A material splashed up onto the Phoenix Mars lander.Posted on 03/18/2009 12:35:11 PM PDT by BGHater
Several photographs taken by NASA’s Phoenix Mars spacecraft show what look like water droplets clinging to one of its landing struts.
Some of the scientists working on the mission are asserting that that is exactly what they were. They contend that there are pockets of liquid water just under the Martian surface even though the temperatures in the northern plains never warmed above minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the six months of Phoenix’s operations last year.
The scientists believe that salts may have lowered the freezing temperature of the Martian water droplets to perhaps minus 90 degrees, or more than 120 degrees colder than the usual freezing temperature of 32 degrees for pure water.
Nilton O. Renno, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan who proposed the hypothesis, was careful to say, “This is not a proof.”
But he added: “I think the evidence is overwhelming. It’s not circumstantial evidence.”
Dr. Renno will present his data and arguments this month in a talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, and he is the lead author among 22 authors of a scientific paper submitted to The Journal of Geophysical Research.
Others are completely unconvinced. “There are simpler explanations,” said Michael H. Hecht, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-investigator of the Phoenix’s wet chemistry instrument. Dr. Hecht, who described himself as the “designated curmudgeon,” said he believed that the process proposed by Dr. Renno to describe the formation and movement of water droplets was “flat-out wrong for these materials.”
A material splashed up onto the Phoenix Mars lander.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ladybugs
The Water Cult....
“There MUST be water on Mars”
“If there’s water, life MUST have evolved on Mars”
good grief.
“Vicious Martian sand-creatures with their wet, sucking lips...PPPPFFFTTTT, PPPPFFFTTTT...” From “Rocketman”... ;)
This is cool. I wonder if we can take water to Mars on our own spacecraft and see what happens to it, just to be sure. Either way we can then definitely say there’s water on Mars... ha
Not unless it’s some kind of magical water that remains liquid well under it’s normal freezing temperature.
Next article is that we propose carbon credits, set up a reservoir and windmills on Mars. If there ever was life on Mars, those microbes are more intelligent than liberals on earth.
Mar-tial warming
Martian Blisters? (VD?)
Spores. Martian spores.
Although it is too cold for water to still be in liquid form, might the drasticly reduced air pressure/gravity allow for its apparent liquid state?
That's where the salt comes in. The greater the salinity of the water, the lower the freezing point.
Yum! I thought anti-freeze tasted sweet? Isn’t that why cats and dogs like it?
Beer
FMCDH(BITS)
You mean like magical salt water?
Hard to tell where that water came from. There are five seas on Mars, but we know the name of only one, Throxeus, which is only a marsh now. Well, that and the Lost Sea of Korus, but that’s no where near Phoenix.
It would have to be some damned salty water. Also there are problems with how would it condense out of the thin martian atmosphere and remain salty.
We’ve pretty much determined that there is water in the martian environment but when it contacts the atmosphere it “boils” off almost immediately due to the very low pressure.
I’m more inclined to think that what we see are clumps of dust drawn together by static.
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