More water found on Mars

This week, Mars made its closest approach to Earth since 2003.

I stood in my driveway, staring up at the bright but dusky orange light in the sky. It would have been even brighter in its orange-ness if not for a planet-wide dust storm currently engulfing Mars. I enjoyed the sight anyway. Space scientists, however, weren't just ogling and admiring the twinkling orange. Far greater findings were afoot.

A massive body of water has been found on Mars. Yes, liquid water. It's 12.5 miles wide and located beneath a mile of ice at planet's south pole. The water is likely quite salty, keeping it in liquid state despite frigid temperatures. This discovery came about via data collected by a radar sensor known as MARSIS on the ESA's Mars Express probe, currently in orbit around Mars. For three years, Mars Express sent 29 radar pulses to the southern ice cap. Imaging came back that resemble that of lakes beneath Greenland and Antarctica here on Earth. Technically, the presence of the water still needs to be independently confirmed by other Mars observers, but things are looking good.

This, it should go without saying, would be a big deal for exobiology. The conditions for this lake would likely be much like Antarctica (see above). It was once thought that nothing could live beneath the ice sheets as the conditions were simply too inhospitable. We now know that to be untrue and that Antarctica is, as one microbiologist says, essentially the largest wetland on our world. If there is microbial life here under those conditions, then it is not unreasonable to suspect that the same may hold true on Mars.

We should probably go there in person and find out for sure. While we're at it, perhaps we could dig around and resolve this whole "face" issue once and for all.

These are the sorts of ruminations flowing through my mind as I stared at Mars this week, and will continue to consider as I'm always looking for the planet in the night sky when I take the dogs outside for their last outing of the day. I think about the human fascination with Mars and wonder what sparks it. I know that in my case it begins with seeing pictures from Viking I when I was a very small boy. Science fiction stories took it from there. That's just it, though. Mars has repeatedly captured the imagination of writers for at least 150 years and I wonder just why that is. 

Standing in the driveway, a thought struck on the matter. There's a school of thought, however ill-considered and bereft of evidence, that holds that humans are actually Martians. We are the progeny of refugees who fled Mars nearly one million years ago as an "ecological 9/11" rendered the planet uninhabitable. Thus, our collective subconscious has always had a psychic connection to the Red Planet.

Now, here we are...staring down the barrel of grim environmental changes that may one day turn the Earth unlivable. Where would we go? Why, Mars is the only likely choice (even if the debate over the feasibility of terraforming still rages).

We in literary and composition studies call this "irony."


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