Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

This is hilarious. "Why don't we just send the rovers to the cities and historic sites and other more interesting places of Mars?"

thanks for the link. I find it staggering that science reporters in these big outlets barely ever link to the original source and often don't even name the exact publication. This kind of writing could easily get students into trouble, why is it acceptable in post-graduate journalism? Links never hurt or confused anyone, and they make the page so much richer.

For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years.

A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date.

If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years.

2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039.

If we could get the top 5 GDP nations to contribute 1% of their GDP to a proper global space program we'd have 400+ billion dollars a year (NASA has has a budget of around 18 billion lately). We could probably start sending unmanned missions in 2020 with test hardware for in situ resource production, develop a decent vehicle for travelling, then land 3-4 manned missions by 2022 with overlapping areas of operation as Zubrin (and others) have proposed that way if something goes wrong with one you can travel in 1-2 days, without exiting your vehicle, to another one of the missions.

You could have extra ships there waiting just to return specimens (and to offer a backup return vehicle for each team to get back up to orbit to return on an ISS-sized ship for the travel to and from Mars, not unlike in The Martian, which you could then park in Orbit around Earth or even the Moon and use as a slightly-used international space station or use it again for another trip out). You could return literal tons of specimens to earth for study, you could have human beings processing the stuff there "no this looks like a waste of time, this one is interesting, that's interesting, that's a weird feature let's drill a few samples here" not to mention just cover more area with various instruments getting all sorts of readings.

sigh

If only. If we could just get 5 countries to agree to contribute 1% for 2-3 years we could establish a permanent moon base and do a hardcore Mars human-exploration mission. Obviously it would take 10-20 years to pull off but an international committee could be selected (representatives from all 5 nations as well as other nations that say want to help with supporting the missions, wouldn't need to pony up nearly as much money). Call it Starfleet 0.5 and make all of the science that results from the missions 100% public, give every country the UN recognizes a certain allotment of specimens as well for display in government-sponsored museums and to allow their own citizens to study.

Alas, I dream too much.

Not exactly true. Water on Mars has been thinkable for quite some time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_discoveries_of...

And there has been speculation about water on Jupiter's moons since at least the 1960's. Probably longer.