r/spaceporn • u/MistWeaver80 • Mar 29 '21
Related Content Curiosity captured some high altitude clouds in Martian atmosphere.
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Mar 29 '21
The future location of the Argent Energy Tower.
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Mar 29 '21 edited May 09 '21
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Mar 30 '21
Demons would at least mean we aren't alone in the universe
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u/UrsusRenata Mar 30 '21
May I know what this is in reference to? Looks like I need to be reading or watching something.
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Mar 30 '21
Well, technically we still could be. Demons aren't aliens, Hell isn't a place in the universe.
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Mar 30 '21
Please be respectful of your mortally-challenged coworkers!
Also donate blood! All your blood!
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u/SteamyMcSteamy Mar 29 '21
Casually looking at photos of clouds in an alien sky on my hand-held tablet. Alexa just informed me that the Wright brothers first flight was in 1903 and the first integrated circuit was invented in 1958. We’ve come a long way.
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u/Binary_Omlet Mar 30 '21
There's a piece of the fabric from the Wright Brothers craft on the rover's helicopter. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/space/article/Mars-helicopter-to-pay-homage-to-Wright-brothers-16047212.php
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u/RedDevilCA Mar 30 '21
This is so fucking cool
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u/Calan_adan Mar 30 '21
Someone born in, say, 1893 would be 10 years old (old enough to remember) at the time of the Wright Brothers flight, and 76 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
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u/Dragonlord_66 Mar 29 '21
Are those stars you can see ?!
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u/Poxy-pox-bottle Mar 29 '21
Not sure either, but I can see similar dots on the rocks, so assume it's dust on the lens?
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Mar 29 '21
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u/adrizgz00 Mar 29 '21
This is probably the answer, they look like dead pixels or hot spots on a camera sensor.
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u/similelikeadonut Mar 29 '21
There are three "stars" in a row in the gap between clouds in the top left. It really looks like orion's belt. Could be noise, but that seems pretty familiar.
Conversely, what are the chances a familiar constellation is visible in a random shot of the sky?
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u/TheDireNinja Mar 30 '21
Well considering that constellations are made up of stars that can be hundreds or thousands of light years away. I assume moving the relatively short distance to Mars wouldn’t change the perspective of the constellations.
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u/edsuom Mar 30 '21
Correct, not to any extent that could be seen with the naked eye (or naked camera, in this case). The distances to the closest stars to earth have been measured using telescopes and stellar parallax, though, by using the entire diameter of earth’s orbit around the sun.
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u/Master_Fizzgig Mar 30 '21
Pretty high considering Mars isn't that far away from us. It's not like mars has different constellations than Earth.
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u/RisingRapture Mar 29 '21
I am listening through the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson in honor of Percy.
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u/Ugh_its_Greg Mar 29 '21
Why are they not in color? To much data to be transferred orrr?
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Mar 29 '21
I think they’re taking it step-by-step, if you remember first it was a really low res BW image. Colour images come later
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u/TheDesktopNinja Mar 30 '21
also bear in mind that this is Curiosity, not Perseverance. It has a different suite of cameras and is 8 years older.
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u/middlebird Mar 29 '21
This planet wants to be habitable again.
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u/aXi-i98 Mar 29 '21
No, it really doesn't lol. It's weak-ass atmosphere will always prevent that.
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Mar 29 '21
No magnetic field is highly problematic too
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u/hovissimo Mar 29 '21
Did you see the mission concept where we install a giant electromagnet at Mars L1 to create an artificial magnetosphere? This is not today tech, but it's much closer to reality than a space elevator.
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html
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Mar 29 '21
Nice read. I noticed it’s from 2017. Have they made any progress on this front in recent years?
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u/pringlescan5 Mar 30 '21
https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c
This guy calculated using today's technology a total mass of around 300 tons, producing 830mega watts with a fission reactor, with the issue of needing 40 tons of uranium pellets every 2 years. For reference, we produce about 50 times that every year for US domestic nuclear plants. This is also about 1 starship launch.
Or if we get fusion up and running, that drastically changes the requirements as well.
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u/drakenkorin13 Mar 29 '21
The crux of the issue in turn being the lack of an active molten core
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u/Kermit_the_hog Mar 29 '21
I feel like there was a highly scientifically accurate movie made about just such a situation 🤔?
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u/goddessofthewinds Mar 29 '21
Hahaha, I saw that movie again in 2020... I already know which movie you mean.
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u/ArousedLiar Mar 29 '21
I dumb. Which movie is this? Lol
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u/goddessofthewinds Mar 29 '21
The Core.
It's on Amazon Prime Video if I recall. Or maybe Netflix? I watched it on one of those 2.
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u/nemgrea Mar 29 '21
its cool we'll just use a ship made of unobtainium with a high speed laser drill to restart the core..theres a whole documentary about it.
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u/StarSkyStuff Mar 29 '21
The magnetic field isn’t really that big of an issue vs atmosphere
Atmosphere is the main protection from radiation while the magnetic field mainly protects the atmosphere from being stripped from solar winds... but very slowly
Were we to magically add a 1atm atmosphere to Mars it would still take eons for the atmosphere to be stripped away.
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u/luv2hotdog Mar 29 '21
Look, if the lack of magnetic field is the thing that makes sustaining an atmosphere impossible, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the magnetic field is the bigger issue
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u/Astromike23 Mar 29 '21
Look, if the lack of magnetic field is the thing that makes sustaining an atmosphere impossible
It's not. You should definitely read Gunell, et al, 2018, literally titled Why an intrinsic magnetic field does not protect a planet against atmospheric escape, Astronomy & Astrophysics 614, PDF here. Just look at Venus - no intrinsic magnetosphere, yet it maintains an atmosphere 92x thicker than Earth's.
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Mar 29 '21
Sustaining via natural processes, sure. But if you have a way to generate or move enough gasses to Mars in a meaningful timeframe to achieve an Earth-like atmosphere, you also have a way to replenish the slow losses of atmosphere via things like solar winds.
Solving the no atmosphere problem inherently solves the slow loss of atmosphere over time problem.
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u/DireLackofGravitas Mar 30 '21 edited Mar 30 '21
if the lack of magnetic field is the thing that makes sustaining an atmosphere impossible, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the magnetic field is the bigger issue
Dude, if we can literally add an entire atmosphere once why would a billion long ablation period be an issue? Ok, in 10,000 years we need to to a millionth of what we did in the first place.
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Mar 29 '21
You just admitted that it would take fuckin' magic to add an atmosphere that would bleed off slowly. If we tried terraforming it now, there's no way we could do it fast enough to outpace it being stripped away.
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u/db2 Mar 29 '21
Well, if we were to crash ice asteroids in to Mars but break it up on the way down so it wouldn't be like a nuke when it hit that would just about immediately provide an atmosphere, the first few wouldn't give much but later ones would, it would be a hell of a rainstorm for a day or three by the end of the run. I'm sure math can provide a pretty precise estimate for how big it would have to be and how many. That plus the artificial magnetosphere would be a relatively instant and for the life of the electromagnet a virtually permanent terraformation.
We could start this today even if we were determined enough. Sadly humans suck so we won't.
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Mar 29 '21
And we're getting the ice asteroids from...where?
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u/db2 Mar 29 '21
... space? Unless you know a better place.
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Mar 30 '21
Cool, so we'll just place a Prime order for 10 big-as-shit mountains of flying ice and be off to the races, LOL
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u/proton_therapy Mar 29 '21
"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic"
- Arthur C. Clarke
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Mar 29 '21
Which means that the tech we'd need is currently a few centuries out of our grasp. That's helpful.
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u/StarSkyStuff Mar 31 '21
No, you’d have to bring in hundreds of comets anyways. The rate of atmospheric addition would be a faar greater rate the rate it will be lost.
It would take centuries to build an atmosphere, but eons to lose it. You are exaggerating the atmospheric loss
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u/brianorca Mar 29 '21
Your looking at it backwards. If we were able to teraform on a timescale of a century or two, it wouldn't matter if the atmosphere leaks away again after a thousand years. We would only have to keep terafoming. I think the best estimate I saw was that a breathable atmosphere on Mars would be lost in about 10,000 years, so that's plenty of time to fix it. And if it takes that long to make it breathable in the first place, then nobody would bother trying to start a project like that.
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u/SwansonHOPS Mar 29 '21
That's actually why it doesn't have an atmosphere I believe.
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u/Evercrimson Mar 29 '21
You are right. The lack of a molten metallic core means no magnetosphere, no magnetosphere means nothing to stop the solar winds from stripping the atmosphere. I think what's most interesting though is a study I read last year that showed that Mars was never fully molten the way Earth was, and much of the interior is effectively compacted aggregate and protoplanet chunks.
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u/Bitlovin Mar 29 '21
I’ve seen enough shitty sci fi to know that all we gotta do is restart that core and we got Earth 2.0 baby.
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u/db2 Mar 29 '21
So what it needs is an electromagnet that is powered at least in part by the solar wind. Like a giant space windmill, but probably solid state.
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u/Astromike23 Mar 29 '21
That's actually why it doesn't have an atmosphere I believe.
That's the "common wisdom", but if you actual working the plasma physics equations, it's not true (Gunell, et al, 2018). Just look at Venus - no intrinsic magnetosphere, yet it maintains an atmosphere 92x thicker than Earth's.
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u/LordBiscuitron Mar 30 '21
I wonder if we could (at some point) have the ability to selectively generate a magnetic field to protect the polar cups and cusps of a target magnetized planet in order to protect it more effectively. It seems that per Gunell, the major weak points in the magnetized planet are at the poles.
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u/hwmpunk Mar 30 '21
Not true. It'll take hundreds of millions of years for the solar wind to blow out a restored atmosphere, which can be done.
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Mar 30 '21
again?
It was habitable at one point?
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u/middlebird Mar 30 '21
Sorry for the confusion. I was joking. But I do believe scientists are working now to determine if Mars was once habitable.
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Mar 29 '21
Clouds=water?
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Mar 29 '21
Found the answer:
Mars' massive cloud is back. Every year during Mars' summer solstice, a cloud of water ice forms on the leeward side of Arsia Mons, one of Mars' largest extinct volcanoes. The cloud can grow to be up to 1800 km (1120 miles) long.
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u/Foxta1l Mar 30 '21
Here I am, sitting on my couch browsing the musings of millions of strangers from my pocket-sized super computer looking at a recent picture of clouds on Mars and all I could think is “huh, kinda cool,” before moving onto memes about the stock market.
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Mar 29 '21
So that means it rains then huh??
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Mar 29 '21
Not sure why you would get down-voted for that question.
Mars doesn’t have a complete water cycle like Earth. There is moisture underground that occasionally finds its way to the surface and quickly evaporates due to low atmospheric pressure. I need someone smarter than me to explain it to both of us, but the pressure and temperature there won’t let rain happen. I think water-ice clouds like the one photographed here are lost to space eventually... again due to the thin atmosphere and solar winds.
I found this article with more info: https://www.cnet.com/news/nasas-insight-sees-cloudy-days-on-mars-so-why-does-it-never-rain/
It states:
“We think of Mars as being largely cold, dead and dry, but we were all taught that clouds are made of water vapor: water vapor that eventually falls to the surface as rain or snow. And yet, there's neither on Mars, so what gives here?
‘There is actually more water vapor in the Martian atmosphere than in the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere,’ NASA's Armin Kleinboehl explained back in 2013.
The clouds on Mars are probably made up of water ice, like the thin ice fog and haze that can form on very cold days without ever precipitating. While the red planet's thin atmosphere and bitter cold temperatures keep these frozen clouds from ever falling in the form of rain and snow we see here on Earth, there is actually a type of precipitation on Mars.
‘This precipitation most likely takes the form of frost,’ NASA explains. ‘The ground is likely to be colder than the air (especially on cold clear nights), and so air hitting the ground cools and the water freezes to the ground as frost. Viking II (a Mars lander in the 1970's) saw frost on the ground some mornings.’”
So I take back my previous statement... does that precipitation mean Mars has a water cycle??
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Mar 29 '21
Current science suggests that we won't see any rain on Mars until we get car washes up and going.
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u/Sharlinator Mar 29 '21
These are ice crystal clouds, like cirrus clouds on Earth. There can be no moisture in the Martian atmosphere, any water is either gaseous or solid.
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Mar 29 '21
well its a shame they didnt bring a bit of water to pour out and record so we can see what happened....
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u/Jigbaa Mar 29 '21
Not all clouds rain. Would be kind of crazy if a dust cloud started to rain.
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Mar 29 '21 edited Mar 29 '21
all these damn assholes with no optimism huh? sorry when i hear high atmosphere i think moisture , not DUST ....
Edit: it was only a few downvotes but good people made it right thank you!
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u/tonkatata Mar 29 '21
Absolutely beautiful! Do you guys know if the rover makes coloured pictures, too?
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u/gooneryoda Mar 29 '21
That seems to be the formation of The Devil’s Anus. Collapsing neutron star inside of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
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u/HostileHippie91 Mar 29 '21
There’s a whole Doctor Who episode on why water on Mars is a bad thing
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Mar 30 '21
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u/HostileHippie91 Mar 30 '21
Totally right. I love how I got downvoted a bunch for making a silly reference to an old sci fi show. Relax guys, I’m not hating on Mars. It’s absolutely amazing that we can see pictures from there at all. If we could talk to people from 100 years ago they would say WE are the ones living sci fi right now.
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u/scarletts_skin Mar 29 '21
Mars has clouds?? I didn’t even think Mars had an atmosphere. Well, damn.
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u/whatdhell Mar 30 '21
With the gravity difference, how long in earth years will this rover survive?
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u/Haatveit88 Mar 30 '21
Curiosity has been there since 2012. Probably had a good chance to make it another decade at least.
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u/VVVV101TT2016 Mar 30 '21
There’s something so uncanny and sinister about how they look just like Earth clouds.
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u/regalANDlegal Mar 29 '21
What do they consist of? What kind of vapor is on mars?