Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Buried Ice Water Discovered on Mars

nasa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 64 posts

Re: Buried Ice Water Discovered on Mars

#4

Post by daveguy »

The images are impressively detailed, but first impression is probaby. Water? How do they know from a picture of a cliff?

Water has been confirmed by spectroscopy, thermal imaging and (previously) radar.

From the article:

"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.

Researchers previously used MRO's Shallow Radar (SHARAD) to map extensive underground water-ice sheets in middle latitudes of Mars and estimate that the top of the ice is less than about 10 yards beneath the ground surface."

Re: Buried Ice Water Discovered on Mars

#5

Post by ChuckMcM »

In general this is pretty awesome. What we now know are:

1) Earth microbes and soil organisms (worms) can live in hydrated martian soil. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/mars-soil-earthw...)

2) Food plants can grow in martian soil that has had said organisms added to it.(https://www.nasa.gov/feature/farming-in-martian-gardens)

3) The water to hydrate the soil is already on Mars.(this article)

4) We can build an artificial magnetosphere[1] to protect an area from solar radiation.

So one trip to Mars that can land a small ([1] They designed it for spacecraft propulsion but it has the effect of a shield if installed in a ground station. http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/M2P2/theory.html

Re: Buried Ice Water Discovered on Mars

#8

Post by justinjlynn »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

In general this is pretty awesome. What we now know are: 1) Earth microbes and soil organisms (worms) can live in hydrated martian soil. ( https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/mars-soil-earthw... ) 2) Food plants can grow in martian soil that has had said organisms added to it.( https://www.nasa.gov/feature/farming-in-martian-gardens ) 3) The water to hydrate the soil is already on Mars.(this article) 4) We ca…

That is indeed awesome but I would argue that it also means we would need to undertake a much more thorough search to find out of mars is indeed a dead planet. Once we land a large concentration of biological matter there -- we won't have an opportunity to look again without dealing with massive potential for cross-planetary contamination.

Of course, it's a trade off and it's great news if we ever had to undertake a crash program to get at least a few humans and/or earth originated genetic material off planet with any hope of it surviving without extensive terraforming.

Post reply on HN