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Water Found On Mars

Let's hope they don't get the rover stuck in a ditch while trying to impress a girl.
 
In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists identified waterlogged molecules — salts of a type known as perchlorates — on the surface in readings from orbit.

“That’s a direct detection of water in the form of hydration of salts,” said Alfred S. McEwen, a professor of planetary geology at the University of Arizona, the principal investigator of images from a high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and one of the authors of the new paper. “There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt.”

By “recently,” Dr. McEwen said he meant “days, something of that order.”
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How much water are we talking here?

“There are two basic origins for the water: from above or from below,” Dr. McEwen said. The perchlorates could be acting like a sponge, absorbing moisture out of the air, but measurements indicate very low humidity on Mars — only enough for 10 microns, or about 1/2,500th of an inch, of rain across the planet if all of the wetness were wrung out of the air.

That idea cannot be ruled out if the lower part of the atmosphere turns out more humid than currently thought.

“We have very poor measurements of relative humidity near the surface,” Dr. McEwen said.

The other possibility is underground aquifers, frozen during winter, melting during summer and seeping to the surface.
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I suspect there may need to be an abundance of liquid water, in a fairly stable location for a long time, for life to originate.
 
PyramidHead said:
How much water are we talking here?

“There are two basic origins for the water: from above or from below,” Dr. McEwen said. The perchlorates could be acting like a sponge, absorbing moisture out of the air, but measurements indicate very low humidity on Mars — only enough for 10 microns, or about 1/2,500th of an inch, of rain across the planet if all of the wetness were wrung out of the air.

That idea cannot be ruled out if the lower part of the atmosphere turns out more humid than currently thought.

“We have very poor measurements of relative humidity near the surface,” Dr. McEwen said.

The other possibility is underground aquifers, frozen during winter, melting during summer and seeping to the surface.
Click to expand...

I suspect there may need to be an abundance of liquid water, in a fairly stable location for a long time, for life to originate.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't it be more like for life to still be on Mars long after it went to crap?
 
Oh, God.
I was going to make a joke about hoping this does NOT mean that there's life on Mars. The conservatives are paranoid enough about immigrants from this planet.

Rush Limbaugh, i just learned, has announced that he doesn't believe in flowing water on Mars, it's part of the Leftist agenda....







Never mind.
 
NASA seems to be dragging their feet on this, pictures of what are clearly seeps along some of the crater walls have been available for over ten years, though some of these are sand slides that uncover a darker subsurface material which gives an appearance of moisture but is not.
 
I just feel like if they missed the actual water by a few days, and they are constantly receiving images and readings, there should be a picture of the water coming any day now. Unless it's such a small quantity that it wouldn't even show up, and not the gushing waterfalls that some media outlets seem to be describing.
 
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“There are two basic origins for the water: from above or from below,” Dr. McEwen said. The perchlorates could be acting like a sponge, absorbing moisture out of the air, but measurements indicate very low humidity on Mars — only enough for 10 microns, or about 1/2,500th of an inch, of rain across the planet if all of the wetness were wrung out of the air.
Click to expand...

Kent Bovine will probably latch onto this and say, "See?!? Waters above separated from waters below, just like it said in Genesis 1. Science is just now catching up to the Buybull."
 
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