Cloud cover on Mars S pole?
Just wondering if it would be clear often enough to allow reliable solar heat to extract the water and make breathing gas and rocket fuel.
Liquid water may be lurking beneath the southern polar ice cap on Mars, according to fresh evidence reported in Nature Astronomy. Dark streaks and other surface patterns on Martian slopes hint that the unforgiving dust world may have once supported lakes and oceans billions of years ago. The loss of its atmosphere is believed …
Move the water underground to where solar conditions are more conducive. Note that the Mars regolith is a fairly decent insulator.
Also note that the regolith/water boundary is the most likely place to find life, making digging there a valuable scientific tool.
Moving H2 is never exactly easy. It hates confinement.
"the water beneath the south pole might need to be really salty, which would make it difficult for any microbial life to inhabit it."
Oh, I dunno. We have the rather imaginatively named "brine shrimp" here on Earth, which are capable of living in saturated salt solutions. We also have the smaller critters that they feed on. If they can survive on Earth, why not Mars? Yes, I know, solutions of different combinations of salts ... but I've seen critters living in mining runoff that isn't all that different from what the chemistry on Mars is probably like. Even in what us puny Humans would consider extremely inhospitable conditions, life always seems to find a way.
I guess we'll find out ... Hope I'm alive to see it.
A beer for the hard working boffins.
I have a feeling Mars never had the 'whatever it takes' to get life started I think you'd need something like the Moon to make massive slushies over volcanic vents just to get the mixing of the required ingredients over the massive possibilities required to get the 120 odd genes together in away that can actually start reproducing then bobs your twenty legged brine shrimp after a billion years or so. I hope I'm wrong but Luca investigations dont seem to make it look like everything started in one place. You really need some hubble bubble and and a big pot to stir it in.
"I have a feeling Mars never had the 'whatever it takes' to get life started"
Indeed. Everyone seems to concentrate on the fact that Mars is half the diameter of the Earth but perhaps the better figure to look at is the planet's mass. Mars' mass is only one ninth of the Earth so the core in Mars' interior cools down much more quickly and so the protective planetary magnetosphere and large scale volcanic replenishment of the atmosphere go after a few hundred million years which is probably not enough time for life to evolve. Today, Mars' atmosphere gives every sign of being in chemical equilibrium so indicating that there's no life present on the planet.
For a planet to be habitable, you would probably need a planet that was at least one third the mass of the Earth for life to get started.
Mars may have had ice asteroids raining down on it faster than the water could escape just long enough for life to have been bootstrapped. Once life takes a hold, it seems it's incredibly hard to get rid of it.
Who knows. At this point, it's more about the journey than the destination.
Go smaller still: halophiles. It just depends whether prokaryotic forms could emerge and whether they could adapt as Mars dried out. We just don't know enough about how life emerged on Earth to be certain. (And I will be so pissed off if they share a genetic link with us and the panspermia whackos are proved right.)
Finding out panspermia is right will be like finding out every major human civilization is descended from Atlantis; a bunch of quasi-mystics and cowardly scientists who ran away from life's rich complexity get to say, "I told you so."
(I could maybe settle with us having a native biota that is merciless obliterated in the Great Oxidation Event by cyanobacteria that have hitched a ride from Mars. I'm not sure they get bragging rights for that. Better, yet, if our native prokaryotes survived - perhaps they are the archaea - that would be almost cool, even if it magnifies some of the flaws I'm about to list.)
But fundamentally, panspermia is a useless idea. It makes it even harder to uncover how life got going. It means we don't get to look at a different path evolution has taken. And it adds another---very small---coefficient to the Drake equation - so you better hope Putin doesn't press the button because, if life has to evolve on one planet and be transplanted to another, we probably are alone.
However if life evolved separately on Mars, the universe will be teaming with life. And we will get to see other solutions; even if they turn out to be a boringly similar RNA/DNA, we will have learnt something about what is possible and what life might look like elsewhere.
Note I said "salts", implying other than pure table salt.
As I said, I've seen life living in some pretty toxic[0] shit seeping out of old mining operations. Life living in perchlorate infused water on Mars wouldn't surprise me ... beyond the "holy shit, life DOES exist on Mars!" amazement, of course.
Hi, amfM. How's it hanging? Care for a beer?
[0] Toxic to most other Earth life ... but not so much to the organisms living in it.
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Worse, fresh water allows rot ... and later, dry rot under the right conditions. Keep that bilge slightly damp with sea water if you want to stay afloat. And make sure that topside is sealed against rain ...
Part of the reason they never invented a "perfect" packing gland, innit.
Mars is tectonically dead. It has no magnetic field, which means its core is not moving any more.
Granted, the sheer volume of material is going to take an undetermined amount of time to cool off, but if the core was that hot, the ice would have melted.
There may well be a point below the surface where the core can agreeably heat an underground dwelling, but I fail to see how that can impact subsurface ice.
Of course, I'm not a geologist, much less an exo-geologist, so maybe I'm just ranting for nothing.
Indeed. The latest studies of Ceres posit that its radioactive elements not only provide local heat but also can heat portions of the core enough that the blob rises to the mantle where they replace cooler blobs which descend creating tectonic activity. From yesterday:
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-the-source-of-the-planet-ceres-unexpected-geological-activity/
So many boffins, so many discoveries, so little time to keep up.
It will still be generating heat in the whole of the solid stuff. The heat will diffuse to the surface but its cold. They even stuck a drill on a probe with the intention of digging down a couple of meters in to gauge just how much heat there was coming up but they couldnt get it in more than a few inches. Cold does that to you!
It wasn't cold that stopped the bit. It was a wrong guess as to the physical properties of the material being drilled. It was acting like bearings instead of shavings. Fine aggregate concretions will do that occasionally, even here on Earth. Ask any hard-rock miner.
There are tremors and a liquid core. And I'm not sure the generation of magnetic fields is well enough understood to say the how stationary the core is. But I'm sure convection would be possible without the rotation necessary for a dynamo and a global magnetic field.
And anyway, I guess they're talking about a small amount of heat warming the bottom of the ice enough to melt it but not the burn through. The article points out such phenomena are not unknown on earth. And there are things which might be geysers (but probably aren't) or mars.