So what happened to the water ?

 

How did photos @6:35 come about? What took those snaps?

 

How about 9:15?

 

How did photos @6:35 come about? What took those snaps?

My guess is that picture was taken by the delivery craft shortly after the rover was deployed. Notice that the tracks seem consistent with it being set down and then moving from there.

 

How about 9:15?

That one's easy. The rover took it. The cameras are mounted on a mast and you can see the mast in the pictured at around 6:35 and that this is consistent with the point of view of the photos at 9:15.

 

My guess is that picture was taken by the delivery craft shortly after the rover was deployed. Notice that the tracks seem consistent with it being set down and then moving from there.

Turns out this was done very differently. It was done by taking many pictures with a camera at the end of the robotic arm and then stitching them together. Since the arm was moving to do this, it was in different positions in different pictures, so it was digitally removed from the composite image. These "selfie" images allowed NASA to monitor the effects of prolonged exposure to the Martian atmosphere on the rover over time.

 

So what happened to the water ?

The cephalopods brought it all here with them when they moved.

 

For those of us who remember watching the first blurry, low-res images of Mars coming from the Mariner IV spacecraft, these photos are essentially magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_4#/media/File:Mariner_4_craters.gif

 

For those of us who remember watching the first blurry, low-res images of Mars coming from the Mariner IV spacecraft, these photos are essentially magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_4#/media/File:Mariner_4_craters.gif

I remember the Mariner images. Those were pretty magical, too.

 

So what happened to the water ?

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2016/where-did-mars-water-go/

I had to check to make sure that BU wasn't a reference to BYU...

 

Correct, Wbahn;
I tell my children and grandchildren that I was very fortunate to be born in the mid-1950s, such that I was a young kid when the space race was at its earnest, and not a single month passed without a milestone.

I credit the space race with my decision to become an engineer.

 

I tell my children and grandchildren that I was very fortunate to be born in the mid-1950s, such that I was a young kid when the space race was at its earnest, and not a single month passed without a milestone.

I was in junior high in the run up to landing on the moon. I had dozens and dozens of posters from NASA for the Saturn V, command module, lunar excursion module, ...

Back then I actually thought Moffett Field was a city when it was actually "just" an airfield in Mountain View. They still received my mailed requests for material.

When I interviewed at ESL, I saw a U2 take off from Moffett. It was quite impressive to watch it climb.

 

I remember the Mariner images. Those were pretty magical, too.

Something didn't seem right about the pictures from Mars being from Mariner. I kept thinking it was Viking. So I did a bit of reading and I'm pretty sure that the Mariner probes that went to Mars only orbited the planet (which I'm pretty sue is what was being referred to regarding Mariner IV). The first pictures sent back from the surface of Mars was, indeed, from the Viking lander in 1975. I recall with wonder the many pictures sent back from the various orbiters and flybys, but there was something special about those first images from Viking -- pictures being sent from the surface of another planet. If we could do that, what couldn't the human race accomplish? And then, of course, with the space race having been "won" we basically all but gave up on it.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=mars+early+atmosphere+paleo+meteorology . . . UPS!
...
https://www.google.com/search?q=mars+early+atmosphere+paleoclimate

 

 

Will signs of life be found ?

 

Did Mars have water long ago ?

Yes. We've known about this for quite some time.

So what happened to the water ?

Mars has no magnetosphere. Without a magnetosphere it can't stop the solar wind from "blowing away" the atmosphere. With little to no atmosphere Mars couldn't hold on to liquid water.

 

Hi,

Fake, fake, fake! These pictures are all complete fakes. It was all done in a studio

Ok now more seriously (?), i wonder who the Neil Armstrong of Mars will be, and what is he/she going to say? Here are some possibilities...

"One small step for a man, one giant blunder for mankind."
"One small step for a person, one giant expenditure for mankind."
"One small step for a person, one free meal for the Martians."

Yeah the way i read it was that Mars once had a denser atmosphere but it had been reduced over time for various reasons. One being lower or no magnetic field, another being low escape velocity i guess due to the lower mass of the planet. It still has an atmosphere and there are chemicals in it that can be used by man such as to make fuel, but it is much less dense now than it was.
The water though is now believed to have been absorbed by the crust. I guess some could have evaporated too as there is some water vapor in the atmosphere.

 

Yeah the way i read it was that Mars once had a denser atmosphere but it had been reduced over time for various reasons.

That was handled in the John Carter movie and the original Edgar Rice Burroughs book.

 

WBahn;
Very True; the first images from the *surface of Mars* were indeed taken by Viking. I should have clarified that I was referring to the first probe to actually approach Mars, which was the Mariner IV.

Even as low-res that the Mariner IV images appear, the original un-processed images were even worse. It was a showcase of what could be done with digital signal processing, at the time still in its infancy.

All in all, a wonderful time for science. And for curious kids to be growing up.