More on Martian ice ‘mystery blob’
Posted on June 20, 2008
Filed Under All, Gulker labs, Photos, Technology |
Here’s a lightened, cropped version of the lower image in the post below, showing no Sol-20 type clumps in the shadow, but clearly showing the ‘mystery blob.’
Re-reading a couple of MPL press releases makes me believe that additional digging was done in the trench pictured on Sol 19, resulting in the images of Sols 20 and 24, showing the now famous ‘disappearing clumps.’
There are also enough differences in the details of the trench itself to make it likely that additional digging explains the disappearance of the blob. But we had fun ‘digging’ through the images… photo courtesy NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona/ Texas A&M University…
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All right! Todays photographs of ice are quite a leap from the days of “We think we’ve found enough evidence at the Opportunity site that liquid water was in abundance for some period of time”.
Still remember when Odyssey found the massive hydrogen footprint and everyone immediately dismissed it as either some other compound or so deep nothing could reach it. Now we now there’s a massive amount of water 2″ below surface, more than all the water in Calif*, enough to produce huge amounts of rocket fuel & sustain human colonies.
My ‘aha’ moment came when MPL released this image of a hard white surface under the lander’s descent rockets:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=1040&cID=34
Scientists have to be very, very careful about what they say, lacking highly supportive evidence. But, moi, understanding from the missions you mention that Mars physics can’t be that radically different from Earth’s, saw those large white patches under the lander, the polygonal tesselations in other images and thought “yes, Mars North polar cap holds a huge amount of frozen water.’