Quote:
Originally Posted by A.DIM
From Astrobio Mag:
New data shows that the area where NASA's Phoenix Mars mission landed may have been habitable for microbes in Mars' past – and could become habitable again in Mars' future. The results are discussed in the first major peer-reviewed reports on the mission's findings, published in this week's edition of the journal Science.
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Thanks for the link. I like this passage in the article:
Another surprise from Phoenix was finding ice clouds and precipitation more Earth-like than anticipated. The lander’s Canadian laser instrument for studying the atmosphere detected snow falling from clouds. In one of this week’s reports, Jim Whiteway of York University, Toronto, and 22 coauthors say that, further into winter than Phoenix operated, this precipitation would result in a seasonal buildup of water ice on and in the ground.
“Before Phoenix we did not know whether precipitation occurs on Mars,” Whiteway said. “We knew that the polar ice cap advances as far south as the Phoenix site in winter, but we did not know how the water vapor moved from the atmosphere to ice on the ground. Now we know that it does snow, and that this is part of the hydrological cycle on Mars.”
This is overwhelmingly important since it suggests H2O precipitation that reaches the ground may be actually occurring on other locations on Mars. Key places to look would be locations known to have recurring dense cloud cover such as Noctis Labyrinthus.
One method this could be tested would be to do a comparison between the cloud opacity at Noctis to the clouds seen over Phoenix. Given the denseness of the clouds seen in that now famous image of Noctis taken by Mars Express, attached, it would seem the Noctis clouds would certainly have to be denser.
This would strongly imply these clouds over Noctis could also produce precipitation as the clouds over Phoenix could.
Knowing this fact would be overwhelmingly important for correctly understanding the hydrological cycle on Mars, since it would suggest such precipitation is actually widespread on Mars.
Bob Clark