Water on the moon or Mars

I was just wondering about this. I remember checking the daily updates
with my office mates about the two rovers on Mars. We were really
disappointed by the amount or quailty of information that was coming
out of NASA from the rovers. We heard all about minerals that might
have been formed in a water solution way back when and this chemical
compound and that. With all of the scientific equipment on the rovers
has NASA said we have found a h20 molecule. It seems that hydrogen is
going to be very important for moon and mars exploration and i would
think that we would want hard evidence before we send a colony or
longer mission.

Thoughts??

Seth wrote:
I was just wondering about this. I remember checking the daily updates
with my office mates about the two rovers on Mars. We were really
disappointed by the amount or quailty of information that was coming
out of NASA from the rovers.

Look to the orbiters rather than the rovers. The ESA's Mars Express
orbiter has a radar specifically built for searching for water, and
it's found quite a bit.

Mike Miller

Seth wrote:
With all of the scientific equipment on the rovers
has NASA said we have found a h20 molecule.

The MER science payload was not designed to look for water directly,
since none was expected near the equator due to the surface temperature
and low atmospheric pressure. The point of the mission was to look for
geologic evidence of a distant past in which liquid water played a
role. Which in fact it found. Nevertheless, the team has seen
indirect evidence of hydrated minerals at the Opportunity landing site.
Oh, and the rovers have snapped pictures of water ice clouds, if you
count that.

It seems that hydrogen is
going to be very important for moon and mars exploration and i would
think that we would want hard evidence before we send a colony or
longer mission.

I wouldn't worry much about colonies or "longer missions" anytime soon.
In any case, aside from the obvious water ice caps, the Mars Odyssey
orbiter has found rather dramatic amounts of hydrogen in large expanses
of the surface of Mars at high latitudes, which pretty much has to be
bound in water ice. In some places, the ground may be on the order of
50% water ice. In 2008, the Phoenix lander will touch down at those
high latitudes in the North to sample the water ice directly and
whatever is there with it.

mark

In article .com,
"Seth" wrote:

I was just wondering about this. I remember checking the daily updates
with my office mates about the two rovers on Mars. We were really
disappointed by the amount or quailty of information that was coming
out of NASA from the rovers. We heard all about minerals that might
have been formed in a water solution way back when and this chemical
compound and that. With all of the scientific equipment on the rovers
has NASA said we have found a h20 molecule. It seems that hydrogen is
going to be very important for moon and mars exploration and i would
think that we would want hard evidence before we send a colony or
longer mission.

Thoughts??


Water is less important than money; if you do the calculations a manned
Mars mission is way more costly than the US can afford. It's all talk,
sending a small team to mars and getting them back alive would bust the
treasury.

--
Free men own guns, slaves don't
www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5357/

Unfortunately with an unexplainable frequency the Mars Express orbiter
also has been noticing a migration of the ice caps in the past three
seasons. It is slowly getting smaller and smaller and it never quite
comes back out as far as the season before. The reason of course is
disappation of the water caps. No one can quite explain the phenomenon
and scientist don't think it will disappear altogether but rather it
seems to be a trend followed quite frequently on our red neighbor.

Originally Posted by tjj1469

Unfortunately with an unexplainable frequency the Mars Express orbiter
also has been noticing a migration of the ice caps in the past three
seasons. It is slowly getting smaller and smaller and it never quite
comes back out as far as the season before. The reason of course is
disappation of the water caps. No one can quite explain the phenomenon
and scientist don't think it will disappear altogether but rather it
seems to be a trend followed quite frequently on our red neighbor.

Actually, that was Mars Global Surveyor, specifically the Mars Orbiter Camera's observations. Mars Express hasn't been in orbit long enough to make this observation.

-Tim.

Once upon a time tjj1469 sat by the fire and begun to tell a story:
Unfortunately with an unexplainable frequency the Mars Express orbiter
also has been noticing a migration of the ice caps in the past three
seasons. It is slowly getting smaller and smaller and it never quite
comes back out as far as the season before. The reason of course is
disappation of the water caps. No one can quite explain the phenomenon
and scientist don't think it will disappear altogether but rather it
seems to be a trend followed quite frequently on our red neighbor.

Firstly, I am not saying this is not a real phenomena. It certainly is,
since it is seen in direct observations.

But I should nevertheless point out that this is only a few years worth of
observations. Think about snow cover on Earth - during any ten years
of terrestrial seasons, sometimes the winter is cold, and snow extends
farther south, and sometimes there are warm winters when the snow doesn't
even get as far as "normally". The same thing happens on Mars. That's
nature.

And looking at seasonal changes for three years will not give you
statistically accurate anything. Never. 50, 100 or preferrably 1000
years might do it.

Secondly, Mars has much more radical periodical changes in its climate
than Earth. And now we are talking about longer term changes, in the
order of thousands to millions of years. Its obliquity and eccentricity
change radically, and hence the solar insolation changes. So it is to be
expected that the Martian environment changes accordingly. In the long
run.

Even on Earth, we actually have no idea of the long-term frequency of
e.g. polar cap sizes and other features of climate change. We have been
observing nature accurately and in a large scale directly for about 100
years. What we get from ice cores or other indirect measurements
don't tell us the whole story, just the after-effects.. and even they are
just a blink of an eye considering the variations which take place during
the millions of years of _recent_ developments of the planets' history.

So looking at MGS images for three (Martian) years just tells you what is
expected if common sense and deduction is used: Martian environment varies
from year to year. Spectacular, maybe, but certainly nothing special.

Jarmo

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Planetology group, Astronomy o o
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Thank you for the correction. It is absolutely important to make sure
all information is current and accurate.