Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
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.
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.
#1) The need for a large ellipse of flat plains with a minimal amount of hazardous rocks/slopes. Landing accuracy is constrained by our knowledge of the Martian atmosphere. Odd features tend to be on the opposite end of the ground hazard spectrum.
#2) Planetary protection. Mars his a Category V target: it has potentially habitable niches, it has an atmosphere able to carry biological contamination anywhere, and we want to return samples from it to Earth. Chances of contamination are much lower when we stay far away from water ice and active gullies. Modern landers and rovers are much more delicate and intricate than the original Vikings and we can't just bake off all the contamination.
#3) Communications. Equatorial plains have a better view of the relay satellites.
#4) Close up, most interesting features on Mars are still a rocky desert. The Phoenix Lander landed on top of permafrost, which was unintended as it was thought to be just another rocky desert.
#5) Odd features are often complex geologically and characterizing the area near the rover may not say much about Mars nor provide useful context for future, more detailed missions.
#6) Perhaps, a tiny bit of backlash from Viking's ambiguous chemical experiments. It's easier to get conclusive science and write solid papers from old, stable parts of Mars.
A couple of reasons. The first is that to make a mission to Mars cost effective, we have to wait about 18 months for Earth and Mars to line up in the right positions, otherwise it costs too much in rocket fuel to be worthwhile. The second is that the missions lag behind the discoveries - it's much easier to analyze pictures and spectographs than it is to design a mission, secure funding for it, and then do it. Sending a landing craft to Mars is not very easy. We've done it successfully a few times, but we've failed quite a few times as well. A lot of these discoveries happen in places that it isn't trivial to land a rover. We put them in flat deserts because it's safer to and there is still much to learn there, but liquid water doesn't necessarily get found in places rovers can go. I imagine we're much more cautious with rovers on Mars than we are on say the moon. It's very costly to make a mistake and lose a rover on Mars.
NASA scientist: I built this space mission up from nothing. When I started, all I had was a martian lake! Other scientists said I was daft to send a rover into a lake, but I sent it all the same, just to show 'em! It sank into the lake, so I built a second one. That sank into the lake. I built a third one. It got stuck, fell over, and then it sank into the lake. But the fourth one floated! And that's what you're going to get, lad--the strongest rover on Mars!
then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
Do you seriously believe that scientist working on billion-dollar space missions for decades just throw a dart at the wall to decide where to land their rover?
Because it takes ages to plan a new mission and the vehicle we send is related to the goals of each mission. It's not like they have a rover stand-by and then decide where to land it. The equipment of the vehicle and the research it has to carry very much determine the way it will be build. So what we've send so far depends on the data we had years ago.
Aside from the logistical concerns others have mentioned, I would expect the risks of contaminating this site with terrestrial stowaways would be relatively high.
Building a rover that can drill more than a few inches deep is presently a huge technical challenge. If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity.
I wonder if it might make sense to have a kind of satellite around Mars with a series of probes that can be deployed wherever interesting things are suggested to be but aren’t necessarily expected to be mobile, beyond perhaps drilling downwards.
That way as more interesting discoveries are made via rovers or other technologies, we can deploy a probe right away instead of having to plan and build and hurl a rover through space for a year and a half.
If I understand the Science article¹ right, this lake is 1.5 km beneath the surface. That's a lot of digging when you can't go buy a new shovel.
Besides the fact it was only discovered right now, that is.
¹ The two-way pulse travel time between the surface and basal echoes can be used to estimate the depth of the subsurface reflector and map the basal topography. Assuming an average signal velocity of 170 m/μs within the SPLD, close to that of water ice (20), the depth of the basal reflector is about 1.5 km below the surface
From the BBC article it suggested that getting a rover there might be difficult.
Since they were talking about flying rovers, I would assume this means that it is not a nice flat plain like the current wheeled-rovers are used to driving around on. I am guessing that it means that it probably looks a lot like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brei%C3%B0amerkurj%C3%B6kull#/...
Kinda fascinating though. I would assume that instead of drilling they could just use some sort of heated "drill" that just sinks through the ice slowly but surely. Probably less to go wrong mechanically?
Have a little more faith in the people running these missions than that. The landing spots for any missions we send over are chosn very carefully and with a lot of thought. There are specific goals for any mission and the landing sites are chosen based on those in mind.
A note slightly related: Mars reaches perihelic opposition with the sun on July 27, 2018, which means observers on Earth will have their closest view of the planet since 2003. Great time to borrow a telescope.
For those, like me, wondering how this is even possible:
In order to remain liquid in such cold conditions (the research team estimate between -10 and -30 Celsius where it meets the ice above), the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it.
It is also quite possible Mars still has 'hot spots' as geologically it was very 'recently' volcanically active. Every now and then there's little anomalies that possibly hint at subsurface hot spots that might allow for hot springs and similar.
In Robert Zubrin's fictional (but hard-science) book "First Landing" on the first manned Mars mission they actually find a hot spot and drill into it resulting in a geyser (which obviously, the water instantly freezes creating a snow-like effect). All of Zubrin's books are worth reading if you are at all interested in manned missions to Mars. He has some non-fiction looks (that are a bit outdated now due to scientific discoveries, like finding the polar caps are lousy with water ice) but he goes into the math and gets you in the right mindset. The fiction book is similar in nature to The Martian (came out well before The Martian) and he also has a short little fiction book meant to be sold to future colonists called 'How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet' which also takes a hard-science fiction approach to the subject.
This is one reason why I am VERY skeptical of this conclusion.
From my reading of the article, the primary evidence they have is a bright radar reflection. That is the long-wavelength equivalent of saying "we found some white stuff, it's probably water ice!" There are other things besides water which reflect strongly. The fact that the conditions at the site are extremely non-conducive to liquid water tempers the idea that there's water there. AFAICT, there is nothing null-hypothesis rejecting here. In fact, it seems barely as good as "it's not impossible that it's water." I suspect the current hoopla is premature at best.
Very interesting; I presume there is a way to determine the concentration of salts that "great many" represents. Would be interesting to compare with known halotolerant lifeforms' salt tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halotolerance).
I fully expect us to find something like a bacterium somewhere else. They might even be very common anywhere where there's hydrothermal activity. Prokaryotes seem to have evolved _twice_ on earth (archaea and bacteria), albeit from some common proto-cell thing. So there's some chemiosmotic 'recipe' which can make them.
What I don't expect is anything like a eukaryote and certainly not like multicelular life. I think that kind of life is either vanishingly rare or non-existent elsewhere.
There was almost 3 billion years of life on this planet before eukaryotes arrived, and they arrived only once and in a form likely almost identical to what we see today. So it's really really 'flukey' and not something that 'just happens' in some necessary teleological fashion.
Nick Lane gets into this in his book "The Vital Question" -- it's quite convincing. And maybe depressing if you grew up on sci-fi like myself.
Ya my feeling at this point is that there is likely primitive life on every planet having liquid water, which means at least one moon around every gas giant, which means nearly every star which has gas giants (not even counting planets in habitable zones). So that part of the Drake equation is covered, but intelligent life could still be rare.
I just imagine the odds of a planet-sized petri dish not evolving life in billions of years, and I certainly wouldn't take that bet!
You have to keep in mind we're teetering on the edge of an exponential explosion in knowledge. What's been done in decades with all of our rovers and probes on Mars could have been accomplished in a matter of days by a single human on the planet. That's not an exaggeration. For instance we're coming up on Curiosity 6th year on Mars in a couple of weeks. It's traveled, in this entire time, a bit less than 13.3 miles. There's an ongoing odometer available here [1]. And it's had some major instrumentation errors (such as with its drill) that a human could have trivially repaired on site.
Only question is how long is it going to take us to get those feet on the planet. From there? I'd expect major discoveries will be a matter of months.
My first thought was why couldn't this be some other liquid like CO2:
We examined other possible explanations for the bright area below the SPLD (supplementary text). For example, a CO2 ice layer at the top or the bottom of the SPLD, or a very low temperature of the H2O ice throughout the SPLD, could enhance basal echo power compared with surface reflections. We reject these explanations (supplementary text), either because of the very specific and unlikely physical conditions required, or because they do not cause sufficiently strong basal reflections (figs. S5 and S6). Although the pressure and the temperature at the base of the SPLD would be compatible with the presence of liquid CO2, its relative dielectric permittivity is much lower (about 1.6) (28) than that of liquid water (about 80), so it does not produce bright reflections.
Why liquid and not solid water?
... Perchlorates can form through different physical and/or chemical mechanisms (30, 31) and have been detected in different areas of Mars. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they are also present at the base of the SPLD. Because the temperature at the base of the polar deposits is estimated to be around 205 K (32), and because perchlorates strongly suppress the freezing point of water (to a minimum of 204 and 198 K for magnesium and calcium perchlorates, respectively) (29), we therefore find it plausible that a layer of perchlorate brine could be present at the base of the polar deposits. ...
This is a similar principle (freezing point depression) to that used in de-icing roads.
And maybe the best part of all - there may be other smaller but currently undetectable pools:
... The limited raw-data coverage of the SPLD (a few percent of the area of Planum Australe) and the large size required for a meltwater patch to be detectable by MARSIS (several kilometers in diameter and several tens of centimeters in thickness) limit the possibility of identifying small bodies of liquid water or the existence of any hydraulic connection between them. Because of this, there is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location. ...
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.
The little kid inside me is jumping up and down, like I have seen Santa. My belief in Mars hosting simple life forms is stronger than ever now. May be NASA already has data for it, but hasn't finished yet sifting through it. Amazing news!
If I really wanted mankind to invest more money into exploring Mars, I wonder what the best approach would be. What do y'all think?
1. Make enough money to invest your own capital/start your own company. (Ex: Elon Musk) AKA Do it yourself.
2. Go into politics and get enough support to start a campaign? AKA Get the government to do it.
3. Other?
[+] [-] liberte82|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FranOntanaya|7 years ago|reply
#2) Planetary protection. Mars his a Category V target: it has potentially habitable niches, it has an atmosphere able to carry biological contamination anywhere, and we want to return samples from it to Earth. Chances of contamination are much lower when we stay far away from water ice and active gullies. Modern landers and rovers are much more delicate and intricate than the original Vikings and we can't just bake off all the contamination.
#3) Communications. Equatorial plains have a better view of the relay satellites.
#4) Close up, most interesting features on Mars are still a rocky desert. The Phoenix Lander landed on top of permafrost, which was unintended as it was thought to be just another rocky desert.
#5) Odd features are often complex geologically and characterizing the area near the rover may not say much about Mars nor provide useful context for future, more detailed missions.
#6) Perhaps, a tiny bit of backlash from Viking's ambiguous chemical experiments. It's easier to get conclusive science and write solid papers from old, stable parts of Mars.
[+] [-] hoorayimhelping|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keketi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
Do you seriously believe that scientist working on billion-dollar space missions for decades just throw a dart at the wall to decide where to land their rover?
[+] [-] elorant|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|7 years ago|reply
That way as more interesting discoveries are made via rovers or other technologies, we can deploy a probe right away instead of having to plan and build and hurl a rover through space for a year and a half.
[+] [-] andygates|7 years ago|reply
And none of the current rovers could drill a mile into ice, or get there in the first place. First drill will be InSight real soon now.
OP, I think, suffers from Earthbound preconceptions of development in a field that has physics laughing back.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|7 years ago|reply
Besides the fact it was only discovered right now, that is.
¹ The two-way pulse travel time between the surface and basal echoes can be used to estimate the depth of the subsurface reflector and map the basal topography. Assuming an average signal velocity of 170 m/μs within the SPLD, close to that of water ice (20), the depth of the basal reflector is about 1.5 km below the surface
[+] [-] mattlondon|7 years ago|reply
Since they were talking about flying rovers, I would assume this means that it is not a nice flat plain like the current wheeled-rovers are used to driving around on. I am guessing that it means that it probably looks a lot like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brei%C3%B0amerkurj%C3%B6kull#/...
Kinda fascinating though. I would assume that instead of drilling they could just use some sort of heated "drill" that just sinks through the ice slowly but surely. Probably less to go wrong mechanically?
[+] [-] modzu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebbv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mozumder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jibal|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gbugniot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colemannugent|7 years ago|reply
Since I (and probably most of us on HN) live in the worst area for light pollution it's not too often you can see other planets like this unaided.
[+] [-] huhtenberg|7 years ago|reply
Go check it out tonight!
[+] [-] lorenzhs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brlewis|7 years ago|reply
In order to remain liquid in such cold conditions (the research team estimate between -10 and -30 Celsius where it meets the ice above), the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it.
[+] [-] ryanmercer|7 years ago|reply
In Robert Zubrin's fictional (but hard-science) book "First Landing" on the first manned Mars mission they actually find a hot spot and drill into it resulting in a geyser (which obviously, the water instantly freezes creating a snow-like effect). All of Zubrin's books are worth reading if you are at all interested in manned missions to Mars. He has some non-fiction looks (that are a bit outdated now due to scientific discoveries, like finding the polar caps are lousy with water ice) but he goes into the math and gets you in the right mindset. The fiction book is similar in nature to The Martian (came out well before The Martian) and he also has a short little fiction book meant to be sold to future colonists called 'How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet' which also takes a hard-science fiction approach to the subject.
[+] [-] tbabb|7 years ago|reply
From my reading of the article, the primary evidence they have is a bright radar reflection. That is the long-wavelength equivalent of saying "we found some white stuff, it's probably water ice!" There are other things besides water which reflect strongly. The fact that the conditions at the site are extremely non-conducive to liquid water tempers the idea that there's water there. AFAICT, there is nothing null-hypothesis rejecting here. In fact, it seems barely as good as "it's not impossible that it's water." I suspect the current hoopla is premature at best.
[+] [-] nickspacek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hossbeast|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henryaj|7 years ago|reply
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
[+] [-] mFixman|7 years ago|reply
Mark my words: in 20 years, we'll find extremely simple proto-bacterial life in Mars and in many other planets.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|7 years ago|reply
What I don't expect is anything like a eukaryote and certainly not like multicelular life. I think that kind of life is either vanishingly rare or non-existent elsewhere.
There was almost 3 billion years of life on this planet before eukaryotes arrived, and they arrived only once and in a form likely almost identical to what we see today. So it's really really 'flukey' and not something that 'just happens' in some necessary teleological fashion.
Nick Lane gets into this in his book "The Vital Question" -- it's quite convincing. And maybe depressing if you grew up on sci-fi like myself.
[+] [-] zackmorris|7 years ago|reply
I just imagine the odds of a planet-sized petri dish not evolving life in billions of years, and I certainly wouldn't take that bet!
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
Only question is how long is it going to take us to get those feet on the planet. From there? I'd expect major discoveries will be a matter of months.
[1] - http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html
[+] [-] tzfld|7 years ago|reply
This not seems to be entirely = to 'water revealed on Mars'
[+] [-] apo|7 years ago|reply
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/scien...
A couple of highlights:
My first thought was why couldn't this be some other liquid like CO2:
We examined other possible explanations for the bright area below the SPLD (supplementary text). For example, a CO2 ice layer at the top or the bottom of the SPLD, or a very low temperature of the H2O ice throughout the SPLD, could enhance basal echo power compared with surface reflections. We reject these explanations (supplementary text), either because of the very specific and unlikely physical conditions required, or because they do not cause sufficiently strong basal reflections (figs. S5 and S6). Although the pressure and the temperature at the base of the SPLD would be compatible with the presence of liquid CO2, its relative dielectric permittivity is much lower (about 1.6) (28) than that of liquid water (about 80), so it does not produce bright reflections.
Why liquid and not solid water?
... Perchlorates can form through different physical and/or chemical mechanisms (30, 31) and have been detected in different areas of Mars. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they are also present at the base of the SPLD. Because the temperature at the base of the polar deposits is estimated to be around 205 K (32), and because perchlorates strongly suppress the freezing point of water (to a minimum of 204 and 198 K for magnesium and calcium perchlorates, respectively) (29), we therefore find it plausible that a layer of perchlorate brine could be present at the base of the polar deposits. ...
This is a similar principle (freezing point depression) to that used in de-icing roads.
And maybe the best part of all - there may be other smaller but currently undetectable pools:
... The limited raw-data coverage of the SPLD (a few percent of the area of Planum Australe) and the large size required for a meltwater patch to be detectable by MARSIS (several kilometers in diameter and several tens of centimeters in thickness) limit the possibility of identifying small bodies of liquid water or the existence of any hydraulic connection between them. Because of this, there is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location. ...
[+] [-] black_puppydog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
Damn! Water and oxidizer for rockets.
[+] [-] jhabdas|7 years ago|reply
Here's a link straight to the downloadable PDF two clicks past that abstract:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/scien...
[+] [-] sidcool|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wytian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scardine|7 years ago|reply
SPOILER ALERT:
The book ends with a dissident faction of Mars settlers living in a hidden water ice dome under the polar cap.
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