Posted on 12/20/2018 11:28:37 PM PST by aquila48
It is a picture perfect Christmas card image from another planet.
The European Space Agency's Mars Express has returned an incredible new series of images showing a giant crater on the red planet.
It shows the Korolev crater, a 50 mile (82 km) wide feature in in the northern lowlands of Mars.
Just south of a large patch of dune-filled terrain that encircles part of the planet's northern polar cap (known as Olympia Undae), ESA says it is 'an especially well-preserved example of a martian crater.'
It is filled not by snow but ice, with its center hosting a mound of water ice some 1.8 kilometres thick all year round.
This domed deposit forms a glacier comprising around 528 cubic miles of non-polar ice on Mars.
Smaller amounts of water ice are distributed on and around the crater edge in the form of thin layers of frost.
This ever-icy presence is due to a phenomenon known as a 'cold trap' caused by the crater's floor lying two kilometres vertically beneath its rim.
The very deepest parts of Korolev crater, those containing ice, act as a natural cold trap: the air moving over the deposit of ice cools down and sinks, creating a layer of cold air that sits directly above the ice itself.
Acting as a shield, this layer helps the ice remain stable and stops it from heating up and disappearing.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Amazing. Interesting that we are just starting to explore and understand some planets in our own solar system, and have such little knowledge about other planetary systems, stars, and galaxies, let alone visible and unknown universes, but we still can muster enough arrogance as a species to think we are all knowing.
Anyone who thinks we're "all knowing" is stunningly ignorant and/or delusional, That having been said, it's hard to overstate how much better we understand the universe and how it works as compared to a couple of centuries ago.
Science works.
There is a plan to try to melt some of the ice on Mars and see if it will help create a human habitable atmosphere. The temperatures on much of Mars can get to about 70 degrees during daylight, but about 70 below at night. A thicker atmosphere might stabilize temperatures.
There is a great irony in all that though. The entire theory rests on forcing greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere to terraform the planet and make it possible to grow plants in the soil. Of course here on earth the plan is to stop greenhouse gases, the exact opposite.
Science does work. But it has to be constantly challenged using the Scientific Method. Science is never “settled”.
Interesting picture. Lots of haze in the picture. Is the ice causing fog to form in the atmosphere?
It’s still hard to believe that we can sit on our backsides in our living rooms and look at an amazing picture like this one.
All true, but we’re gonna try it anyway. May need to raise the temperature significantly and release a lot of O2 into the atmosphere. There are some theories that say the ideal average temperatures on earth should be 2-4 degrees higher than it is now. But those people are heretics to the GW establishment. Meanwhile we’ll try to do to that exact thing to Mars to make plants thrive. It’s gonna be a 100+ year project of trial and error but it will be interesting, however much of it we will personally see unfold. Probably won’t even start for a decade.
No. That is not "haze."
Regards,
I wonder how old that crater is? I assume a 50 mile wide crater would be a planet killing impact from a big rock doing 50,000 mph. Mars may have at one time in the distant past been quite lovely with strange and unimaginable creatures moving about. Interesting
Gee, yuh think?!
Rest assured: Thousands of people with PhDs in Geophysics and Astronomy and Meteorology using peta-flop computers have already invested many man-centuries of labor in developing complex mathematical models examining exactly this question.
But, by all means: Continue your armchair observations!
No offense intended, but your remark seemed (to me) to be so flippant.
Regards,
Good luck doing that on a planet without a magnetosphere.
They never spotted that before? Or did they assume it was carbon dioxide?
What is it?
Lack of a magnetic field is its greatest disadvantage. This prevents it from retaining a thick atmosphere against the solar wind, and also allows solar and cosmic radiation to reach the surface.
The Waters of Mars
Dr Who Episode
L8r
Never happen. No molten iron core, no magnetosphere. No magnetosphere, no atmosphere. Never happen.
These people should see if they could form an independent, sustainable community growing broccoli at the Nort Pole before they try to take on a planet like Mars.
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