Mars Colonization Discussion Thread

[DAL59]

http://www.sci-news.com/featurednews/martian-surface-water-planets-crust-05564.html

[Green Baron]

Thorough work replacing some guesswork with more specific views. We need more it.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Thorough work replacing some guesswork with more specific views. We need more it.

The report is bunk. Ive seen the mineral analysis from mars. The presence of oxides instead of the hydroxides or carbonate forms is gives no indication that water is locked up in the minerals, quite the opposite, the minerals have been purged of water. A tell tell sign is the presence of calcium oxide. We get calcium oxide here on earth as a form of potash, you take limstone and bake it till it decays. It is very difficult to get calcium to mineralize in the oxide form with the presence of water or carbon dioxide, the most stable salt is calcium carbonate. You can test this at home, take cooking lime and place about a quarter teaspoon in a gallon of water an stir it, within a day or so you will have a nice layer of calcium carbonate on the surface.

[Green Baron]

Frankly, it looks like you haven't understood the work. It is about hydrated basalt (*).

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25031

 

Here's another summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08670-y

 

More hints against flowing water on Mars:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24657

 

tl:dr: life could have had no time to evolve on Mars.

 

(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite as a start for the chemistry interested.

Edited December 25, 2017 by Green Baron

[PB666]

15 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Frankly, it looks like you haven't understood the work. It is about hydrated basalt (*).

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25031

 

Here's another summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08670-y

 

More hints against flowing water on Mars:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24657

 

tl:dr: life could have had no time to evolve on Mars.

 

(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite as a start for the chemistry interested.

This is all the chemistry you need to know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA16572-MarsCuriosityRover-RoverSoils-20121203.jpg

When you understand the heats involved to convert Alkali metal carbonates into Alkali Oxides you basically know that one of their assumptions is garbarge. There was clearly enough energy flux on mars to dehydrate the planet without merry-fairies creating basaltic laval refuges on Mars. The question is when. Read up on Earth's Archean, the period following the late heavy bombardment. Heat flux 3 fold.

This paper is not science, first, the hypothesis it proposes in not a testable hypothesis, how do you disprove that large 90km deep reservoirs exist? The deepest well dug on Earth is 13km deep, and they had to stop because of the latent heat of Earth. Imagine how hot Mars was 20 to 90km down 4 billion years ago, there would not have been water going down on Mars its flux was up, up, up. You cannot disprove the hypothesis, in fact every counter argument they seem to have an excuse why its not applicable, but in fact if you dug a well in a prime spot and found no water, they would simply say the water is elsewhere, you cannot disprove it. There is no precedence to say this is where the water is being stored, they claim the water is stored in minerals. Nickle hydroxide is a salt, it is not water, a salt is a cation and anion in a lattice. Water inonizes roughly 10-7/mole of water, it is not a salt, its a solvent. Some salts of water do not decompose easily, but we have 59 and 23 rover samples on Mars indicating that most of Mars hydrated and carbonated minerals close to the surface underwent higher energy decomposition, how they did this is unclear, but it wasn't merry-fairies or aliens with ray guns. The conclusion in non-occamic. Occams conclusion would stipulate that the forcing events that caused the decomposition of alkali carbonates (one mentioned has a decomposition temperature of 1500 to 2000'C) also eliminated water from the Martian surface. IOW the conditions required to make oxides from hydrates require 100s of kJ/mole, on Earth occur at temperatures in excess of 800'C and would naturally occur if all CO2 and H20 were removed over a million billion years. The other problem is that the second assumption that in the time when most of the basalt flowed, would have been water to flow into them? Basalt flows 20 to 90 km deep take 100s of millions of years to cool during the 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago heat flux was > 2 times what it is presently thus not just basalt flows but flows that cooled to permit water at martian subsurface temperatures and atmopheric pressure. The basalt is an igneous rock but the early basalts would have been different and likely reflect the separation of (and times required) between felsic and mafic layers. Basalt they are talking about is mafic, so they are talking about volcanic activity that occurred after 4 million years ago in a period where the water was already gone and would have been permissive to water flow a billion years later.

" Roughly three-quarters of all Martian meteorites can be classified as shergottites. They are named after the Shergotty meteorite, which fell at Sherghati, India in 1865.^[8] Shergottites are igneous rocks of mafic to ultramafic lithology. " The majority come from rocks on the order of 180 million years ago (After the overwhelming majority of Mars water was long gone). So the basic idea that early martian water got trapped underground is bunk, because the rock formation took time to appear and the water was gone. However more recent martian meteorites suggest water is present transiently on martian surface. We would scarcely notice the addition on Earth, but with a planet that is dryer than bone dry, the addition of space-water  from comets would have profound effects. We could debate where the water went but we cannot debate its fate, its not on the surface and it did not hydrate the alkali oxides nor form carbonates. Therefore these events were probably localized and extremely episodic. Sure the water could have trickled underground or frozen at the poles. Or it make have just flowed into a deep Sand dune and locked away as a alkali hydroxides that slowly absorb carbon dioxide and turn to hard stone.

Again Nature has a long and well noted history of publishing poorly refereed science. They (Science and Nature) have pointed to a substantially higher retraction rates for coffee-table science magazines. I don't really credit anything in either magazine but if you can find something in a peer-reviewed field specific science journal I would be happy to take a look at it.

[kerbiloid]

42 minutes ago, PB666 said:

how do you disprove that large 90km deep reservoirs exist?

And a teapot orbits around the Sun.

43 minutes ago, PB666 said:

The deepest well dug on Earth is 13km deep, and they had to stop because of the latent heat of Earth.

Acoustics. Electromagnetism.

44 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Imagine how hot Mars was 20 to 90km down 4 billion years ago

Was it? Why should it be hot (unless being hit by something big)?

46 minutes ago, PB666 said:

they claim the water is stored in minerals

changing their acoustic values.

46 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Nickle hydroxide is a salt

Of hydroxide acid?

49 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Some salts of water

Sometimes they call them bases.

[Green Baron]

3 hours ago, PB666 said:

[Wall of mostly irrelevant text]

Forget carbonates, nobody is talking about carbonates. I don't have much time so will only give a short answer: yes, it can and will be tested when looking at ejecta from large impacts. Its in the paper. Where things can't be tested they will stay hypothetical. On earth quite a lot of deep metamorphic stuff is at the surface because tectonics. That is where we have the different facies of metamorphic basalt from zeolite to granulite/eclogite from. Nothing hypothetic there, not even the mantle variations, which have been replicated recently in experiments with diamond anvil cells.

The paper explains quite well a few things and fits, together with the other recent works about Mars (lineages from gravity instead of flowing water, primordial clay from early atmospheric reactions instead of an ocean), in a picture of Mars having had an ocean only for a very short time. That does not necessarily exclude oceans and flowing water but limits their necessity to explain the Marsian surface. But of course, like anything sciencey, we must be ready to adapt as new data comes in.

 

If the link you gave is all you need to know then you're missing out a lot ! All of the paper, actually ;-)

Edited December 26, 2017 by Green Baron

[PB666]

5 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Forget carbonates, nobody is talking about carbonates. I don't have much time so will only give a short answer: yes, it can and will be tested when looking at ejecta from large impacts. Its in the paper. Where things can't be tested they will stay hypothetical. On earth quite a lot of deep metamorphic stuff is at the surface because tectonics. That is where we have the different facies of metamorphic basalt from zeolite to granulite/eclogite from. Nothing hypothetic there, not even the mantle variations, which have been replicated recently in experiments with diamond anvil cells.

The paper explains quite well a few things and fits, together with the other recent works about Mars (lineages from gravity instead of flowing water, primordial clay from early atmospheric reactions instead of an ocean), in a picture of Mars having had an ocean only for a very short time. That does not necessarily exclude oceans and flowing water but limits their necessity to explain the Marsian surface. But of course, like anything sciencey, we must be ready to adapt as new data comes in.

 

If the link you gave is all you need to know then you're missing out a lot ! All of the paper, actually ;-)

Carbonates are everything, carbonates are the lowest energy state of minerals in the presence of water and carbon dioxide, to put this in a more meaningful way give the level of C02 in the martian atmosphere if there was significant distribution of water since a past heat event, then we would expect all the minerals detected at oxides on the surface to be carbonates, and no carbon dioxide on the Martian poles and very little in the martian atmosphere. The cognate oxides of carbonates and/or hydroxides are the most abundant minerals on Mars, how did they get there, the fact that more carbonates are found on phobos than on Mars tells all . .they were in the solar system, they did take part in the formation of mars, there bioproducts are in the martian atmosphere and surface (except water), and they are stable in the presence of a very rare atmosphere . . . . all of these conditions are conducive to the presence of carbonates on Mars today, but they are rare. Major energy event on surface of Mars. If you don't get that you don't know squat about chemistry. I repeat this once again so that it can be made clear, at the energies required to make the compounds below, the surface conditions are not conducive to the presence of water, at these conditions the atmosphere is not conducive to the stability of dihydrogen oxide. This does not mean that all biproducts of water disappeared everywhere. It means the overwhelming majority of water on mars was essentially 'blown off the surface' by an excess of energy.

Do you see a single carbonate on the list of major minerals detected at 59 and 23 sites? Few carbonates means no liquid water on the surface during a heat event. Read these pages on production of oxides and you will understand. In a water free, CO2 free environment at current martian temperatures these minerals would take a 125 pentillion years to form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_oxide#Preparation    '850'C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_oxide#Production   1000-1500'C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_oxide#Preparation  '825'C  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxide#Production  1000'C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_trioxide#Preparation 463'C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus_pentoxide#Preparation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Allotropes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_oxide#Production requires a two step process involving calcium oxides '825'C

If there model does not explain this it does not explain squat.

Also the mafic rock that they tested had no water.

 

 

Edited December 26, 2017 by PB666

[Green Baron]

Are we making this personal ?

You do a lot of wording but miss the point of the paper, use misunderstood terms from Geoscience like felsic, mafic, ultramafic out of context and formulate Mr. Spock-like statements, generalize renowned journals as being "bunk", call for proofs from other sources (if you're a scientist you must be aware that Nature and Science do not accept a work that has been published elsewhere or given to the media beforehand) and you stubbornly refuse to understand the points in the work presented above. Instead you evade, argue, and bend around without a real handle to discuss. You call a work ("not science") because you apparently don't know about the methods to prove or disprove it.

How shall i reply if not by naming this ? I am aware that this will summon the moderators, but what shall i do ?

The presented work is NOT bunk, it has surely its weaknesses (that dry marsian mantle mineral mentioned in the summary), but it explains a missing reservoir. Not a subsurface lake if that is your notion but an ocean worth of water locked inside minerals. Similar, but not equal to earth's crustal and mantle minerals, due to the different conditions on Mars (more iron, less gravitation, ...). Also it adds to the picture together with other recent works.

Btw., carbonates, whatever element they are based upon, are unstable, especially in the presence of CO2. They offer a sink as well as a source for carbon e.g. But it is banana in the context of the paper, you don't even need carbonates on earth to lock water into lava, visit Hawaii and a contemporary lava flow, they play no role here.

Edited December 26, 2017 by Green Baron

[PB666]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Sometimes they call them bases.

A salt can be acidic (such as sodium hydrosulfate (your water softener), or basic such as (trisodium phosphate). The compounds become basic or acidic when placed in a ionizing solvent. Salts can have water, for example a common salt of sodium phosphate  is hydrated NaHPO₄*H₂0. This is why I distinguish water from hydroxide salt. Salts can have water, but a hydroxide of a metal is a salt not a hydration of a salt. In addition the hydroxide of a metal need not come from water at all, it can be generated from a redox event.

Not all hydroxides are good bases, some are relatively stable to neutral pHs, just not the alkali salts (left hand of periodic table. This is why i specifically referred to transition metal salts and not alkali salts. The metals salts often do not give up their hydroxides easily. The chemical structure show are not how the electrons arrange in the salt. For example natural tin (tin oxides) binds small hydroxides readily and chelates them and are stable at pH 7.0. Lead hydroxide is also know as Orthoplumbic acid. 

I do expect both hydroxides and carbonates in their analyses because, depending on the cation valencies it can be very difficult to liberate complexed and polyvalent anions from a salt matrix by heat. Of course almost any hydroxide that ever existed will undergo displacement in the presence of a good monoprotic acid (such as 6N HCl).

 

 

[PB666]

53 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Are we making this personal ?

You do a lot of wording but miss the point of the paper, use misunderstood terms from Geoscience like felsic, mafic, ultramafic out of context and formulate Mr. Spock-like statements, generalize renowned journals as being "bunk", call for proofs from other sources (if you're a scientist you must be aware that Nature and Science do not accept a work that has been published elsewhere or given to the media beforehand) and you stubbornly refuse to understand the points in the work presented above. Instead you evade, argue, and bend around without a real handle to discuss. You call a work ("not science") because you apparently don't know about the methods to prove or disprove it.

How shall i reply if not by naming this ? I am aware that this will summon the moderators, but what shall i do ?

The presented work is NOT bunk, it has surely its weaknesses (that dry marsian mantle mineral mentioned in the summary), but it explains a missing reservoir. Not a subsurface lake if that is your notion but an ocean worth of water locked inside minerals. Similar, but not equal to earth's crustal and mantle minerals, due to the different conditions on Mars (more iron, less gravitation, ...). Also it adds to the picture together with other recent works.

Btw., carbonates, whatever element they are based upon, are unstable, especially in the presence of CO2. They offer a sink as well as a source for carbon e.g. But it is banana in the context of the paper, you don't even need carbonates on earth to lock water into lava, visit Hawaii and a contemporary lava flow.

In the presence of excess CO2 carbonates form bicarbonates, another form of carbonate. In the addition of more acid carbonates are liberated, this is a banana in the discussion of mars because the soils are alkaline. In alkaline soils carbonates are stable. But this misses the other issue SO3 and P205 are also not in their most stable states, in fact why is there not Na₂SO₄. You have two salts, that if hydrated and passively dehydrated would form a more stable salt, what type of energy placed them in the high energy state? Where was the water when this happened . . . .was there some superhuge calamity that struck the Martian surface in the last 3 billion years that we have evidence of . . . .or was Mars just to unstable for the persistence of liquid water in its equatorial regions. Read the wikilinks I provided and investigate, you will see that these oxides should not exist on a hydrated planet, the may have been derived from hydrates, but when they came to exist, there was no hydration present. You simply cannot get around this problem, if the sedimentary substrate on Mars has significant alkali oxides, it has been denatured by energy, period.

Second point, what is the timeline, when could have the heat that generates these oxides, recently, or during the early timeline for Mars.
Third point what is the timeline for mafic basalt to have formed, in the very early mars, or over the course of Martian geology. Hawaiian islands are a very recent formation on Earth, their basalts are from the pushing up of magna through the very carbon and sulfur rich sea floor and produces the gases that create a very porous stucture . . .Hawaiian basalts are bananas. The basalts noted in martian metorites are very fined grain structure with small pores AND they formed recently on Mars, also. And the mafic basalt the sample was water free. What is the specific evidence that they will accept as refutation of their hypothesis? Since they reject most other evidence?

Not scientific, speculative.
Fact - The 80 or so surface show minerals demonstrative of active dehydration (as opposed to passive evaporation of hydrates at nominal temperatures) on the surface.
Answer- the water must have gone underground.
Fact - The dehydration conditions appear to have been too energetic to support water in any for for long periods.
Answer- the water was perserved underground in chemicals in the basalt at high pressure.
Fact - The conditions, not current, most likely occurred in Early Mars, during the time with crustal heat flux was folds higher. pressures would have dropped very early in Martian history.
Answer- the water was trapped in pressurize chambers 20 km to 90 km down
The basalt that would have allowed occurred over the entire history of Mars at least a few billion years. How is this a hypothesis that can be disproven in the foreseeable future?
Also the heat flux was from the core of the planet outward, deep chambers of hydroxides and other hydrates 20-90 km down would have been much hotter than a surface that appears to have had considerable energy to cause carbonate and hydroxide decomposition.
Answer - read the paper all their evidence fits like a glove.

Cat . . . mouse . . . . game. nough.

 

Edited December 26, 2017 by PB666

[DAL59]

MDRS Crew 185 – Final Mission Report
 
The following is the final summary report of Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) Crew 185 (Mars Society 2). A full review of this field season's activities at MDRS will be presented at the 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention in 2018 (date and location to be announced in the very near future).
 
MDRS End of Mission Summary
Crew 185 – Mars Society 2
December 16-31, 2017

Commander: Ilaria Cinelli (Italy/Ireland)

Executive Officer/Crew Engineer: Thibault Paris (France)
Greenhab Officer/Crew Biologist: David Murray (United States)
Crew Engineer: Arno Passaron (France)
Crew Health & Safety Officer: John Sczepaniak (United States)

Today is the last day of SIM, and tomorrow morning my crew and I will land on Earth!!!

As you may know I am Commander of an international crew, selected by The Mars Society, and this is an international mission getting close to the end. I will mention a few of our activates to show you how much (international) science we can get out of two-week mission.

Yesterday, we have completed a very interesting experiment about “Shared Spatial Representation” of the environment around Astros on EVA and HabCom (in the Hab), during which we were looking for objects placed in specific places, guided by with the vocal indication of HabCom (so without GPS and tech), (PI IMS laboratory and Association Planète Mars, France).

Then, today we have also completed two undergraduate student projects about sediment movement by aeolian transport and response of the use of a loaded vehicle over a range of terrain types (PI Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland).

We also did different surveys to evaluate the quality of life in the Hab. One of this was the use of a software to estimate the stress level during writing (PI Mars Planet – Italian Mars Society, Italy). Then, other are about crew dynamics. Pre-flight tests evaluate individual differences before the mission (PI University of Padua, Italy), and other tests evaluate individual performance during the mission (PI 100 Year Starship, USA). Instead, team cohesion was archived by practicing empowerment (PI Fondazione Interpedantonale verso l’Etica – FIVE – onlus, Italy) and mindfulness (PI University of London, UK), and table games!

Then, two studies about safety were pretty useful to develop awareness in isolation analysing both the context (PI William Carey College of Osteopathic Medicine, USA) and the Crew (PI Mars Planet – Italian Mars Society, Italy).

In the end, we did some fun activities about education and outreach. One was about the “Kid2Mars” project where children from all over the World asked questions about Mars (PI InnovaSpace). The other was about “Crea(c)tivity”, a two-day workshop during which secondary school students have been designing and engineering prototypes that can have real space applications (PI ISIA Firenze, Italy).

A very original experiment was about clothing and textiles understanding the needs and constraints of design for apparel and habitats for long-duration space exploration and habitation (PI University of Rhode Island and 100 Year Starship, USA).

Then, we are honoured to have tested the first prototype of a 3D printed spacesuit, called X-1 (PI Ecole polytechnique, France). This project was supported by the French chapter of the Mars Society (PI The Association Planete Mars) to develop and test this prototype.

Additionally, we have been utilizing the full potential of crops to imitate conditions found in a limited resource environment. By producing a fertilizer from the most nutritious plant on Earth, we not only get nutritional value from this plant but hopefully the ability to increase the yields of other crops.

In the end, crew 185 completed an important anesthesia task during the mission looking at the ability of astronauts to complete a nerve block of the lower leg. They used gel models created at the University of California, San Diego to place a needle above and below the simulated nerve located behind a knee.  The simulation looks at the ability of participants’ time to complete tasks in an emergency scenario.

I can say we had fun while working! There are so many things happening everyday that there is not worries to be bothered during the day (and night) at the Hab.

If it is not a technical problem, it will be a human factor issue within the Crew! I LOVE what I am doing, I will never get tired of these challenges! I really LOVE what I am doing, hard to tell you how much!

Really, thank you for having me as Commander, and thank you for this great Crew!

I am learning so much in management, communication and science, and I am trying to give back good quality data that can be use for on-going and future research projects. I am feeling so enriched that I need to share my empowerment! So, science is the best way though which I can have a positive impact in research.

Thus, thank you so much! This is a great personal experience, and I see my Crew getting the most out of it. It is time for me to let them go, I have trained them for the best and I believe these two weeks gave them enough experience to make them stronger in the future.

Again, thank you to all the Team of Mission Support and The Mars Society!

In particularly, thank you Shannon!

Commander Ilaria Cinelli

[Green Baron]

A greenhouse experiment

http://eden-iss.net/

has been transported to a Antarctica

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-24518/#/gallery/28752

and will arrive at

https://www.awi.de/en/expedition/stations/neumayer-station-iii.html

for a several months lasting experiment to produce veggies in a (mostly) closed cycle.

 

Bon appetit.

:-)

Edit: this experiment is not part of the main focus of the institute. It is not necessarily connected to Mars but may be part of a bigger picture for future efforts.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Green Baron

[DDE]

14 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

for a several months lasting experiment to produce veggies in a (mostly) closed cycle.

Hauling it to Antarctica seems a bit excessive. Anyone remember BIOS? All you need is a cave and no Bannon.

[Green Baron]

They did a successful test run already, they want to know how it behaves under more strenuous but controlled conditions.

[tomf]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2158431-mars-has-ice-sheets-130-metres-thick-hiding-below-its-red-dust/

I can't see the full article so I'm not sure of the details, but it makes me hopeful that there might be ice in relatively usable forms and locations.

[Green Baron]

It is a science paper (www.sciencemag.org) published this month.

It would add to the picture together with recently published works that suggest that the marsian ocean was partly drawn into the mantle in the first few million years besides being lost into space. Part of it might still be present today and not only as pore water and locked in the minerals.

Edited January 12, 2018 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, tomf said:

.

They have found eight large underground ice deposits (seven around Prometheus plain in Southern hemisphere, one in Milankovich crater near North pole). They became partially visible from above due to the winds and so.
Each several kilometers long and up to 130 m thick. They are layered, that could be probably caused by climatic periods.
In total up to 1/3 of Martian surface contains lumps of ice.
This was done by HEND neutron detector onboard the Mars-Odysseus orbiter.

(Not sure if this is from that article, but that's what google knows.)

P.S.
This in turn raises a practical question: Why we don't have neutron detectors in KSP? Can we be sure that the stock parts find all available water on Duna?

P.P.S.
Can Mars-Odysseus detect potato plantations? Plantations of other... weeds?

Edited January 12, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Diche Bach]

I keep coming back to this one and watching a bit more every now and then. Bit slow, but very detailed.

 

[Green Baron]

Thanks. A pity that i have limited bandwidth ...

[Diche Bach]

25 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Thanks. A pity that i have limited bandwidth ...

The main highlights I gathered from finally finishing it:

1. The lead scientist, Dr. Vasavada: when asked what surprised him most from the five years, he said (to paraphrase) the overwhelming amount of evidence for abundant, long-persisting surface water during the Hesperian. We're talking, scores of meters deep lakes that persisted for 10s of millions of years, possibly longer.

2. Organic compounds are well-preserved in many of the samples they have extracted from rocks that are billions of years old. He seemed to feel this was quite promising for future studies to explore the presence of ancient (now extinct likely) microbial life.

3. Related to #2, the climate on Mars seems to have stayed both wet and warm for a surprisingly long time, possibly long enough that microbial life could have evolved.

4. Someone asked about the perchlorates in the soil and he acknowledged they are a problem. But referred back to a point he made in reference to the 15 or so drill samples they have collected: in many cases (not all) they found that the degree of oxidation (and I suppose perchlorate levels) was much lower in the immediate sub-surface than in the surface rock/sediments. Thus, he suggested that simply mining sub-surface rock could be a solution to the poison soil when/if astronauts are trying to harvest soil for agriculture at some point in the future.

I keep a picture of Curiosity as my desktop on my PC and it trickles me a steady stream of wonder/marvel at human ingenuity and intrepidness. I think it must be one of the pinnacles of human achievement that this machine has been methodically doing our bidding on that far away inhospitable world, giving us close up insights onto the worlds long and mysterious history.

Some of us may disagree on the specifics of how humans will continue to engage with Mars, with some of us being more skeptical of the utility or promise of sending humans there AT ALL, much less at any time in the next few decades; and others apparently convinced that there will be thriving colonies there within that time frame. But if there is one thing we can all agree on, perhaps it is just the pure wonder of Mars, as one nearby example of the mysterious universe in which we find ourselves as we awaken from our evolutionary history and move forward into our human future.

Edited January 14, 2018 by Diche Bach

[sh1pman]

Huge water ice deposits found on Mars

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2018-007

Quote

The new study not only suggests that underground water ice lies under a thin covering over wide areas, it also identifies eight sites where ice is directly accessible, at latitudes with less hostile conditions than at Mars' polar ice caps. "Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need," Byrne said.

 

[Green Baron]

Already linked by @tomf and me farther up :-)

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6372/199

Edited January 22, 2018 by Green Baron

[sh1pman]

Just now, Green Baron said:

Already linked by @tomf and me farther up :-)

Sorry, got over excited and didn't check 

[Green Baron]

No problem, just pointing out that these two are the same.

tl,dr: in several locations with steep scarps and blueish reflections the MROs imaging spectrometer detected an absorption that points to H2O-ice. "Several lines of evidence" indicate that this is only an outcrop of much deeper ice deposits rather than just frost. The scarpes likely form and retreat by sublimation of the ice.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Green Baron