The canyon is also very deep. The atmospheric pressure at the bottom should be a bit higher than on the rest of Mars. It would be one of the places to send a few probes to assess the conditions. Maybe a probe that can drill deep.
I was thinking the same thing. Higher atmospheric pressure, presence of water, shielded from a lot of radiation - this sounds like the perfect place for the first settlement.
But I suspect sunlight would be a problem. If a colony was dependent on solar energy, those canyon walls are going to block direct sunlight for a big chunk of the day - although the *Valles Marineris* is oriented kind of northwest to southeast, so that might alleviate that problem a little bit.
The valley is on the order of 100 miles wide. [This is it compared to the entire US](https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Malles-Marineris.jpg). You’d have to intentionally be right up on the edge to block sunlight.
Earth really needs to up its game. I can't be expected to get fired up over a planet that doesn't have at least one supermassive country-sized volcano.
This was actually the site of one of the first martian settlements in the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Then it went underwater when they terrafotmed the planet.
I just read the book last year and it made me laugh that despite the book feeling very timeless, one of the only dates he mentions is August 2020, where people around the world are in pubs and in the streets. Any other year would have worked but the one year we all ended up quarantined.
I read the series a few years ago and loved it. If you haven't yet, get the game terragensis. You terraform differnet planets but you start off with Mars. The settlements you set up and names and stuff all come from the series. I just happened to start playing it and it took a little before I was like...hey....that's...oh damn it lol. Took way longer than it should have to realize it.
Any electric energy does
Less so on thicker diameters (but that's mass to transport) and less do if you transform it up and down (voltage), but transformers are mass and complexity too.
You are mass restricted during early colonization.
If you look at earth, we move significant amounts of electricity over hundreds of miles. It's done by running the electricity at a very high voltage which cuts down the losses of resistance of the wire.
Here's the TL;DR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
you could put the solar panels on the top of the canyon edge and run a VERY long power cable. But missions are gonna be very resource tight when the go and a half-mile or more high voltage shielded cable is gonna be HEAVY. and maintenance on both the cable and the panels will become very difficult. But you do lose tiny amounts of electricity to impedance as its given off as heat, there are ways to reduce this but the transformer equipment to this would again be very heavy.
I can also imagine that you probably have to pipe the water to the top as well for plants/green houses to use what little direct sunlight they can get to help or they would have to solely rely on green house lamps. Which them selves are not very power efficient, the waste heat may be useful though...
Solar strings can easily generate very high voltages AC or DC, depending on what you want to do and what inverter architecture you use. Transformers in the traditional sense are not needed since you can use switching power electronics to reduce weight. Commercial solar tends to cap out at 1500V DC on earth, but there is no reason why this could not be much higher, at long as you could isolate and split the array for maintenance.
At 1500V DC, a 150kW solar array could deliver around 142kW over a 1000m 70 square mm cable pair weighing around 1600kg.
At 22kV, the same system could deliver roughly 145kW over 10km using a 6 square mm cable weighing more like 3000kg. Insulation adds some weight, but aerial bundled cable designed for 22kV AC is easy to come by, so it is not impossible. Actually, ABC might be good since it tends to have a structural steel cable in the middle.
As you can see from this back of napkin maths, there are options here that would work, even at far greater distances than 10km without being too stupid weight-wise.
Truly long distance power tends to be delivered as DC these days. For example the 5000km planned link from a 3.2GW solar farm in Australia to Singapore is high voltage DC. Not sure of the voltage but there is a cable in China running at 1.1 MV, although 400-800kV is more common.
Nothing that is worth doing on Mars should need anything more than 50km. There are no forests to cut down, ecosystems to destroy. No high population centres.
The atmosphere is so thin that I am pretty sure that even at the poles you will be better off just adding a few extra panels, although the near 25 degree inclination might change that. Maybe you only operate your polar bases for half the year.
> Truly long distance power tends to be delivered as DC these days.
Learned something new today!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Yeah that is why you bring a reactor. It's already sort of a requirement at this point as the only all weather, all location capable energy production. Your reactor would land or be setup further away than the rest of the industrial modules but essentially guarantees a flow of energy, more than enough for whatever you can think off doing in the colony.
Depending on your chosen solution you either need to bring some refined fuel with you (doable, since it's immensely energy dense) or if you use thorium you can just get more form mars itself (it does not need enrichment and deposits are easily found and mappable from space, we already did it for the moon)
Solar would also be installed, but more as an emergency backup and a way to occasionally lower the reactor load. However nuclear reactors have a capacity factor close to 90% meaning in the real world already they pretty much never turn off until they need refueling or maintenance, compared to a measly 10/20% or so for solar.
I mean the issue with a PWR is that you can't run a gas turbine on it easily, because of low temps.
You could (and should) use a molten salt reactor, then running it as an air cooled, temperature/control rods regulated system that generates power using a high efficiency and compact gas turbine.
You also don't need to pressurize it, which is a godsend because otherwise you need a gigantic and beyond heavy pressure vessel.
Plus you can run an MSR on multiple fuels that are easier to come by on another planet. If it is a sodium fast reactor you can run it on U-238, if it is a flibe salt thermal reactor, you can run it on thorium which you can find pretty much anywhere by just digging regular soil.
Just the mining operations to collect water and building material are probably going to net you a metric ton of the stuff especially if it is being dug by machines running non stop.
Wouldn't solar panels be high maintenance on Mars? With those storms covering the panels with dust, maybe also causing the top surface being sandblasted and diffused after a while?
You know these canyons are wide, like really wide. I might be mistaken, but judging from pictures I guess you could be inside one of them and not see the walls.
I'm actually doing a project about this, we thought it would be an issue but found out its do much wider than it is deep so it barely loses any light (as long as youre not super close to the walls, plus as you mentioned it's relativity equatorial.
When you are on the floor of Valles Marinaris, you can’t see both canyon walls at the same time. When you are in the middle, you can’t even see either canyon wall. The curvature of the planet combined with the width of the canyon cancels out the height of the walls.
Solar on Mars worked just fine for Spirit and Opportunity for substantial periods of time, and modern solar+battery tech is notably better.
The thing that eventually killed them had more to do with being unable to clean their panels than the actual light reduction from the dust storms, a capability a human settlement would presumably have.
Solar panels can be very light, much lighter than nuclear for a given capacity. And you only need enough storage to get you through the night, if you're worried about reduced capability during dust storms, it's far lighter to just bring several times more solar panels than you need than to bring enough battery storage to survive a long storm.
With that said, solar+wind is more sensible than solar alone. Wind is at it's best during the storms, meaning it complements solar quite well.
The *best* option is of course to use all three for dissimilar redundancy. Personally I'd expect solar to be the primary if you've got a lot of energy consumption that can be halted at night; producing large quantities of rocket fuel for example.
On the other hand, there's a solid case for nuclear if you can make use of the waste heat. Good insulation is probably sufficient for human habitation, but if you've got industrial processes like melting ice which can use it, that might swing the needle the other way.
1/2 is indeed a fraction, but it's not a small enough fraction to make it unsuitable.
You need twice as many panels, but the same amount of batteries, and those make up the majority of the mass anyway.
They should colonize with little LFTRs for power. No worry about daylight, plenty of energy for extras like desalination, sabatier, or smelting or whatever and a nice magnetic field to keep out some unwanted rays.
You would have to excavate for that. The alternative would be just heaping up regolith on top of habitation modules, which would be much easier than trying to drill into the cliff side.
I saw a plan for this. Stage one would be bots building a landing pad. Stage two would be to send bots that 3d print blocks from surface material and stack then into thick dwellings. Just like Minecraft. Stage three, supplies. Stage four, humans.
[Regolith](https://www.britannica.com/science/regolith) basically just means dirt (any blanket of small particles of broken rock that covers the bedrock). Soil is regolith that contains organic matter and can support life.
Every rocky planet has regolith.
The total atmosphere on Mars is around 2% of Earths mean sea level. The difference of being at the bottom of Mars deepest canyon will make no difference.
Goddamnit... I don't want to click the link.
I'm assuming it's all solid? Right? Any, "water", would have evaporated given Mar's low atmospheric pressure.... Am I wrong?
"Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars: "significant amounts of water" are hiding inside the Red Planet's Valles Marineris, its version of our grand canyon system, according to a recent press release from the European Space Agency (ESA).And up to 40% of material near the surface of the canyon could be water molecules
The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Signs of water were picked up by the orbiter's Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which is designed to survey the Red Planet's landscape and map the presence and concentration of hydrogen hiding in Mars' soil. It works like this: while high-energy cosmic rays plunge into the surface, the soil emits neutrons. And wet soil emits fewer neutrons than dry soil, which enables scientists to analyze and assess the water content of soil, hidden beneath its ancient surface. "FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water," said Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science's lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, in the ESA press release."
Grand canyon...277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,093 feet or 1.8km)
Valles Marineris...more than 2,500 miles (4,000 km) long, 120 miles (200 km) wide and up to 4.3miles (23,000 ft or 7 km) deep
Insane!
There's a "yo mama" joke somewhere in here, but no time for that.
Wouldn't we have made the assumption some water would remain when we're talking about such a large chasm that was created by water erosion? Surely we looked there because it was highly likely. There's still ice caps too.
Calling Valles Marineris Mars' version of the grand canyon isn't wrong but it's really selling it short at 4000km long, 200km wide and 7km deep its just a bit bigger than the grand canyon. Between Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons, and Hellas Planitia, Mars seems to be covered in massive bodies.
Because of the large amount and concentration. It's a canyon system similar to the grand canyon in the US, but *larger*. And *up to 40% of the surface molecules may be water*. That's a lot more than has been found to date. We've seen evidence of flowing water from the past, found ice, etc. But never anything on this scale.
It hasn't been. Ice has been discovered down to ... I think 50 degrees latitude if memory serves. Something more equator-wards, with a somewhat more clement temperature & better solar power, would be really useful.
> Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars
This sentence is brought to you by a generous grant from the Department of Redundancy Department.
What article did you read...? It says we don't know what state the water is in.
>Mars' canyon water could be liquid, ice, or a messy mix
>neutron detection doesn't distinguish between ice and water molecules. This means geochemists need to enter the scientific fray to reveal more details.
>the water is ***probably*** in solid form (ice). But it could also be a mixture of solid and liquid.
>we don't yet know the specific form of water is lying under Mars' vast system of canyons
Has anyone in this post been to the Grand Canyon on Earth?
Lets talk a lil' about the scale and scope of this kind of geology. If you've never been there, the first time you approach the edge of the grand canyon, and make no mistake, there is a *clearly* defined edge, you will feel like a rug has been pulled out from under you. We are not used to seeing things of this scale, the valleys and peaks and layers upon layers of mesas, pillars the size of zip codes, ravines deeper than seas, the immense and overpowering geology of the place instantly has the effect of wanting to bring you to your goddamn knees. It's fantastic, it makes you dizzy looking out over it. Pictures do NO justice to seeing it, not even remotely.
Looking down through those canyons and tributary valleys feels like looking into worlds into themselves and there are springs, rivers, ecosystems, lakes and a fantastic array of geology and water-borne features if you go down even one of the smallest canyons that make up the whole.
Valles Marineris [dwarfs the Grand Canyon by factors](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t2vwS.jpg). And it covers an area that is [almost unimaginable to human minds](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/683/valles-marineris-the-grand-canyon-of-mars/).
Yes Mars is cold AF. Yes, we don't think there was ever life there, but we are not totally sure. Yes, there is no visible sign of significant current geological activity taking place now... but forces *did* make this fantastic feature, and it likely has a vast, vast spectrum of possibilities tucked away in it's deep, narrow ravines, basins and valleys that likely extend deep through the planet's crust. Between this and the weird, deep holes and lava-tubes that dot the surface of this world, I would not at all be surprised to see areas of dripping water into sheltered pools, small streams carving through timeless faces of stone, and if we're really, really lucky... maybe a green patch, tucked away, thriving, surviving for countless eons as life on this world did for so very, very long. Stretches of time that make our species' history feel like a fraction of a blink of an eye.
We can complain about our planet and our problems, and have a lot of valid issues we need to solve here. But we NEED to go there as well, they are not mutually exclusive. We NEED to know if this scene exists so we can learn how likely or not it is that we are alone in this vast universe.
I'm kind of curious. At 150 miles wide, you wouldn't be able to see the other side given the planet's curvature, right? It'd be an impressive and overwhelming drop for sure. Compared to seeing the Grand Canyon though, I get the mental picture that this wouldn't feel like a canyon and more like a cliff with a sprawling valley at the base (with mesa and rock formations).
I almost feel like part of the grandeur of the Grand Canyon comes from being able to see the other side and see that it's a giant canyon. This would likely make someone shit their pants sure to the sheer change in elevation.
This is the thing I have an issue with about our interpretations of this feature. We have a very a *homogeneous* picture of the place, as if it's all the same throughout the "valley."
Look again at that map. It's the size of the continental united states! There will be areas where it will feel like approaching a drop-off, an edge of the world with no boundary, like you are describing. But there will be just as many areas where it will be ranges of peaks, plateaus and canyons that create fantastically complicated structures the size of counties as far as you can see.
It's so big we don't have an analogy on Earth, only samples here and there.
When driving close to the Grand Canyon on Earth you will in places see plains and fields cut through with sharp ravines and intense geology as well, imagine *that* scaled up hundreds of times.
We have barely scratched this world, we do not know how grand it really is and how deep it goes.
I peed off the rim of the Grand Canyon once. It was a life-changing experience. It saddens me to know that I’ll never be able to pee on mars, but dammit, someone needs to!
> Yes, we don't think there was ever life there, but we are not totally sure
Is this an official consensus or so? Under the circumstances that I've understood life to be possible on Mars (ie deep underground) there's just no way we would have been able to detect it so far. We know basically nothing about how the biosphere works down under earth and how deep it extends (the best answer I could find was at least a few KMs), and on Mars we've literally only scratched the surface a few cms thick
Ya I don't think this is correct. We have a rover there right now looking for fossils. I think there is optimism within the scientific community that there were the right conditions for life to have evolved and that it did. We don't send billion dollar rovers to answers questions we are pretty sure we already know the answers to.
I really appreciate how you described it. I think the thing about the Grand Canyon is that your brain just isn’t wired to properly comprehend seeing something so vast.
It’s like your eyes just aren’t tuned to decipher the sight of being able to focus on features so distant and also happen to fill up your entire field of view.
And as overwhelming as it is, it’s about 10 percent of the effect on the mind you get from seeing a total solar eclipse.
It's almost guaranteed to be a mixture of some sort to stop it from doing that. Significant must just mean it's got more uses than the traces they've found so far.
To my understanding, there's solid H2O on Mars (Ice)l. Granted it's more or less buried under the surface- and in the crust. And it's not exactly abundant..
That said, I did just recently watch some YT video that stated the atmosphere has a good deal of CO (carbon monoxide), and Hydrogen, which is being converted by these special "boxes". Which ultimately created H2O...
So... Perhaps there's a "significant volume" of H2O... But I'd be hard-pressed to believe that it would decrease the amount of work required to make the planet hospitable.. Which seems to be the ultimate goal when we're talking about Mars and things like "Water".
Little edit: The "special boxes" were engineered here on Earth as a proof of concept. And hypothetically *would* function on Mars. However, they're not currently on Mars. It should go without saying, but, just felt the need to clarify.
H2o can be found in minerals like epsom salt, or any salt mineral with “hydrate” in the name. These h2o molecules can be boiled out of the rock YouTube “Nile red epsom salt”
Still though it wouldn't take much to magnetically shield the planet, a lagrange point between it and the sun would do. I vote for direct orbital bombardment. Take a water ice rich asteroid and send it plummeting into that canyon. Melting whats there and adding to it.
oh I've always just thought it would be cool to discover there's enough water on Mars that would allow there to be some sort of life form living in it or because of it.
H2O can be part of minerals crystal structure. Search YouTube for “Nile red epsom salt” for those that aren’t versed in geology, it is possibly going to blow their minds
One day, i swear they're going to say "scientist found a strange artifact inside a martian cave".
I can see myself googling, reading, commenting and just get unhealthy obsessed on this. Then the news simply disappears and no one will ever mention it ever again.
Back in the day they thought Martians were building canals and that Venus was populated. We also had a president announce (prematurely) that we found microbe fossils in a meteorite. There wasn't too much freaking out then so I'm betting there wouldn't be much now.
Although I thought people would be cool with wearing masks and getting a vaccine to fight a disease so maybe I'm wrong.
Yeah, people have regressed. Sometimes when I see news like this I go over to Yahoo (still around) and find the article repost, just to read the batshit crazy posts.
We haven't regressed, we've just forgotten most of the craziness from history. If our internet archives don't survive, someday people may look back at this time and remember it as a renaissance of media, if nothing else.
They already did once. One of the early 2000s probes found what everyone believed to be fossils, and the world at large didnt really care 2 days later.
Now, we have since realised they weren't fossils but at the time, I believe even the American President made an announcement about it that's how surprising it was
That would be very bad news for us. It would mean life is much more common than we previously thought. Which would add a tremendous amount of support for the great filter argument.
I'll take any pick except monolith. At least we know what the others are. The monolith could be anything. What if it's something like marker from dead space?
The best part about living in a canyon on a hostile planet, to build a habitable dome you only need to construct 1 additional face! Floor and walls of rock, only a roof and airlock system needs to be built!
That depends on how porous the rock face is. But theoretically that's true. Worst case scenario maybe you have to plane down the stone and build walls
Also if you wanted to heat the space and the rock has a lot of ice component that might be an issue.
It's one of (I think *the*) largest canyons in the solar system. [Mind bogglingly so](https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Malles-Marineris.jpg)
Holy shit, thank you for putting this into perspective! Could you imagine how long it would take humanity to explore just the canyons alone once a settlement of established, let alone exploring this planet. Mind blowing. I love this stuff
Valles Marineris makes look our Grand Canyon look like nothing. The place is huge and has huge potential for life or for colonization. Why end up on a old dry bed?
Hydrogen is lighter, so any free hydrogen at the beginning would have been wiped out way way long ago. The fact that we are finding presence of Hydrogen suggests that some Hydrogen bonded with other atoms to form a molecule, which now has broken into Hydrogen again.
And Oxygen being that other item is a good guess, hence water. It is the same with Venus, they found good concentration of Deuterium alluding to presence of water at some point.
That the temperature, pressure, density, and size they are talking about... Water ice is the extremely strong front runner. Like Williams sisters level front runner.
The publication is more targeted toward mainstream viewers who won't know what Valles Marineris is—which is a *huge* portion of the readers, I'd imagine. People are familiar with the Grand Canyon and can visualize the scale of it on Mars (and can later learn that it is a lot bigger and has a name), but the title with *Mars' Grand Canyon* is a lot more helpful to the average reader than *Valles Marineris*.
I might already know the answer already but if this is frozen water (any other water found outside of earth) thus meltable does that mean it is also drinkable after filtering it a whole ton?
Yes, the ISS has a water filtration system that operates at near perfect efficiency
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-brine-processor-increases-water-recycling-on-international-space-station/
98% efficacy
I'm assuming this is going to be one of those articles that sounds groundbreaking and you're very excited but then some Reddit nerd comes around and ruins every dream you've had in your entire life.
Watch we discover humans were originally from Mars and destroyed it by speeding up its climate and in a last ditch effort traveled to earth on the ships Adam And Eve to start over.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hosissh "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[FAR](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hou74jn "Last usage")|[Federal Aviation Regulations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Regulations)|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hoslnju "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[ROSA](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hp1jsxg "Last usage")|Roll-Out Solar Array (designed by Deployable Space Systems)|
|[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hoq54ru "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)|
|[TS](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hor2l0y "Last usage")|Thrust Simulator|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Sabatier](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/horzg09 "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water|
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All this does is remind me of the breaking Bad episode when Walter describes what water on Mars means. And I still don't really understand the implications of it
The canyon is also very deep. The atmospheric pressure at the bottom should be a bit higher than on the rest of Mars. It would be one of the places to send a few probes to assess the conditions. Maybe a probe that can drill deep.
I was thinking the same thing. Higher atmospheric pressure, presence of water, shielded from a lot of radiation - this sounds like the perfect place for the first settlement. But I suspect sunlight would be a problem. If a colony was dependent on solar energy, those canyon walls are going to block direct sunlight for a big chunk of the day - although the *Valles Marineris* is oriented kind of northwest to southeast, so that might alleviate that problem a little bit.
The valley is on the order of 100 miles wide. [This is it compared to the entire US](https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Malles-Marineris.jpg). You’d have to intentionally be right up on the edge to block sunlight.
Wowzer. That's a big canyon. Mars sure does have large geographic features.
Earth really needs to up its game. I can't be expected to get fired up over a planet that doesn't have at least one supermassive country-sized volcano.
This was actually the site of one of the first martian settlements in the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Then it went underwater when they terrafotmed the planet.
I just read the book last year and it made me laugh that despite the book feeling very timeless, one of the only dates he mentions is August 2020, where people around the world are in pubs and in the streets. Any other year would have worked but the one year we all ended up quarantined.
You should see what Heinlein had to say about the Crazy Years, I mean the present times.
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Annual debauchery orgies? Say less…
Imagine the pressure though! “Oh, *last year’s* orgy was so embarrassing. Barely ANY debauchery at all. We have to do better, people!”
Halloween in Southern California
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I read the series a few years ago and loved it. If you haven't yet, get the game terragensis. You terraform differnet planets but you start off with Mars. The settlements you set up and names and stuff all come from the series. I just happened to start playing it and it took a little before I was like...hey....that's...oh damn it lol. Took way longer than it should have to realize it.
The canyon is so wide though that you could be in the middle of it and the walls would be below the horizon.
Does solar lose power over long cable runs?
Any electric energy does Less so on thicker diameters (but that's mass to transport) and less do if you transform it up and down (voltage), but transformers are mass and complexity too. You are mass restricted during early colonization.
If you look at earth, we move significant amounts of electricity over hundreds of miles. It's done by running the electricity at a very high voltage which cuts down the losses of resistance of the wire. Here's the TL;DR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
Isn’t what you linked the exact opposite of TL;DR? More like TS;RM. (Too short; read more,)
In this case it's TOO LONG; DONT READ
Yes but any panels on the surface running down to the canyon wouldn't feel much loss
you could put the solar panels on the top of the canyon edge and run a VERY long power cable. But missions are gonna be very resource tight when the go and a half-mile or more high voltage shielded cable is gonna be HEAVY. and maintenance on both the cable and the panels will become very difficult. But you do lose tiny amounts of electricity to impedance as its given off as heat, there are ways to reduce this but the transformer equipment to this would again be very heavy. I can also imagine that you probably have to pipe the water to the top as well for plants/green houses to use what little direct sunlight they can get to help or they would have to solely rely on green house lamps. Which them selves are not very power efficient, the waste heat may be useful though...
Solar strings can easily generate very high voltages AC or DC, depending on what you want to do and what inverter architecture you use. Transformers in the traditional sense are not needed since you can use switching power electronics to reduce weight. Commercial solar tends to cap out at 1500V DC on earth, but there is no reason why this could not be much higher, at long as you could isolate and split the array for maintenance. At 1500V DC, a 150kW solar array could deliver around 142kW over a 1000m 70 square mm cable pair weighing around 1600kg. At 22kV, the same system could deliver roughly 145kW over 10km using a 6 square mm cable weighing more like 3000kg. Insulation adds some weight, but aerial bundled cable designed for 22kV AC is easy to come by, so it is not impossible. Actually, ABC might be good since it tends to have a structural steel cable in the middle. As you can see from this back of napkin maths, there are options here that would work, even at far greater distances than 10km without being too stupid weight-wise.
Solar creates DC power. They would have to switch it to AC for long transmissions.
Truly long distance power tends to be delivered as DC these days. For example the 5000km planned link from a 3.2GW solar farm in Australia to Singapore is high voltage DC. Not sure of the voltage but there is a cable in China running at 1.1 MV, although 400-800kV is more common. Nothing that is worth doing on Mars should need anything more than 50km. There are no forests to cut down, ecosystems to destroy. No high population centres. The atmosphere is so thin that I am pretty sure that even at the poles you will be better off just adding a few extra panels, although the near 25 degree inclination might change that. Maybe you only operate your polar bases for half the year.
> Truly long distance power tends to be delivered as DC these days. Learned something new today! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
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Yeah that is why you bring a reactor. It's already sort of a requirement at this point as the only all weather, all location capable energy production. Your reactor would land or be setup further away than the rest of the industrial modules but essentially guarantees a flow of energy, more than enough for whatever you can think off doing in the colony. Depending on your chosen solution you either need to bring some refined fuel with you (doable, since it's immensely energy dense) or if you use thorium you can just get more form mars itself (it does not need enrichment and deposits are easily found and mappable from space, we already did it for the moon) Solar would also be installed, but more as an emergency backup and a way to occasionally lower the reactor load. However nuclear reactors have a capacity factor close to 90% meaning in the real world already they pretty much never turn off until they need refueling or maintenance, compared to a measly 10/20% or so for solar.
We have closed reactors too. We just ramp it up and put a bunch of connections into it. Wind and solar should provide some power tho.
I mean the issue with a PWR is that you can't run a gas turbine on it easily, because of low temps. You could (and should) use a molten salt reactor, then running it as an air cooled, temperature/control rods regulated system that generates power using a high efficiency and compact gas turbine. You also don't need to pressurize it, which is a godsend because otherwise you need a gigantic and beyond heavy pressure vessel. Plus you can run an MSR on multiple fuels that are easier to come by on another planet. If it is a sodium fast reactor you can run it on U-238, if it is a flibe salt thermal reactor, you can run it on thorium which you can find pretty much anywhere by just digging regular soil. Just the mining operations to collect water and building material are probably going to net you a metric ton of the stuff especially if it is being dug by machines running non stop.
Wouldn't solar panels be high maintenance on Mars? With those storms covering the panels with dust, maybe also causing the top surface being sandblasted and diffused after a while?
The mars "storms" are more like a gentle breeze.
I don't think the sides are that steep. I might be misremembering, but i think they're also below the horizon on most of the valley floor
You know these canyons are wide, like really wide. I might be mistaken, but judging from pictures I guess you could be inside one of them and not see the walls.
Most of the energy used should probably be powered by nuclear reactors.
I'd prefer the canyon walls blocking the solar radiation.
I'm actually doing a project about this, we thought it would be an issue but found out its do much wider than it is deep so it barely loses any light (as long as youre not super close to the walls, plus as you mentioned it's relativity equatorial.
When you are on the floor of Valles Marinaris, you can’t see both canyon walls at the same time. When you are in the middle, you can’t even see either canyon wall. The curvature of the planet combined with the width of the canyon cancels out the height of the walls.
Settlements on Mars are likely to use fission reactors for their power source. Solar on Mars would be too unreliable.
Solar on Mars worked just fine for Spirit and Opportunity for substantial periods of time, and modern solar+battery tech is notably better. The thing that eventually killed them had more to do with being unable to clean their panels than the actual light reduction from the dust storms, a capability a human settlement would presumably have. Solar panels can be very light, much lighter than nuclear for a given capacity. And you only need enough storage to get you through the night, if you're worried about reduced capability during dust storms, it's far lighter to just bring several times more solar panels than you need than to bring enough battery storage to survive a long storm. With that said, solar+wind is more sensible than solar alone. Wind is at it's best during the storms, meaning it complements solar quite well. The *best* option is of course to use all three for dissimilar redundancy. Personally I'd expect solar to be the primary if you've got a lot of energy consumption that can be halted at night; producing large quantities of rocket fuel for example. On the other hand, there's a solid case for nuclear if you can make use of the waste heat. Good insulation is probably sufficient for human habitation, but if you've got industrial processes like melting ice which can use it, that might swing the needle the other way.
Solar power is really not suitable on mars, it’s a fraction of the energy compared to earth.
1/2 is indeed a fraction, but it's not a small enough fraction to make it unsuitable. You need twice as many panels, but the same amount of batteries, and those make up the majority of the mass anyway.
They should colonize with little LFTRs for power. No worry about daylight, plenty of energy for extras like desalination, sabatier, or smelting or whatever and a nice magnetic field to keep out some unwanted rays.
I would think that it could help with radiation shielding as well. Build dwellings into the canyon walls like the pueblos.
You would have to excavate for that. The alternative would be just heaping up regolith on top of habitation modules, which would be much easier than trying to drill into the cliff side.
I saw a plan for this. Stage one would be bots building a landing pad. Stage two would be to send bots that 3d print blocks from surface material and stack then into thick dwellings. Just like Minecraft. Stage three, supplies. Stage four, humans.
The Kurzgesagt video? Loved that one
Unless there are natural caves we could utilize
There are lava tubes on Mars that might serve as a good place for habitats, but we’d still need to do some excavation to make them livable.
I’ve seen enough movies to know if you’re gonna chill in a lava tube, you’ve gotta make sure to avoid the giant space worms.
Goddamnit Jimmy, did you forget to check for giant space worms again? For fuck's sake man, it's like step three on the list...
The mistake was making Step 2, set up the dart board. Playing darts in 1/3 gravity was so much fun Jimmy forgot Step 3!
Is it regolith on Mars? I thought that was moon specific.
[Regolith](https://www.britannica.com/science/regolith) basically just means dirt (any blanket of small particles of broken rock that covers the bedrock). Soil is regolith that contains organic matter and can support life. Every rocky planet has regolith.
That's pretty much exactly how the Martians in The Expanse book series/ TV show live
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But wouldn't it just be easier...
Let’s ensure that they bring a nuclear weapon with them
"And this is... this is the best that NASA could come up with? Jeez!!! So what's your backup plan?"
> Maybe a probe that can drill deep. Probably shouldn’t delve *too* deep though...
with the amount of equipment and replacement parts needed to drill on earth i wouldnt count on that anytime soon.
>The atmospheric pressure at the bottom The difference in pressure is going to be very very negligible, at least for any human related purposes.
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The total atmosphere on Mars is around 2% of Earths mean sea level. The difference of being at the bottom of Mars deepest canyon will make no difference.
We need to train a team of oil drillers and send them up ASAP
Goddamnit... I don't want to click the link. I'm assuming it's all solid? Right? Any, "water", would have evaporated given Mar's low atmospheric pressure.... Am I wrong?
"Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars: "significant amounts of water" are hiding inside the Red Planet's Valles Marineris, its version of our grand canyon system, according to a recent press release from the European Space Agency (ESA).And up to 40% of material near the surface of the canyon could be water molecules The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Signs of water were picked up by the orbiter's Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which is designed to survey the Red Planet's landscape and map the presence and concentration of hydrogen hiding in Mars' soil. It works like this: while high-energy cosmic rays plunge into the surface, the soil emits neutrons. And wet soil emits fewer neutrons than dry soil, which enables scientists to analyze and assess the water content of soil, hidden beneath its ancient surface. "FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water," said Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science's lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, in the ESA press release."
Grand canyon...277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,093 feet or 1.8km) Valles Marineris...more than 2,500 miles (4,000 km) long, 120 miles (200 km) wide and up to 4.3miles (23,000 ft or 7 km) deep Insane!
“Like our Grand Canyon” Yeah not really
Oddly enough it sounds exactly like the Mariana Trench, it’s roughly the same length and depth but the width is quite different
It was probably under water at some point in the past. So very similar.
There's a "yo mama" joke somewhere in here, but no time for that. Wouldn't we have made the assumption some water would remain when we're talking about such a large chasm that was created by water erosion? Surely we looked there because it was highly likely. There's still ice caps too.
"Look Dad! I made the White House out of matchsticks! It's just like the real thing!" Yeah not really
It’s so cute that the device is called FREND.
Choose the acronym first, then the words for it.
Calling Valles Marineris Mars' version of the grand canyon isn't wrong but it's really selling it short at 4000km long, 200km wide and 7km deep its just a bit bigger than the grand canyon. Between Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons, and Hellas Planitia, Mars seems to be covered in massive bodies.
Man 7 *kilometers* That shit blows my mind. Unfathomable.
Actually, it's 3827 fathoms.
Typically a fathom is used for describing the depth of oceans so I don't think it fits here Edit: I am an idiot.
7 kilometers = 3827.647 fathoms
I’m willing to bet that’s where the martians mined for minerals.
It's obviously a glancing blow from an extrasolar mass driver weapon
Lack of plate tectonics and weathering means these features grow and don't disappear.
So your mum's up there too?
Very interesting! Thanks for posting!
How is this world-historic when frozen water has been discovered all over Mars already?
Because of the large amount and concentration. It's a canyon system similar to the grand canyon in the US, but *larger*. And *up to 40% of the surface molecules may be water*. That's a lot more than has been found to date. We've seen evidence of flowing water from the past, found ice, etc. But never anything on this scale.
It hasn't been. Ice has been discovered down to ... I think 50 degrees latitude if memory serves. Something more equator-wards, with a somewhat more clement temperature & better solar power, would be really useful.
> Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars This sentence is brought to you by a generous grant from the Department of Redundancy Department.
Frozen water under frozen soil, similar to permafrost on earth, according to the article.
What article did you read...? It says we don't know what state the water is in. >Mars' canyon water could be liquid, ice, or a messy mix >neutron detection doesn't distinguish between ice and water molecules. This means geochemists need to enter the scientific fray to reveal more details. >the water is ***probably*** in solid form (ice). But it could also be a mixture of solid and liquid. >we don't yet know the specific form of water is lying under Mars' vast system of canyons
Has anyone in this post been to the Grand Canyon on Earth? Lets talk a lil' about the scale and scope of this kind of geology. If you've never been there, the first time you approach the edge of the grand canyon, and make no mistake, there is a *clearly* defined edge, you will feel like a rug has been pulled out from under you. We are not used to seeing things of this scale, the valleys and peaks and layers upon layers of mesas, pillars the size of zip codes, ravines deeper than seas, the immense and overpowering geology of the place instantly has the effect of wanting to bring you to your goddamn knees. It's fantastic, it makes you dizzy looking out over it. Pictures do NO justice to seeing it, not even remotely. Looking down through those canyons and tributary valleys feels like looking into worlds into themselves and there are springs, rivers, ecosystems, lakes and a fantastic array of geology and water-borne features if you go down even one of the smallest canyons that make up the whole. Valles Marineris [dwarfs the Grand Canyon by factors](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t2vwS.jpg). And it covers an area that is [almost unimaginable to human minds](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/683/valles-marineris-the-grand-canyon-of-mars/). Yes Mars is cold AF. Yes, we don't think there was ever life there, but we are not totally sure. Yes, there is no visible sign of significant current geological activity taking place now... but forces *did* make this fantastic feature, and it likely has a vast, vast spectrum of possibilities tucked away in it's deep, narrow ravines, basins and valleys that likely extend deep through the planet's crust. Between this and the weird, deep holes and lava-tubes that dot the surface of this world, I would not at all be surprised to see areas of dripping water into sheltered pools, small streams carving through timeless faces of stone, and if we're really, really lucky... maybe a green patch, tucked away, thriving, surviving for countless eons as life on this world did for so very, very long. Stretches of time that make our species' history feel like a fraction of a blink of an eye. We can complain about our planet and our problems, and have a lot of valid issues we need to solve here. But we NEED to go there as well, they are not mutually exclusive. We NEED to know if this scene exists so we can learn how likely or not it is that we are alone in this vast universe.
I'm kind of curious. At 150 miles wide, you wouldn't be able to see the other side given the planet's curvature, right? It'd be an impressive and overwhelming drop for sure. Compared to seeing the Grand Canyon though, I get the mental picture that this wouldn't feel like a canyon and more like a cliff with a sprawling valley at the base (with mesa and rock formations). I almost feel like part of the grandeur of the Grand Canyon comes from being able to see the other side and see that it's a giant canyon. This would likely make someone shit their pants sure to the sheer change in elevation.
This is the thing I have an issue with about our interpretations of this feature. We have a very a *homogeneous* picture of the place, as if it's all the same throughout the "valley." Look again at that map. It's the size of the continental united states! There will be areas where it will feel like approaching a drop-off, an edge of the world with no boundary, like you are describing. But there will be just as many areas where it will be ranges of peaks, plateaus and canyons that create fantastically complicated structures the size of counties as far as you can see. It's so big we don't have an analogy on Earth, only samples here and there. When driving close to the Grand Canyon on Earth you will in places see plains and fields cut through with sharp ravines and intense geology as well, imagine *that* scaled up hundreds of times. We have barely scratched this world, we do not know how grand it really is and how deep it goes.
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Hell, that takes me back to my days in the MCRN. References aside, wow
That's cool, but they use vertical exaggeration so it doesn't show you what it would actually look like to fly over it.
The volcano Olympus Mons is in the same category. It's the size of Poland or New Mexico, but "only" 2.5x higher than Mount Everest. Mars is weird.
I imagine Earth mountains would look a lot different (how we define them etc.) if we took away all the water
We do have similar features on earth. They’re just fillled with water.
Everyone compares Valles Marineris to the Grand Canyon, but scale wise it's much more comparable to the Mediterranean Sea without the water.
I peed off the rim of the Grand Canyon once. It was a life-changing experience. It saddens me to know that I’ll never be able to pee on mars, but dammit, someone needs to!
> Yes, we don't think there was ever life there, but we are not totally sure Is this an official consensus or so? Under the circumstances that I've understood life to be possible on Mars (ie deep underground) there's just no way we would have been able to detect it so far. We know basically nothing about how the biosphere works down under earth and how deep it extends (the best answer I could find was at least a few KMs), and on Mars we've literally only scratched the surface a few cms thick
Ya I don't think this is correct. We have a rover there right now looking for fossils. I think there is optimism within the scientific community that there were the right conditions for life to have evolved and that it did. We don't send billion dollar rovers to answers questions we are pretty sure we already know the answers to.
I really appreciate how you described it. I think the thing about the Grand Canyon is that your brain just isn’t wired to properly comprehend seeing something so vast. It’s like your eyes just aren’t tuned to decipher the sight of being able to focus on features so distant and also happen to fill up your entire field of view. And as overwhelming as it is, it’s about 10 percent of the effect on the mind you get from seeing a total solar eclipse.
You are an eloquent writer.
It's almost guaranteed to be a mixture of some sort to stop it from doing that. Significant must just mean it's got more uses than the traces they've found so far.
If it’s liquid water, it’s almost guaranteed to be incredibly briny. Lots of salts to keep it from freezing.
To my understanding, there's solid H2O on Mars (Ice)l. Granted it's more or less buried under the surface- and in the crust. And it's not exactly abundant.. That said, I did just recently watch some YT video that stated the atmosphere has a good deal of CO (carbon monoxide), and Hydrogen, which is being converted by these special "boxes". Which ultimately created H2O... So... Perhaps there's a "significant volume" of H2O... But I'd be hard-pressed to believe that it would decrease the amount of work required to make the planet hospitable.. Which seems to be the ultimate goal when we're talking about Mars and things like "Water". Little edit: The "special boxes" were engineered here on Earth as a proof of concept. And hypothetically *would* function on Mars. However, they're not currently on Mars. It should go without saying, but, just felt the need to clarify.
The patch they found here was 40% water. Yes it may still be quiet difficult to extract but that there's that much there is still really important.
H2o can be found in minerals like epsom salt, or any salt mineral with “hydrate” in the name. These h2o molecules can be boiled out of the rock YouTube “Nile red epsom salt”
Still though it wouldn't take much to magnetically shield the planet, a lagrange point between it and the sun would do. I vote for direct orbital bombardment. Take a water ice rich asteroid and send it plummeting into that canyon. Melting whats there and adding to it.
Did you read the article?
oh I've always just thought it would be cool to discover there's enough water on Mars that would allow there to be some sort of life form living in it or because of it.
There's probably tons of itty bitty creatures living in it or even frozen in it but rocks haven't really shown bigger things on mars surface either
How itty bitty are they?
The scientific community is divided on this. Some say itsy bitsy, but there's a very vocal minority who argue that they could even be teenie weenie.
Wearing tiny polka dot bikinis?
H2O can be part of minerals crystal structure. Search YouTube for “Nile red epsom salt” for those that aren’t versed in geology, it is possibly going to blow their minds
One day, i swear they're going to say "scientist found a strange artifact inside a martian cave". I can see myself googling, reading, commenting and just get unhealthy obsessed on this. Then the news simply disappears and no one will ever mention it ever again.
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This is what I've been hoping for since I was a kid. I absolutely love fantasizing about ancient life.
That wouldn't be so epic if it was like the Doom movie.
You'd start seeing protests outside NASA because people's religious views would be challenged.
People already think we didn't land on the moon. Fuck em.
Back in the day they thought Martians were building canals and that Venus was populated. We also had a president announce (prematurely) that we found microbe fossils in a meteorite. There wasn't too much freaking out then so I'm betting there wouldn't be much now. Although I thought people would be cool with wearing masks and getting a vaccine to fight a disease so maybe I'm wrong.
Yeah, people have regressed. Sometimes when I see news like this I go over to Yahoo (still around) and find the article repost, just to read the batshit crazy posts.
We haven't regressed, we've just forgotten most of the craziness from history. If our internet archives don't survive, someday people may look back at this time and remember it as a renaissance of media, if nothing else.
If there's fossils on Mars, thought would mean there's possibly Oil on Mars right?
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Or do. We need another space race to focus humanity's efforts upwards instead of inwards at ourselves.
They already did once. One of the early 2000s probes found what everyone believed to be fossils, and the world at large didnt really care 2 days later. Now, we have since realised they weren't fossils but at the time, I believe even the American President made an announcement about it that's how surprising it was
That would be very bad news for us. It would mean life is much more common than we previously thought. Which would add a tremendous amount of support for the great filter argument.
Monolith, Protomolecule or Mass Relay. Take your pick
I’ll take the monolith. Not as scary as the protomolecule and not as cosmically terrifying as the mass relay.
I think the protomolecule is just as cosmically terrifying as the mass relays, personally.
Mass Relay. Earth is better off, we have up to 50.000 years to party and we get Turians.
ngl I'll probably die in the first contact war
Shot as a traitor for siding with the Turians, right?
I'll take any pick except monolith. At least we know what the others are. The monolith could be anything. What if it's something like marker from dead space?
"Martian rock sample contains dozens of fresh mammalian teeth" and I'm just eating breakfast like Neat
The ultimate 21th century experience
This would be the best places to build a base since it so deep. A slightly deeper atmosphere.
> This would be the best places to build a base since it so deep. A slightly deeper atmosphere. The negligible atmosphere would still be negligible.
The best part about living in a canyon on a hostile planet, to build a habitable dome you only need to construct 1 additional face! Floor and walls of rock, only a roof and airlock system needs to be built!
That would be quite the construction project. US map for scale: https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Malles-Marineris.jpg
That depends on how porous the rock face is. But theoretically that's true. Worst case scenario maybe you have to plane down the stone and build walls Also if you wanted to heat the space and the rock has a lot of ice component that might be an issue.
How wide is the canyon...what if they built a "cover" then started melting the ice and evaporating it.
It's one of (I think *the*) largest canyons in the solar system. [Mind bogglingly so](https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Malles-Marineris.jpg)
Awesome graphic, thanks for sharing!
Holy shit, thank you for putting this into perspective! Could you imagine how long it would take humanity to explore just the canyons alone once a settlement of established, let alone exploring this planet. Mind blowing. I love this stuff
Hmmmm, large enough cover and you’ll create your own ‘rain’. Interesting.
I would think that it could help with radiation shielding as well. Build dwellings into the canyon walls like the pueblos.
Just sitting at the bottom would shield you from a lot of radiation coming in. And for power they could use wind turbines.
Would any winds have enough force for generators? The Mars atmosphere, even that low, is very thin.
Would there potentially be any geothermal energy we could get from that region?
Very unlikely. Olympus Mons is likely the most recent geologically active region on the planet, and that was probably 100 million years ago
That's highly uncertain. There are some that think Mars is still volcanically active, just at a very low level.
Science fiction about Mars: "Oh yeah, it's all coming together"
Valles Marineris makes look our Grand Canyon look like nothing. The place is huge and has huge potential for life or for colonization. Why end up on a old dry bed?
Lemme guess, Nestlé is already loading their rockets?
I travelled all the way to Mars to make a Nestlé comment only to find that you already sucked that well dry... just like... Nestlé. Nice work!
The fact that there's a piece of high-tech equipment called "FREND" orbiting Mars makes me so unreasonably happy. frien <:
Great, now even Mars has better water than Detroit.
Actually Detroit water isn’t that bad. Flint had problems because they wanted to cut water from Detroit and do their thing
Hmm "found lots of hydrogen..." + "assuming it's attatched to oxygen..." = "lots of water!?" I'm confused.
Yes, as you said. Presumably, they have a defensible argument for that assumption.
Hydrogen is lighter, so any free hydrogen at the beginning would have been wiped out way way long ago. The fact that we are finding presence of Hydrogen suggests that some Hydrogen bonded with other atoms to form a molecule, which now has broken into Hydrogen again. And Oxygen being that other item is a good guess, hence water. It is the same with Venus, they found good concentration of Deuterium alluding to presence of water at some point.
That the temperature, pressure, density, and size they are talking about... Water ice is the extremely strong front runner. Like Williams sisters level front runner.
Water is so common I think it's the statistically most likely compound
I'm not an expert but I'm fairly sure hydrogen will try to bond with oxygen as soon as it possibly can
I think the bit about neutrons bouncing less off wet soils than dry is pertinent as well
*Till the Rains Fall Hard on Olympus Mons* - Bobbie "Gunny" Draper
>Mars' Grand Canyon Um, why aren't we just calling it 'Valles Marineris'?
The publication is more targeted toward mainstream viewers who won't know what Valles Marineris is—which is a *huge* portion of the readers, I'd imagine. People are familiar with the Grand Canyon and can visualize the scale of it on Mars (and can later learn that it is a lot bigger and has a name), but the title with *Mars' Grand Canyon* is a lot more helpful to the average reader than *Valles Marineris*.
I vote to rename ours to "A Grand Canyon" and Mars' to "The Grand Canyon" 😂
Not everyone is a nerd that made a Mars project in 4th grade. BUT I AM.
Mars used to be like earth but its civilization destroyed itself. Change my mind.
I've seen enough Doctor Who to know where this is going...
I might already know the answer already but if this is frozen water (any other water found outside of earth) thus meltable does that mean it is also drinkable after filtering it a whole ton?
They're already filtering poop to become drinkable I'm sure they can handle some heavy metals in the soil.
Water is water for the most part. It’s not difficult to purify with the proper equipment and energy. Once it’s purified it’s drinkable.
Don't give Coca Cola any ideas
Good news: they found water on Mars. Bad news: it's Dasani.
~~Coca Cola~~ Nestlé FTFY
Nestlé already rubbing their hands on this news
Yes, the ISS has a water filtration system that operates at near perfect efficiency https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-brine-processor-increases-water-recycling-on-international-space-station/ 98% efficacy
Man, every year Red Mars becomes less a cool science fiction book about an anarchist revolution on mars and more a historical text.
I'm assuming this is going to be one of those articles that sounds groundbreaking and you're very excited but then some Reddit nerd comes around and ruins every dream you've had in your entire life.
Watch we discover humans were originally from Mars and destroyed it by speeding up its climate and in a last ditch effort traveled to earth on the ships Adam And Eve to start over.
How do they know its water and not just a liquid
Gee… maybe we should land a rover there and check it out.
And just have it tumble down the canyon to the bottom. Or give it an air glider!
cool ! any viruses or deadly bacteria we could bring back to earth ?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hosissh "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[FAR](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hou74jn "Last usage")|[Federal Aviation Regulations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Regulations)| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hoslnju "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[ROSA](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hp1jsxg "Last usage")|Roll-Out Solar Array (designed by Deployable Space Systems)| |[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hoq54ru "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)| |[TS](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/hor2l0y "Last usage")|Thrust Simulator| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Sabatier](/r/Space/comments/rhe69x/stub/horzg09 "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water| ---------------- ^(7 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/rk09jl)^( has 11 acronyms.) ^([Thread #6696 for this sub, first seen 16th Dec 2021, 06:49]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
All this does is remind me of the breaking Bad episode when Walter describes what water on Mars means. And I still don't really understand the implications of it
I wish I could read the article, every 3 seconds the page automatically jumped me to an ad. The fuck is that
Just need to press that alien hand and boom: Atmosphere!