You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Lots of Water on Mars

Martian Underground Radar

The top image shows the radar imaging of underground structures on Mars, below that is the typography of that same region and the radar swath is represented by the white line that cuts through it.

In the radar image, the point at which the traces or “layers” split into two (on the left side) is where it is thought that the materials change and so the radar is echoing again off that lower subsurface. They also add that “the strength of the lower echo suggests that the intervening material is nearly pure water ice”, which apparently may translate into a depth of 3.5 kilometres of ice. This image is not alone, additional radar scans have suggested ice that runs to a depth of 1.5km in other places with surely many more to come.

It would seem that the intended purpose of finding where, or if, water exists on Mars has more or less been satisfied. I don’t think that anyone expected to find this much evidence of water on Mars between the recently discovered water flows and now a nearly planetwide (theoretical) underground reservior of pure water ice. Future astronauts on Mars will not go thirsty!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Alternate Imaging, Mars, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Lots of Water on Mars”

  1. Sir Charles W. Shults III Says:
    March 26th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    It seems unconscionable that NASA has not yet made this clear- there should have been headlines proclaiming “Mars Had Oceans”, yet to a man, everyone I have spoken with still thinks that it was always a dry, dusty, barren place. NASA has the absolute worst PR of any organization.

    So now we see that there is in fact a huge amount of water on the planet and that we will be able to live indefinitely without importing it. Will this see headlines? No, you can bet on that. It completely pulls the rug out from under 40 years of erroneous data and destroys the foundations of many papers and doctorates. So where does it go from here?

  2. thomas Says:
    March 26th, 2007 at 4:23 pm

    i couldn’t agree more… part of my inspiration for doing this blog was to make a more “everyman” place for people to be inspired by current and past missions. they have discovered AMAZING things in our very own solar system and yet the average person doesn’t have any ideas that there are active volcanos anywhere other than Earth… and that we have photographed them! most people have no idea that water has been found in vast quantities in numerous places.

    my own wife was unsure of the answer when i asked how many other worlds have we landed astronauts so far. she knew we were on the moon but was also under the impression that at some point we got to mars as well.

    when i show people images of Io… they are shocked.

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