Anglers are lining up for the next flight to Mars, even as we speak...
Posted on 09/29/2020 6:25:13 AM PDT by Red Badger
A network of salty ponds may be gurgling beneath Mars' South Pole alongside a large underground lake, raising the prospect of tiny, swimming Martian life.
Italian scientists reported their findings Monday, two years after identifying what they believed to be a large buried lake. They widened their coverage area by a couple hundred miles, using even more data from a radar sounder on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.
In the latest study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy, the scientists provide further evidence of this salty underground lake, estimated to be 12 miles to 18 miles (20 kilometers to 30 kilometers) across and buried 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) beneath the icy surface.
Even more tantalizing, they've also identified three smaller bodies of water surrounding the lake. These ponds appear to be of various sizes and are separate from the main lake.
Roughly 4 billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, like Earth. But the red planet eventually morphed into the barren, dry world it remains today.
The research team led by Roma Tre University's Sebastian Emanuel Lauro used a method similar to what's been used on Earth to detect buried lakes in the Antarctic and Canadian Arctic. They based their findings on more than 100 radar observations by Mars Express from 2010 to 2019; the spacecraft was launched in 2003.
All this potential water raises the possibility of microbial life on—or inside—Mars. High concentrations of salt are likely keeping the water from freezing at this frigid location, the scientists noted. The surface temperature at the South Pole is an estimated minus 172 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 113 degrees Celsius), and gets gradually warmer with depth.
These bodies of water are potentially interesting biologically and "future missions to Mars should target this region," the researchers wrote.
A huge liquid water lake beneath the southern pole of Mars:
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-huge-liquid-lake-beneath-southern.html
Global warming!
It’s a new fiscal year in 33 days...
Anglers are lining up for the next flight to Mars, even as we speak...
A big salty lake?
Next thing you know they’ll find Mormons.
Mormons in SPAAAAAACE!
I see a movie, or a TV show.
That’s actually a subplot in the sci-fi show “The Expanse”. The Mormons build a giant generation ship to ditch this solar system and head for greener pastures.
Some people will do anything to promote desert as “beachfront property”...
Its important to discern between scientific theory and trolling for funding.
Tell Pelosi and Biden the salt water will keep the skin in their faces stretched out and they’re along for the Mars ride.
Salty Ponds........ that’s going to be my porn star name.....lol
Liquid water has been discovered on Mars so many times, it's important to remember that there just isn't a lot of water on Mars, and thanks to the very low atmospheric pressure (about the same as what is found 40 miles above the Earth) liquid water exists only in transient events.
So the water that manages to get to the surface, vaporize and rise into the thin atmosphere would freeze and fall as snow, right?
So Dan Quayle was right about this too.
Impact events produce microclimates in the imeediate area, provided there is ice in the soil; water vapor makes liquid water possible for short periods, followed by refreeze, which produces that from-nowhere-to-nowhere erosion pattern found here and there across the Martian surface. These have been missed as far as realtime, but have been observed in aftermath at least once, where the same orbiter reimages an area that didn't have any trace of water erosion, then on a later pass, it does and it's obvious.
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