It is hyper dry but it is not without water and
really plenty of it. I personally
suspect that crust is actually saturated with water just like Earths and any
original surface deposits have been simply buried with dust and material while
subjected to millions of years of sublimation.
That implies establishing a viable Mars colony will
need critical mass but no importation of significant resources that act as a
deal killer. In the event, such a
habitat will need to largely go underground anyway. From there it should be feasible to drill
very deep bore holes from which to extract water. Add energy and all is good to go.
The existence of Phoebus which is an obvious space
habitat informs us that habitats likely already exist on Mars. Thus our arrival in magnetic field exclusion
vessels ( MFEV this Blog) will plausibly be acknowledged.
Water for future Mars astronauts
by Staff Writers
Los Alamos NM (SPX) Oct 01, 2013
This
image shows two areas on Mars in a location named Rocknest that were scooped
out by the Curiosity Rover last year. Researchers took samples of the areas to
determine whether they were wetter underneath or whether they dried out after
scooping. Researchers found that soil moisture was consistent at the surface and
underneath. Nevertheless, there is a small amount of water in the soil that
astronauts might be able to use to sustain themselves. These finding and others
are outlined in a series of papers appearing today in the Journal
"Science." Credit: Image credit: NASA/JPL.
Within its first three months on Mars, NASA's
Curiosity Rover saw a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a
half-kilometer route that tell a complex story about the gradual desiccation of
the Red Planet. Perhaps most notable among findings from the ChemCam team is
that all of the dust and fine soil contains small amounts of water.
"We made this discovery literally with the
very first laser shot on the Red Planet," said Roger Wiens, leader of the
ChemCam instrument team. "Every single time we shot at dust we saw a
significant hydrogen peak."
In a series of five papers covering the rover's
top discoveries during its first three months on Mars that appear today in the
journal Science, Los Alamos researchers using the rover's ChemCam instrument
team up with an international cadre of scientists affiliated with the CheMin,
APXS, and SAM instruments to describe the planet's seemingly once-volcanic and
aquatic history.
Researchers believed the hydrogen seen in the
dust was coming from water, a hypothesis that was later corroborated by
Curiosity's SAM instrument, which indicated that all of the soil encountered on
Mars contains between 1.5 and 3 percent water. This quantity is enough to
explain much of the near-equatorial hydrogen observed beginning in 2001 by Los
Alamos's neutron spectrometer on board the Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
ChemCam also showed that the soils consist of
two distinct components. In addition to extremely fine-grained particles that
seem to be representative of the ubiquitous Martian dust covering the entire
planet's surface like the fine film that collects on the undisturbed surfaces
of a long-abandoned home, the ChemCam team discovered coarser-grained particles
up to one millimeter in size that reflected the composition of local rocks. In
essence, ChemCam observed the process of rocks being ground down to soil over
time.
The ChemCam instrument-which vaporizes material
with a high-powered laser and reads the resultant plasma with a
spectrometer-has shown a similar composition to fine-grained dust characterized
on other parts of the planet during previous Martian missions. ChemCam tested
more than 100 targets in a location named Rocknest and found that the dust
contained consistent amounts of water regardless of the sampling area.
What's more, the Rover dug into the soils at
Rocknest to provide scientists with the opportunity to sample the newly
unearthed portion over the course of several Martian days. The instrument
measured roughly the same tiny concentration of water (about 2 percent) in the
surface soils as it did in the freshly uncovered soil, and the newly excavated
area did not dry out over time-as would be expected if moist subsurface
material were uncovered.
The water signature seen by Curiosity in the
ubiquitous Martian dust may coincide with the tiny amount of ambient humidity
in the planet's arid atmosphere. Multiple observations indicate that the
flowing water responsible for shaping and moving the rounded pebbles
encountered in the vicinity of the rover landing area has long since been lost
to space, though some of it may still exist deep below the surface of the
planet at equatorial locations (water ice is known to exist near the surface at
the poles).
Despite the seemingly small measurements of
water in the Martian environment, the findings nevertheless are exciting.
"In principle it would be possible for
future astronauts to heat the soil to derive water to sustain them," said
Wiens.
While at Rocknest, scientists were also able to
test samples that had been characterized by ChemCam with two other instruments
aboard the rover: CheMin, a miniaturized apparatus partially developed at Los
Alamos that uses X-rays to determine the composition of materials; and SAM, a
tiny oven that melts samples and identifies the composition of gases given off
by them. The analyses by all three instruments indicate that Mars likely has a
volcanic history that shaped the surface of the planet.
A fourth instrument, the Alpha Particle X-ray
Spectrometer (APXS), provides additional insights into the volcanic diversity
on Mars. APXS analyzed a rock called Jake Matijevic-named in honor of a deceased
Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars engineer-and found that it is one of the most
Earth-like rocks yet seen on the Red Planet.
The rock's enrichment in sodium, giving it a
feldspar-rich mineral content, makes it very similar to some rocks erupted on
ocean islands on Earth. ChemCam contributed to
the characterization of Jake_M.
The Curiosity Rover is scheduled to explore Mars
for another year at least. In the coming months, Curiosity will travel to Mount
Sharp, a towering peak nearly three miles in elevation. Mount Sharp appears
to contain layers of sedimentary history dating back several billion years.
These layers are like pages of a book that could teach researchers much about
the geologic and climate history of the Red Planet.
Curiosity rover reveals surprising amount
of water on Mars soil
Findings from rover's 100 days on Mars published this week
Thomson
Reuters Posted: Sep 26, 2013
Analysis of Martian soil by NASA's ongoing Mars
Curiosity rover turned up a surprising amount of water, as well as a chemical
that will make a search for life more complicated, scientists said on Thursday.
A scoop of fine-grained sand collected by the rover
shortly after its August 2012 touchdown showed the soil contains about
two per cent of water by weight.
"It was kind of a surprise to us," said
Curiosity scientist Laurie Leshin with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
"If you take a cubic foot of that soil you can
basically get two pints of water out it," she said. "The soil on the
surface is really a little like a sponge for sucking stuff out of the
atmosphere."
No signs of methane yet
Scientists announced last week that so far the
planet's atmosphere shows no signs of methane, a gas which on Earth is strongly
tied to life. Plumes of methane had been detected over the past decade by Mars
orbiters and ground-based telescopes.
Methane, which should last about 200 years under
Martian photochemistry, also can be produced by geologic events.
The water was found by heating a tiny bit of soil to
835 C inside Curiosity's chemistry laboratory and analyzing the resulting gas
releases.
Scientists found that in addition to water, sulfur
dioxide, carbon dioxide and other materials, the sands of Mars also contain
reactive chemicals known as perchlorates.
NASA's now-defunct Phoenix lander had found perchlorate
in the planet's northern polar region, but scientists did not know until
Curiosity's analysis that the chemical apparently is widespread.
"They seem to accumulate on the surface (of
Mars), almost like snow," said lead Curiosity scientist John Grotzinger
with the California Institute of Technology.
Search for habitats of ancient microbial life
continues
That is important to know because looking for
organic material on Mars may now require a new approach.
"The tried-and-true technique on Earth is to
heat the sample and take a look at the gases that are produced,"
Grotzinger told Reuters.
But the heat can cause perchlorate to break down, in
the process degrading the organic compounds scientists are looking for,
Grotzinger said.
"We as a community will have to wrestle with
understanding the behaviour of perchlorate," he added.
The presence of perchlorate in soil samples could
explain why scientists have so far had a hard time finding organic material on
Mars. Even if life never evolved on Mars, the planet should have organic carbon
deposits left by crashing asteroids and meteors, scientists believe.
The results of Curiosity's first 100 days on Mars,
published in the journalScience this week, also revealed the presence of a
rock with a far more complicated chemical history than scientists expected to
find on Mars.
Curiosity is continuing its search for habitats that
could have supported ancient microbial life. It already has found one suitable
location inside an ancient slab of bedrock near the rover's Gale Crater landing
site.
Curiosity is driving to its primary science site, a
five-kilometre-tall mountain rising from the crater's floor.
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