(Today: Distant Damp? and Clicker Shock)
Ares' Aqua?
Tuesday at 2pm Eastern NASA will be holding a press conference to announce "significant findings" concerning water on Mars. As they're making a show of it - including holding this press conference at NASA's HQ in Washington, D.C., when all other press updates have been held at JPL in Pasadena - and this has apparently been building since last week, it seems to be a safe presumption that they've found water in martian soil. To what degree, and whether or not they've been able to better determine if the layering they've seen in some of the soil profiles was caused by sedimentation - that there was at one time enough free water to result in martian lakes and rivers - is also possibly part of the news.
Interesting times.
(Next may be to figure out if it's more or less pure than Dasani.)
Update 3/2/04: Weeeeeellll... the announcement was the confirmation that all signs point to a body of water, perhaps as large as one of North America's Great Lakes, once existed in the site where Opportunity landed. While certainly not to be dismissed, it's another case of the space agency not knowing exactly how to communicate items of significance to the general public, and/or attempting to make the most of what they do find. This research, this gathering and analysis of data, is a painstaking process, and the general public has little taste for that. They need to emphasize, IMHO, how evidence of past water gives us some indication of how much is still there, be it beneath the surface or frozen at the poles. After all, the presence of water, even if it ends up being an essentially mined resource, will be critical to any manned bases on the planet in the decades ahead.
The next step will be to have the robots - designed for roughly 90 days of operation, but which could continue operating into the summer - travel farther afield and investigate other impressions, so as to better determine how common this ancient lake was.
I'll be adding the NASA and JPL main site links to my page, something I'd meant to do almost from the start of this blog.
One more update: Despite what I said in my comments to Dwight (below) it appears that the full press conference did attempt to pitch the excitement and vision of a martian future to the audience at yesterday's press conference. (Thanks to Mark Gibson for pointing out that link.)
Ares' Aqua?
Tuesday at 2pm Eastern NASA will be holding a press conference to announce "significant findings" concerning water on Mars. As they're making a show of it - including holding this press conference at NASA's HQ in Washington, D.C., when all other press updates have been held at JPL in Pasadena - and this has apparently been building since last week, it seems to be a safe presumption that they've found water in martian soil. To what degree, and whether or not they've been able to better determine if the layering they've seen in some of the soil profiles was caused by sedimentation - that there was at one time enough free water to result in martian lakes and rivers - is also possibly part of the news.
Interesting times.
(Next may be to figure out if it's more or less pure than Dasani.)
Update 3/2/04: Weeeeeellll... the announcement was the confirmation that all signs point to a body of water, perhaps as large as one of North America's Great Lakes, once existed in the site where Opportunity landed. While certainly not to be dismissed, it's another case of the space agency not knowing exactly how to communicate items of significance to the general public, and/or attempting to make the most of what they do find. This research, this gathering and analysis of data, is a painstaking process, and the general public has little taste for that. They need to emphasize, IMHO, how evidence of past water gives us some indication of how much is still there, be it beneath the surface or frozen at the poles. After all, the presence of water, even if it ends up being an essentially mined resource, will be critical to any manned bases on the planet in the decades ahead.
The next step will be to have the robots - designed for roughly 90 days of operation, but which could continue operating into the summer - travel farther afield and investigate other impressions, so as to better determine how common this ancient lake was.
I'll be adding the NASA and JPL main site links to my page, something I'd meant to do almost from the start of this blog.
One more update: Despite what I said in my comments to Dwight (below) it appears that the full press conference did attempt to pitch the excitement and vision of a martian future to the audience at yesterday's press conference. (Thanks to Mark Gibson for pointing out that link.)
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