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Water ice found near Martian equator

A review of old Mars Odyssey data has revealed the presence on Mars of water ice near the planet’s equator.

The article makes a big deal about the importance of this discovery for the possibility of past or even present life on Mars. I say that its real importance relates to future colonists, and cannot be understated.

I should add one caveat: The resolution of the data is not great, 290 kilometers, which leaves a lot of room for error.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

One comment

  • Kirk

    This reminds me of a four year old European paper, “One million cubic kilometers of fossil ice in Valles Marineris: Relicts of a 3.5 Gy old glacial landsystem along the Martian equator”: http://www.dmzone.org/papers/Gourroncetal2014_VM.pdf

    I’ve never heard any followup on that. The ice hypothesized in that paper would likely be covered a bit too deep for Mars Odyssey’s neutron spectrometer to detect, but I’ve not heard if it should have been detected by the penetrating radars on Mars Express or MRO.

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