Well that finally answers...
why a bottle of water is $2.25 at my work. They've had a Martian supplier for years!
It's a big day for extra-terrestrial water: not only are there hints of water on the moon, but now Carnegie says that the mantle of Mars might have water concentrations similar to those found on Earth. Specifically, the researchers say that rocks in Mars’ mantle could have concentrations of water between 70 and 300 parts per …
Um...yes they are. "Dwarf planet" is still a planet. (Vesta is a candidate.) Both bodies have differentiated interiors, both achieved hydrostatic equilibrium (until that unfortunate catering on Vesta...) and with the exception of clearing their orbits, they meet all the requirements to be terrestrial planets. Vesta and Ceres both were altered by thier own Late Heavy Bombardment, and Ceres is thought to have geology shaped by (probably long dormant) tectonics. (We'll know soon enough; thanks, DAWN.)
And yet...both bodies are really nothing alike. For that matter, Mars and Earth aren't, either. Earth appears to be unique in that we were impacted by Theia late in the birth of the solar system. This re-liquefied most of the crust, dramatically changed mineral distribution - and the size of our radioactive core - spun the planet up, and gave us a moon large enough to almost count as a double planet.
That any of these bodies share anything but the most superficial similarities is astounding. Theia is probably what stopped Earth from becoming Venus; it would have blasted off an Early Earth’s atmosphere. What we had left then was low pressure enough that life eventually could transform it from Class Y to Class M.
Mars and Ceres were just too small. They can’t hold on to an atmosphere for long enough; it just keeps bleeding away into space. (Or sublimating!) Without a magnetosphere, solar winds slowly ionise the atmosphere and erode it.
Mars, Ceres and Vesta are all dead; the core quiet, the mantle cold. Their geology is a map of history; ours has been actively influenced by life – a lot of life – for billions of years. Life is so prolific on Earth that it has fundamentally altered not only our atmosphere, but the composition of geological structures ranging from sand to sedimentary rock, limestone to hydrogeology.
Mars, Vesta and Ceres are an interest record (and result) of things that crashed into them. And therein lies my point; from the same cloud of dust, with orbits a stone’s throw away, these planets had totally different things crash into them. The balance of minerals, the % of volatiles, the mixing due to differentiation…the formal is completely different for each.
So Mars has a similar % of water in its rocks to Earth? That is indeed interesting. I wonder quite how that happened?
writer - "the mantle of Mars might have water concentrations similar to those found on Earth."
martin - "formed next to each other, from the same cloud of dust, at the same time. Guess what - they turned out fairly similar!"
I don't see things like oceans from the Mars rovers.
I guess rocks and ozone are pretty similar by the same definition.
oh, the humanity...
They didn't have to, us Dutch sent them Heineken (Youtube link) years ago ;-)
That was the worst action regarding interplanetary relations ever; I wonder why the Martians haven't unleashed horrible fiery death upon us.
Apparently they've found a way to put it to good use, running it through something like the Piss Processing Plant in the ISS, but optimised for horse urine.
Of course there was once life on mars. We are that life. We left, due to massive geologocal events that would leave mars unihabitalbe many moons ago aboard a massive space craft that crash landed in Africa. We then set about colonising and replaceing the idigenous life of earth. All our religous texts talk about magical lands that we were cast out of. The garden of Eden was Mars. The barren lands are Earth. We are the aliens.
scary thing is that there is a little part of me that thinks this is true!
As any fule kno, we travelled inside the moon, parked it around earth in a synchronous orbit then threw everything on a one way trip down the gravity well.
The eons may have reshaped our once gracefull and slender bodies, and the memory of our great exodus is long blurred into myth and fantasy, but our ancestral roots remain locked into our DNA, our body clocks still reverting to Martian time in the absence of contrary sensory cues.