Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Water for Future Mars Astronauts




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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