Mars has a new hot spot for exploration, according to a team of researchers who’ve identified a region that shows signs it was once flooded with water. The region may offer a prime spot to explore for signs of past life on the red planet.
“The site on Mars that we have examined is located on the floor of a small valley that was eroded by flowing water,” Mary Bourke, a Trinity College, Dublin researcher who co-led the team that made the discovery, told Digital Trends. Along with her colleague, Heather Viles, from the University of Oxford, Bourke published a paper detailing her findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters this week.
“For the topic of our paper, there is an additional geomorphological signature, and that is the layers of sediments on that valley floor that are visible between the aeolian (windblown) dunes that now occupy the valley,” Bourke said. “Those sediments are arranged in such a way that they suggest they are traces of dunes that have migrated down the valley. There are only a limited number of ways in which those sediments could be present, and they all involve the presence of water.”
To make these observations, the researchers used high -esolution satellite data, which allowed them to identify small-scale landforms that resembled features seen in satellite images of Namibia here on Earth. “We were able to visit the site in Namibia to help us test our theory about the Martian features,” Bourke said.
“We are interested in this in terms of the aeolian geomorphology,” Bourke said, “but perhaps also as a potential new site for those planning Mars missions, where habitable conditions were met on Mars.”
Moving forward, Bourke and Viles will continue to research how water helped construct Martian landforms while studying analogous sites in Namibia, Antarctica, and Australia.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.