Don't paint all your critics with the same brush. One person brought up pressure.

Yes, some points on the Martian surface have atmospheric pressure above the triple point, which makes liquid water possible if certain thermal conditions also are met. You're an "atmospheric guy," so finish the problem.

Please state your claim clearly. Initially you said that "some people" would wonder why NASA would pass up standing water. Then when that was challenged as a naive expectation, you asked if you were "the only one who saw ponding" in the photograph. You then implied that we were accusing you of having a "mental illusion" by questioning your interpretation. You must be clear, because these rhetorical tricks are a common feature of conspiracist arguments. It is possible to hypothesize that you misinterpreted the photograph without also necessarily suggesting that you are mentally ill or deluded for having done it.

Do you have any evidence besides your interpretation of this photograph that what it depicts is liquid water?

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

My water images were speculation. The argument I am hearing is it can not be water, I believe pressure was the prime concern. I challenged that assumption. There is no way to prove an image contains water, but we do know the conditions that it can exist. I said it looked like water.

There seems to be some confusion as this thread seems to have got tangled up with the other. I apologize if you thought that was my claim. This thread was started to express my opinion on how conspiracy theories start.

As far as my background I will not give out particulars on my personal identity, this being an open internet forum. I will say I have worked as a weather forecaster and studied meteorology all my life.

Dfrank

This was discussed in your previous thread. Did you forget it? There are both pressure and temperature issues. At that pressure, there is a very narrow temperature range where liquid water can exist: Too high and there is vapor, too low and there is ice. During summer the maximum recorded atmospheric temperature during the day was too high, and it dropped well below freezing every night. There would only be a brief period with a "just right" temperature. That would not be conducive to bodies of liquid surface water existing for extended periods.

Ultimately, as previously noted, there could be rare eruptions of liquid underground water. Given the conditions, it is expected that most underground water would be extremely well frozen permafrost. All of this means that, if you're going to suggest an image shows flowing surface water, you are going to need very good evidence to support it. You haven't provided it.

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

The flaw in your argument is the assumption that NASA scientists would come to the same conclusion as you. If they didn't see it as an indication of liquid surface water, or interesting in some other way, they would have no reason to investigate it.

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Van Rijn

“There are both pressure and temperature issues. At that pressure, there is a very narrow temperature range where liquid water can exist:”

As discussed earlier,

There is a big difference between air temperature and water temperature. For example, if a cup of pure water was placed in a room with the ambient air temperature of 100c the water in the cup would not boil till the temperature of the water in the cup was 100c at Earth slp.

I would think any water on a ground that was -65c on nightly bases would lengthen the window of the liquid state. There is no water temperature data and any correlation to ambient temp would be an uneducated guess.

Dfrank

Freezing ground temperature is going to lengthen the time for water to remain liquid?

Anyway, you've already said that this is speculation, so do you withdraw your claim of suspicious NASA behavior?

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

No sir,

I am just trying to explain at 6.1 mb the temperature of the water would need to be near 10c. To say an ambient air temperature of 20 or 30c would mean the water would boil is not correct. It would depend on the water temperature.

We do not know the underground dynamics that would produce these liquid eruptions I suspect it is some type of brine containing salts and possibly other antifreeze agents.

I think they should have taken a look. Just yawn and driving away could provide some people with the idea that they might be hiding something.

The birth of a conspiracy.

Dfrank

But the idea without evidence is meaningless. Do you have evidence that they are hiding something? These guys have been studying Mars for years, some even for decades now. Do you know what information they have accompanying that picture? What local time was it? What was the pressure at that site at that time? What was the temperature doing at that time? in short, can you show us that the experts whose job it is to actually study the stuff coming back from the rovers had any reason to believe there might have been liquid water there, beyond what your eyes tell you?

Handwaving about the general case does not a coherent theory make. Bring some specifics to your argument.

No, as Jay already said, the birth of a conspiracy theory. If there is a real conspiracy it was born a long time ago.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

. . . with freezing ground temperature and air temperature usually at freezing or (sometimes) boiling temperature, with only a brief window during some summer days of a "just right" temperature. As I pointed out in a prior post here, and in other posts in other threads, that would not be conducive to bodies of liquid surface water existing for extended periods. Do you disagree?

But you've already said that this is speculation! NASA has a team of scientists to set priorities of what should be investigated. Why is it a conspiracy if they don't choose to investigate something you say yourself is simply speculation?

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

That is your characterzation of what happened...that JPL/NASA was ignoring something that they should have seen as important. Will you be providing evidence to back up your characterization?...or will the handwaving continue?

I think there are a lot of conspiracy theories about NASA. The faked moon landing, hiding the colors of Mars just to name a couple.

The purpose of this thread was to show how NASA will never run dry of new conspiracies. The, what looks like water, was just an example of how they get started.

An unproven conspiracy is just a conspiracy theory. I hear you say they have all this data why it could not be water. I think we have gone through pressure and temp. Do you have privy to all this other data that you speak of?

Dfrank

NASA is not responsible for conspiracies. It is the scientifically uninformed who create them out of whole cloth.

You do understand that right??

True, and there are common themes running through the moon hoax and Mars color CTs, including limited understanding of technical issues and suspicion of authority.

Yes, folks that have frequented the BAUT CT forum are quite familiar with conspiracy theories based on "Look at the picture" arguments.

More accurately, what you're hearing is that your personal speculation about Mars images doesn't demonstrate suspicious NASA action. You have shown no evidence that they would come to the same conclusions about the images as you, so there is no reason to expect them to follow the actions you would prefer.

Related to the water issue, we have discussed why liquid water would likely be quite rare on the Martian surface, and would require some pretty specific conditions to occur.

This is your claim. Have you gone through other information?

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

RAF,

Most Conspiracy theories are a little out there. I think most do it to sell a book and make money on the scientific uninformed.

In my opinion NASA gives them a lot of material that’s all, and they show no signs of stopping.

Dfrank

Van,

As far as I know temperature and pressure is it. I did not know of anything else that would regulate temporary surface water on Mars, I thought you knew something I did not

Dfrank

Is NASA conspiring or not? Be clear. Thanks.

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I don’t think anyone can prove they are. The act like it and will give us plenty of conspiracy theories, as I stated in post 1.

Dfrank

So, you're not convinced they are, and you're certainly not claiming they are. Good.

Now what?

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My water images were speculation.

But apparently NASA is somehow remiss for not addressing that speculation, no matter how farfetched it may be. Explain how that works. Yes, people may form conspiracy theories around it based on their inexperience or prejudice, but why is that anything but those people's problem?

The problem is not that you speculated, but that you seem to want that speculation to be taken for something more than what it is.

The argument I am hearing is it can not be water...

No, one such argument was made. Most everyone else seems to be wondering why some regular guy's knee jerk reaction should have any legitimate bearing on the operation of a space mission being conducted by well-trained operators and qualified scientists.

...we do know the conditions that it can exist.

The conditions also allow for the presence of ice cream. So if I speculate that it's a puddle of Cherry Garcia and provide no other evidence, is NASA acting strangely for not stopping the rover to see?

There are other reasons for rejecting the puddle-of-water interpretation.

This thread was started to express my opinion on how conspiracy theories start.

Agreed. But you implied that the reasons for which they arise ought to be addressed by NASA. If uninformed people get the wrong idea from their intuition and decide to base an accusation upon it, why is that anything more than an unfounded, speculative accusation? Why does that create an obligation for someone else.

Just because you were fooled into thinking that might be water doesn't mean the operators of the spacecraft don't have a better means of making that determination and have more experience observing these special photographs, and thus made the right decision to move on.

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Clavius Moon Base

This whole thread was prompted by Dfrank's interpretation of the image linked in the OP, correct?

I assume the feature he's referring to is the small teardrop-shaped area located top center, at the end of what appears to be a valley bottom. If that's correct, I have a couple questions.

Does anybody know what it looks like in real color, rather than this false-color image?

Is there any way to determine the scale of this feature? The rover cameras can make quite small objects look large. It seems to me that the feature could be as small as a fist or as big as a few meters across, but that's really a guess. Can we get a better estimate of its distance and size?

Has anyone determined an "official" explanation o