Prospecting for water on Mars
s humans spread out across the Earth, the locations of new colonies were driven by the accessibility of resources: not only food and water, but arable land, forests and minerals.
Access to such resources remains important as the economy moves into space and water has emerged as the pre- eminent resource to exploit first.
From where will we extract the water? Along with the moon and near- Earth asteroids as potential sources, Mars is an important candidate.
Mars is the focus for human settlement in space, largely because of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Mars One and Nasa’s activities in this regard.
The Nasa human landing site selection committee proposed 47 potential sites for a human occupied base on Mars. They considered scientific regions of interest and also “resource regions of interest” — where there is accessible water.
A number of conditions need to be met for an exploration zone to be considered for prospecting for water. Water needs to be accessible, located near the surface, and of sufficient size and concentration to meet user needs.
For operational reasons, the Mars water site also needs to be located with a latitude less than 50 degrees. This ruled out previously identified large surface ice deposits in the high latitude polar regions of Mars.
The Protonilus- Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars is in the planet’s northern mid- latitudes. This region is host to numerous land forms, which appear to contain large buried ice deposits, hundreds of metres thick and several kilometres wide.
If the ice is preserved as we believe, these features would represent a significant resource easily capable of satisfying the requirements for a human base. Three exploration zones have been proposed in the region.
At the low pressures in the Martian atmosphere, and the temperatures in equatorial regions, ice can sublime directly from the solid to gas state ( evaporation being the transition from water to gas). The features we are observing protect ice under a layer of debris.
Because of this, it is not possible to evaluate directly the quantity of ice present. Instead we must rely on data collected by orbital spacecraft to work out the geological properties and potential water resources available.
If we were able to make measurements on the planet itself, things would be much clearer. However, there have been no landed rover missions to this region of Mars, so we are reliant on remotely sensed data.
There is still a lot to be learned from data collected by satellites orbiting Mars. These give us high resolution imagery of the surface, along with insight into the geological properties of these features.
We can make informed assessments about how much water there is, and where it is distributed, as well as about what lies over it ( which will have to either be drilled through or excavated to reach the water). These interpretations can be used to guide future exploration activities, and assist equipment design and mine planning operations.
Rover missions could provide more certainty but planning such a mission will not be done until after site selection, and insight into the feasibility of mining ice deposits on Mars to support human missions to the Red Planet.
It’s not only Mars which is being investigated as a potential source of water in space. The moon with its supply of polar water ice is being considered as a potential resource to supply proposed lunar bases or propellant for Mars missions. The Lunar Resource Prospector mission, set to launch in the early 2020s, will help us better understand the resource potential of the Moon.
Asteroid mining companies such as Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are looking to exploit water stored in near- Earth asteroids and are working towards exploratory missions in the near future.
There are a large number of technical issues that must be navigated before such an ambitious mining enterprise is considered low- risk enough to be feasible. These are challenging, but not insurmountable. University of Adelaide PhD student Jon Jacobsen said.
Senior author Professor Mark Hutchinson said: “Given the drinking culture that exists in many nations, with associated addiction to alcohol and related health and societal issues, we hope our findings will lead to further studies.” Scientists say a large extinct frog called Beelzebufo, which lived about 68 million years ago in Madagascar, would have been capable of eating small dinosaurs.
The conclusion comes from a study of the bite force of South American horned frogs from the living genus Ceratophrys.
The team found the South American horned frogs have similar bite forces to those of mammalian predators.
“Unlike the vast majority of frogs which have weak jaws and typically consume small prey, horned frogs ambush animals as large as themselves — including other frogs, snakes, and rodents,” said author Dr Marc Jones, of the University of Adelaide. When people see an image of a person they recognise — tennis star Roger Federer, for instance — particular cells light up in the brain.
Researchers have found that those cells light up even when a person sees a familiar face or object but fails to notice it.
The only difference, in that case, is that the neural activity is weaker and delayed in comparison to what happens when an observer consciously registers and can recall having seen a particular image.
The findings offer new insight into the nature of conscious perception.
“Our study finds that a ‘ Roger Federer cell’ can also become active when its owner fails to notice the image of Roger Federer rapidly flickering by in a stream of other images,” says Professor Florian Mormann, of Germany’s University of Bonn Medical Centre.
“Thus, we find that there is highly abstract information present in neuronal activity that is inaccessible to conscious experience.”
It wasn’t clear whether consciousness was an all- ornothing phenomenon or a matter of degrees. Because neuronal firing happened in both cases, but differently, the researchers argued in favour of consciousness as a more nuanced, graded event.