fast as a feather. I'll just have more inertia, though, but I fail to see how will this help with the problem. Care to explain?

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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