Mars News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

All Mars orbiters work together to trace largest marsquake on record
By Michael Irving
October 17, 2023

NASA’s InSight lander was deployed to listen out for seismic activity on Mars, and last year it picked up a marsquake so big it was suspected to be from a meteoroid impact. Now, thanks to the cooperation of all agencies with orbiters around Mars, the source has been tracked.

On May 4, 2022, InSight detected a marsquake with a magnitude of 4.7 – the strongest ever seen on Mars. Designated S1222a, the quake was five times stronger than the next-strongest, and released the equivalent combined energy of all other marsquakes it detected over its five-year lifespan.

Mars doesn’t have any active plate tectonics, so it wasn’t thought capable of producing quakes this powerful. As such, scientists suspected that S1222a was the result of a meteoroid striking the surface, which is a common occurrence that produces similar seismic waves. Based on its power, such an impact would have produced a crater measuring at least 300 m (984 ft) wide – so to put the matter to bed, the entire planet was scoured for any new craters that size or larger.

https://newatlas.com/space/mars-orbiter ... marsquake/

[weatheriscool]

Scientists discover molten layer covering Martian core
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-scientist ... -core.html
by University of Maryland

NASA's InSight mission to Mars helped scientists map out Mars' internal structure, including the size and composition of its core, and provided general hints about its tumultuous formation.

But findings from a new paper, titled "Geophysical evidence for an enriched molten silicate layer above Mars' core," published in the journal Nature could lead to reanalysis of that data. An international team of researchers discovered the presence of a molten silicate layer overlying Mars' metallic core—providing new insights into how Mars formed, evolved and became the barren planet it is today.

Published on October 25, 2023, the team's paper details the use of seismic data to locate and identify a thin layer of molten silicates (rock-forming minerals that make up the crust and mantle of Mars and Earth) lying between the Martian mantle and core. With the discovery of this molten layer, the researchers determined that Mars' core is both denser and smaller than previous estimates, a conclusion that better aligns with other geophysical data and analysis of Martian meteorites.

[weatheriscool]

Mars Might Have Had a Network of Rivers, Analysis Suggests
If the Red Planet really was covered in rivers, these findings could have exciting implications for the discovery of ancient Martian life.
By Adrianna Nine October 26, 2023

Researchers in Pennsylvania have uncovered evidence of an obsolete river network on Mars. Though the rivers no longer remain, how they once moved water across the Red Planet could guide us toward discovering signs of ancient extraterrestrial life.

We’ve known for a while that Mars contains water in the form of liquid and ice. How that water moved—and continues to move—has been a bit trickier. In 2019, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express found evidence of a groundwater system that once stored and transported liquid water across the planet. Because this system is believed to have formed after the Red Planet’s long-term climate shifts forced water to retreat, scientists remained curious about Mars’ surface waters. This led to a few key findings earlier this year, from Curiosity’s wave discovery to the remnants of a powerful river spotted by Perseverance.

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/m ... s-suggests

[weatheriscool]

[caltrek]

I have not read either of the books discussed in the rest of the post that follows, but the review itself makes a lot of interesting and what I think are valid points.

Book Review: Are We Ready to Head to Mars? Not So Fast.
by Christie Aschwanden
November 10, 2023

Introduction:

(Undark) IN AUGUST 1998, 700 people came to Boulder, Colorado to attend the founding convention of the Mars Society. The group’s co-founder and president, Robert Zubrin, extolled the virtues of sending humans to Mars to terraform the planet and establish a human colony. The Mars Society’s founding declaration began, “The time has come for humanity to journey to the planet Mars,” and declared that “Given the will, we could have our first crews on Mars within a decade.” That was two and a half decades ago.

In their hilarious, highly informative and cheeky book, “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?”, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith inventory the challenges standing in the way of Zubrin-like visions for Mars settlement. The wife-and-husband team serves a strong, but never stern, counterargument to the visionaries promising that we’ll put humans on Mars in the very near future. “Think of this book as the straight-talking homesteader’s guide to the rest of the solar system,” they write.

Just as in their previous book, “Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything,” the authors — she’s a faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice University and he’s a cartoonist — use humor and science to douse techno dreams with a dose of reality. “After a few years of researching space settlements, we began in secret to refer to ourselves as the ‘space bastards’ because we found we were more pessimistic than almost everyone in the space-settlement field,” they write. “We weren’t always this way. The data made us do it.

While working on their deeply researched book, the Weinersmiths came to view sending people to Mars as a problem far more complicated and difficult than you’d know by listening to enthusiasts like Elon Musk or Robert Zubrin. It’s a challenge that “won’t be solved simply by ambitious fantasies or giant rockets.” Eventually humans are likely to expand into space, the Weinersmiths write, but for now, “the discourse needs more realism — not in order to ruin everyone’s fun, but to provide guardrails against genuinely dangerous directions for planet Earth.”

Read more of the Undark article here: https://undark.org/2023/11/10/review-city-on-mars/

Where to order the book A City on Mars : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo ... nersmith/

Where to order the book Soonish: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... 039956384

Soonish is described as “a hilariously illustrated investigation into future technologies — from how to fling a ship into deep space on the cheap to 3D organ printing.”

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

I have not read either of the books discussed in the rest of the post that follows, but the review itself makes a lot of interesting and what I think are valid points.

Book Review: Are We Ready to Head to Mars? Not So Fast.
by Christie Aschwanden
November 10, 2023

Introduction:

(Undark) IN AUGUST 1998, 700 people came to Boulder, Colorado to attend the founding convention of the Mars Society. The group’s co-founder and president, Robert Zubrin, extolled the virtues of sending humans to Mars to terraform the planet and establish a human colony. The Mars Society’s founding declaration began, “The time has come for humanity to journey to the planet Mars,” and declared that “Given the will, we could have our first crews on Mars within a decade.” That was two and a half decades ago.

In their hilarious, highly informative and cheeky book, “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?”, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith inventory the challenges standing in the way of Zubrin-like visions for Mars settlement. The wife-and-husband team serves a strong, but never stern, counterargument to the visionaries promising that we’ll put humans on Mars in the very near future. “Think of this book as the straight-talking homesteader’s guide to the rest of the solar system,” they write.

Just as in their previous book, “Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything,” the authors — she’s a faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice University and he’s a cartoonist — use humor and science to douse techno dreams with a dose of reality. “After a few years of researching space settlements, we began in secret to refer to ourselves as the ‘space bastards’ because we found we were more pessimistic than almost everyone in the space-settlement field,” they write. “We weren’t always this way. The data made us do it.

While working on their deeply researched book, the Weinersmiths came to view sending people to Mars as a problem far more complicated and difficult than you’d know by listening to enthusiasts like Elon Musk or Robert Zubrin. It’s a challenge that “won’t be solved simply by ambitious fantasies or giant rockets.” Eventually humans are likely to expand into space, the Weinersmiths write, but for now, “the discourse needs more realism — not in order to ruin everyone’s fun, but to provide guardrails against genuinely dangerous directions for planet Earth.”

Read more of the Undark article here: https://undark.org/2023/11/10/review-city-on-mars/

Where to order the book A City on Mars : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo ... nersmith/

Where to order the book Soonish: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... 039956384

Soonish is described as “a hilariously illustrated investigation into future technologies — from how to fling a ship into deep space on the cheap to 3D organ printing.”

Personally, I'd send 3-4 75-85 year olds that are gravely sick to mars first. Give them the chance as it will likely be a one way ticket and no going back. We could give them the very best for a couple of years on mars until they pass away.

[Tadasuke]

Living on Mars seems like a nightmare! I wouldn't go there, even if somebody gave 1 billion dollars to me. I don't understand why would anyone want to live on Mars, other than using it as a source of matter, for robots to construct humongous supercomputers, to simulate virtual reality for us, where we can finally feel good instead of terrible.

We have so many problems on Earth, which is basically a hellhole in itself, and Mars could be even worse. How about improving humans or Earth itself, instead of approximately 10 months long one-way trips to Mars, which would be longer than trips to Australia from Europe 200 years ago? Crazy!

[wjfox]

[Tadasuke]

The video above is private and unavailable for me.