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.
How confident are we that hydrogen detected really is water?
Hydrogen just doesn't get bound up into minerals (unless essentially as water) and not at any great density, and there isn't another plausible substance that would be hanging out in a canyon on mars.
tbc I don't believe there's oil on mars nor do I think it is remotely likely.
“Methane (CH4) is abundant on the giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—where it was the product of chemical processing of primordial solar nebula material. On Earth, though, methane is special. Of the 1,750 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) of methane in Earth’s atmosphere, 90 to 95 percent is biological in origin.”[1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-on-mars-t...
Melting (freezing) point 195.42K-77.73°C
The pressure on mars is too low for liquid ammonia to exist and the freezing/sublimation temperature is more like 180K or -100C
And to exist underground in large amounts for millions or billions of years it’s not good enough for temperatures to occasionally be low enough to freeze ammonia, when it was warmer the ammonia would turn into gas and blow away so unless there is a significant local source of ammonia it is highly doubtful that is where the hydrogen comes from.
> The bulk of the northern ice cap consists of water ice; it also has a thin seasonal veneer of dry ice, solid carbon dioxide. Each winter the ice cap grows by adding 1.5 to 2 m of dry ice.
> The part of the cap that survives the summer is called the north residual cap and is made of water ice. This water ice is believed to be as much as three kilometers thick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_polar_ice_caps
That's a lot of water!
But the pressure is still effectively nil. It's far below what would be needed for humans to venture outdoors, and makes a negligible difference to the strength required for pressurised buildings.
https://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals...
Finding life would be huge, we're not going to just go settle on top of it willy-nilly.
Should we lose that for the sake of microbs, as long as we can preserve them for study?
If we found some alive in Mars and we could found it quickly if we found a cannon with water, we should call them in a distinct way. I will propose marteviruses:
Marte-herpesvirus, Marte-adenovirus, Marte-coronavirus, etc.
Another way could be putting before a M- prefix but would be less convenient to read
That’s potentially billions of tons of water ice.
You might be able to make an argument for refueling bases on Mar’s tiny moons with their negligible gravity wells for Martian missions themselves but that’s about all I can see.
What am I missing?
New sites give us more to consider for future missions and broaden the set of experiments we want to conduct.
I'd much rather keep finding water, even as ice, then have the planet run dry. It only increases the odds.
If you’d have said there was water on mars in 1970 you’d have been met with disbelief. 1980? 1990? Later?
From [1]: "As recently as the early 1960s, it still seemed possible to a few astronomers that the dark regions had some kind of plant life because they seemed to darken each summer as if plants were growing in response to sunlight."
[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia02362-the-dark-surfaces-o...
Makes me think about how soon sci-fi written today will get similarly outdated.
I think that something similar awaits modern science fiction in 50 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mars_observation#Ea...