Water on Mars
 

Figured I'd make a thread about it because it might give us something to discuss. Gathered a few articles just for the occasion.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...ars-soil-water
http://www.space.com/22949-mars-wate...ity-rover.html
http://news.discovery.com/space/this...ter-130926.htm

So yeah, you guys. Actual, factual water was found on Mars. It's a thing that happened. I had thought it already happened ages ago but I was then informed that we only found evidence that there was water on the planet at some point in time rather than finding straight up water.

We did find it at the poles, though not all the ice is water ice.

let's get people up there. we should have a science base on the moon by now, anyway. funding generally slows things down.

We need to get out to the poles of Mars where it isn't perma-frosty, Titan, Enceladus, Europa and that moon with a thin oxygen atmosphere and an ionsphere!

yeah but i bet all the other drinks cost a fukken bomb

i'll have a water cocktail.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sc...-1226723186041

This one is slightly less credible and kind of funny.

I'd rather steer clear of Europa until we've studied it more, will care. It's the best chance in the Solar system of extra-terrestrial life, and I don't want to risk contaminating it.

I heard about that. Guy has no evidence whatsoever that those particles are organic, let alone off-world organisms. The information content of those pictures is precisely zero.

Opportunity rover photographs water-ice clouds on Mars, 2008.

E: But finding it in abundance in the soil is still an amazing discovery.

Pretty sure NASA scientists can sterilise the actual stuff that'd be hitting down on the Europan surface though. The sooner the better, imo! I don't want to die without having seen pictures of the surface of Europa, Titan and Ganymede.

And Pluto. And Io. And Miranda. Because tectonics.

When I retire I want to go to Mars!

Harder than you think. They don't even like risking it on Earth with the Antarctic subglacial lakes.

Isn't it debatable whether our bacteria would even effect any autochthonic life on Europa any way? Like, the whole premise to us surviving War of the Worlds is fallible.

Funnily enough I had a dream about WotW last night. Man, I spent a lot of time hiding in a Tesco.

The point is that if we find bacteria on Mars, we want to know that it actually is from Mars and not brought there by us. There's a whole department at NASA focused on this. It's a surprisingly difficult problem.

For example, NASA has a pretty good idea where on Mars life is more likely to exist - regions with large amounts of water ice are a the best bet. And yet, the Curiosity rover was sent elsewhere. This is because it has a radioactive power source; if it crash landed, it could melt the ice and provide a nice warm area for Earth bacteria to multiply. Also, Curiosity has a robotic arm that can pick up one of a number of drill bits for drilling rock. They were treated to extreme conditions - cleaned with bleach, high temperatures, radioactivity - to kill any bacteria that might have been on them. And then one bright engineer opened the sealed box, took out one of the bits and attached it to the arm before takeoff. Now NASA won't let Curiosity go near any potentially life-bearing rock, because we simply can't know whether those bits brought anything along with them from Earth.

Wow, that's really disappointing! I assumed the cold vacuum of space would be enough to kill any bacteria that hitched a lift on Curiosity. I do hope we managed to get something out to the potential life-inhabited parts of the Solar System, but yeah, just plopping our own life forms on them is a little less inspiring.

Less inspiring but I still think it's pretty neat. Life forms from our own planet making their way into space and it would be even better if they continued to survive.

i completely agree. what a lovely way to put it.

I suppose, if you believe in abiogenesis, it really doesn't matter if we stick some microbes on Europa any way, because they'll have been coming in from comets for aeons.

Yes, but if they were transported there from Earth by meteorites (which is a possibility) then they will have been evolving independently in an alien environment for millions, perhaps billions of years. We still don't want to contaminating it with fucking Streptococcus and E. coli, do we?

Depends, if the E. Coli rapidly became sapient on Europa, that'd totally rock my world.

Technically it’d be rocking someone’s else’s world.

It’d be more accurate to say it would be out of this world.