Mars!

Welcome to Sciforums, essexman. May your posts be long and varied.

The idea of whether to use space as our habitat or a planet is a long debatable issue. On one side to make a habitat in space would be easier than trying to terraform a planet. True. However terraforming a planet is something that sooner or later will be tried. Why? Near earth's area we have a backup in that our home is not far away if we get into trouble. Should earth disappear from catastrophic circumstances, as a liviable enviroment, we shall have no other area that suits us. Several possibilities supply that scenerio now. Birthing and body degradation due to space and its effects at this time do not allow us to spend long term lenghts in its enviroment. As such a hospitable planet is required.

 

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Swiss Cheese-Like Landscape on Mars

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Swiss Cheese-Like Landscape on Mars
Credit: Malin Space Science Systems, MGS, JPL, NASA
Why do parts of the south pole of Mars look like swiss cheese? This little-understood landscape features flat-topped mesas nearly 4 meters high and circular indentations over 100 meters across. Since this swiss-cheese topography is unique to the polar cap covering southern Mars, exogeologists speculate that mesa composition might be high in frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice). Additionally, dry ice might have had a role in this strange landscape's creation. In the above picture, the Martian surface is illuminated by sunlight from the upper right. The above picture was taken in August 1999 by the robot Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft currently orbiting Mars.

 

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3-D Dunes

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Mars: 3-D Dunes
Credit: MSSS, JPL, NASA

: Get out your red/blue glasses and treat yourself to this dramatic 3-D view of sand dunes on Mars! The field of undulating dunes is found in Nili Patera, a volcanic depression in central Syrtis Major, the most prominent dark feature on the Red Planet. Two different images from the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft were combined to make this stereo picture, one taken in March 1999 and the other recorded in April 2001. Sculpted by winds like the sand dunes of Earth, these particular Martian dunes show no change in shape over the time separating the two images, a period equivalent to about one Martian year. This cropped version of the 3-D picture spans an area around 2 kilometers across. Walking, you might cover that distance in about 20 minutes.

 

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Art Bell

Hi, sorry it took so long. But we get Art Bell and other scientific, paranormal talk show host here in Montgomery Alabama U.S.A. 'am' 1170 WACB every day, I listen every once in a wile and I say I don't believe everything herd on those shows, but is entertaining and be's on the air for 5-6hours 12 mid-night till 6 in the morning, talking about Mars, Bigfoot, UFO's, Ghosts, astronomy, cloning, much more,and the stuff that I have read a little about on this forum!

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Some times I tape it all and listen on the week end because it's so long and can't stay awake long enough to here the whole show. He says the show is on short wave radio you may find him at: art bell.com, They really be into what you have been debating about and others on the forum, no matter how way out there conversations would be! We really enjoy the pictures! Wet1 !http://www.artbell.com

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Clues about Martian Water

Martian Colors Provide Clues about Martian Water

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Photo Credit: Jim Bell (Cornell University), Justin Maki (JPL), and Mike Wolff (Space Sciences Institute) and NASA

NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of Mars taken in visible and infrared light detail a rich geologic history and provide further evidence for water-bearing minerals on the planet's surface.

LEFT This "true-color" image of Mars shows the planet as it would look to human eyes. It is clearly more earth-toned than usually depicted in other astronomical images, including earlier Hubble pictures. The slightly bluer shade along the edges of the disk is due to atmospheric hazes and wispy water ice clouds (like cirrus clouds) in the early morning and late evening Martian sky. The yellowish-pink color of the northern polar cap indicates the presence of small iron-bearing dust particles. These particles are covering or are suspended in the air above the blue-white water ice and carbon dioxide ice, which make up the polar cap.

Accurate colors are needed to determine the composition and mineralogy of Mars. This can tell how water has influenced the formation of rocks and minerals found on Mars today, as well as the distribution and abundance of ice and subsurface liquid water. Confirmation of the presence of certain oxidized (rusted) minerals (processed by heat or water action) would imply the possibility of different, perhaps much more Earth-like, past Martian climate periods. Because the smallest features visible in this image are only about 14 miles (22 km) across, Hubble can track small-scale variations in the distribution of minerals that do not follow global trends. The image was generated from three separate Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 images acquired at wavelengths of 410, 502, and 673 nanometers, in March 1997.

RIGHT A false-color picture taken in infrared light reveals features that cannot be seen in visible light. Hubble's unique infrared view pinpoints variations in the abundance and distribution of unknown water-bearing minerals on the planet. While it has been known for decades that small amounts of water-bearing minerals exist on the planet's surface, the reddish regions in this image indicate areas of enhanced concentrations of these as-yet-unidentified deposits. They are perhaps related to the water-rich history of this part of Mars. In particular, the large reddish region known as Mare Acidalium was the site of massive flooding early in Martian history. (NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft landed at the southern edge of this region in 1997.) This composite image was taken in July 1997 with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. Red corresponds to the strength of an absorption band detected near 1450 nanometers; green to the brightness of the surface in the near-infrared; and blue to topographic elevation, determined from Viking Orbiter data.

Thank you for the link, Sir. Loone, This one's for you.

 

Sir. Loone,

I found that you can listen to the Art Bell show through the internet from the link you supplied. I listened to a small amount of it. I plan to try a little longer slice later. I think you're right, I could indeed be interesting.

 

From APOD Archives:

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http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/im...orces, the debris forming a ring around Mars.

 

He's really with it....

From Potato Land:

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/11/89

 

I just had a VERY good idea.

What if we were to attach a couple of gigantic rockets to the equator of Mars, get a good sized comet, fliy the comet in a close orbit of Mars, while at the same time firing the rockets in the opposite direction in which the comet's gravitational force would speed up the rotation.

What I would think this would do, would be to accelerate the innards of mars, while keeping the crust where it is (because the rockets dont affect the entire planet, just the crust).

This would likley restore Mars's magnetic field.

No, this is not some irrational super-destructive thing. It would not be THAT hard to maybe bore holes alone the Martian equator, fill them up with oxygen and engines, and ignite all of them simultaneously. Apart from giving Mars a megnetic field, this would also warm Mars up a considerable degree, and pressurize the atmosphere at the same time (with the exaust gases of rockets).

If you ask who would be doing all of this drilling and engine making, it would have to be robots. And no, I am not talking about the little fragile tin cans that NASA is sending there today, I mean millions of heavy duty building size robots that self-replicate, and are controlled from ON Mars, or in orbits of Mars.

I am aware that we do not currently have the technology to do this, but wait about 50 years and well see about that.

 

I see that you have been thinking here tetra.

Maybe I'm wrong here but it looks like you assume that the core is molten as it is on earth. On earth radioactives keep the core molten. On Mars there is no molten core. Maybe that means that there are no radioactives. Without the molten core I don't think there is anything for your comet to react on. As the whole of Mars appears to be solid.

The molten core is what gives the magnetic field.

 

yes, Mars does have a molten center, although it is not nearly as large proportinally to earth.

 

I think what I meant to say is that it is not continous. But rather in pockets like it is almost gone.

 

if it is in pockets, then there is a good chance that many will be close to each other, and woul merge together if shifted by any large heavenly body.

 

No arguement there.

 

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The Mars Polar Lander entered the martian atmosphere on December 3, 1999, and contact was never re-established after that time. On January 17, 2000, after considerable effort to communicate with the spacecraft, NASA/JPL declared the mission at an end. No data were returned from the MARDI instrument

 

Surrounded by Mars

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Surrounded by Mars
Credit: Mark T. Lemmon (Texas A&M), IMP Team, JPL, NASA
Just after landing on Mars in 1997, the robotic Mars Pathfinder main station took a quick first look around. This insurance panorama was taken even before the Sagan Memorial Station camera was raised to its two-meter-high perch. The full view is best seen by slowly scrolling to the right. The unique perspective captures many Mars Pathfinder instruments in the close foreground including a screen for judging sky illumination, communications antennae, solar panels, and two ramps leading down to the surface for the robot probe Sojourner. After taking the ramp on the right, Sojourner can be seen on the Martian surface. Visible on the surface are numerous rocks and hills that came to be better studied. The Mars Pathfinder mission went on to return 16,000 images and data that resulted in many discoveries, including evidence for warmer and wetter conditions on Mars in the past. After nearly three spectacular months exploring the surface, Mars

 

cool!
thanks for all the pictures.

I don't care what the general public thinks, the only thing we should be concentrating on now is getting a significant number of people who are not dependant on Earth.

The Human Species needs it to stay alive. I doubt that we will last another 300 years on our own.

 

hey all

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hey wet1....
look at the far right of the big pic!
it looks like there is evidence of wind effect on the dust and as if it has lightly rained on it first.
what a strange place it must be.
i stagger to try to imagine the type of physics at work in such an enviroment.

groove on all

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terraforming mars

I really love all those pictures!
Do you know SimEarth? It's a computer game about terraforming Mars, Venus or trying to play around with climate and life on Earth. To terraform Mars you have to add greenhouse gases and water-containing meteors. You need very long before anything can live there and the climate is always uncontrolled. There is also the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't know any more what they do to change the climate there, but they use genetically-changed plants and animals that thrive in arctic climates.
It doesn't sound impossible in those books and I would feel much better if there was another place to live, just in case some lunatic blows up this one.
(Sorry for my English!)

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I am going to get off the subject for a minute. I am amazed at our foreign visitors. Most apologise for their English and actually they do better that us that are native born to it. Would that I could do so well....