Liquid water on Mars?

[rhinochopig]

RobDickinson said:

We still havnt got a material strong enough to build a space elevator. Its probably the best bet for getting lots of mass up into orbit tho.

CNTs are, they're just not feasible (at the moment) in the sizes required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube

[RobDickinson]

rhinochopig said:

CNTs are, they're just not feasible (at the moment) in the sizes required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube

yeah as I said, we dont have the materials yet, unless we want a very very small space elevator...

[MitchT]

tank slapper said:

NASA have posted some interesting pictures on their website that appear to show liquid water flows.

Either water flows or surface relief becoming less and more apparent as the angle at which it is being lit changes over time. I'm sure NASA have thought of that though.

[Eric Mc]

I'm sure they have.

Those photos span a number of different Martian seasons. Mars is tilted on its axis (like earth) so exhibits similar seasons - although they are twice as long because Mars takes two earth years to circle the sun.

[tank slapper]

MitchT said:

Either water flows or surface relief becoming less and more apparent as the angle at which it is being lit changes over time. I'm sure NASA have thought of that though.

The paper in science goes into quite a bit more depth than is on the website. It is pretty clear that it isn't just surface relief, but that there is something else going on, as it is changing in an apparently seasonal pattern. The problem is there are very limited tools to identify what. The high resolution camera on the orbiter is going to be imaging areas where this phenomenon has been noticed more frequently now so that will provide more data.

The paper isn't claiming that there definitely is liquid water there, but that certainly fits the data available so far and better than other alternative explanations. It is far from proven, but it's a good point to base a hypothesis on.

[Use Psychology]

they can't directly measure for water because the high resolution camera has a resolution of about 30cm whereas their spectrometer has a resolution of 18 metres...

but the darkening features are correlated with higher temperatures and they fade at lower temperatures.