Giant Pyroclasts, Hyperion Objects, and the Theoretical Evaporation of Mars' Oceans

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Hello everyone! Not sure why I am on such a astronomy thing this week -- call it being "starry-eyed", I suppose. :flame: But this stuff is very interesting when you look at it closely.


Giant Pyroclasts, Hyperion Objects, and the Theoretical Evaporation of Mars' Oceans

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Hyperion_true.jpg/540px-Hyperion_true.jpg


Where the heck did this thing come from?

I was reading about Saturn a bit yesterday, and still had a page open that discusses Saturn's moons Titan and Hyperion (sharing an orbital resonance with one another, apparently, lol) today; the page about Hyperion itself struck me as rather odd.

It says, roughly, that Hyperion is the first non-round moon to have been discovered by known astronomers. It is full of holes, like ejecta from a volcanic eruption. In fact, to me it looks exactly like a monstrous pyroclast-type object!

Now, this raises some questions regarding moons of Saturn that have caused death rather than encouraged the formation of life...

We were talking a bit about Mars today, also, in one of my other threads here. The fact that most of its water is strangely locked away in polar ice, or possibly trapped in wells far beneath the ground, as described in the Bible on ancient antediluvian Earth, was mentioned in that thread.

I was wondering, in the context of objects like Hyperion, if Mars was not hit by a similar object sometime in its past, which caused the evaporation and loss of much of Mars' atmosphere and surface moisture. I wonder if such an impact might have weakened the ability of Mars to hold onto its atmosphere -- of course, the magnetism is different when you are dealing with a geologically active planet, but in general, striking a magnet makes it weaker!

That's a pretty horrible thought.

And even stranger, and perhaps more incomprehensible, is the idea that Hyperion objects do not arrive alone, but travel in groups. Meaning during the time period that Mars might have been bombarded by such objects, Earth was also impacted, but by a smaller object (thankfully), which caused only a small loss of atmosphere and resulted in much evaporation of the ancient oceans (like the Sahara, perhaps) -- however most of this water might have been reclaimed by our gravity and trapped in polar ice, only to thaw later and evaporate, or precipitate naturally from the atmosphere into what is now the modern ocean and lakes of the world.

The million dollar question in this scenario would be, where did the Hyperion objects originate? Is there a volcanic source large enough, powerful enough to create a moon-sized irregularly-shaped pyroclast, and not only produce this mass but also launch it into space?


http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles7/684968/projects/2957123/295e7416707ce7741506cddcd2564c2c.png

Jules Verne, I've mentioned his theories before -- hypothetical Verneshots too -- thought that planets such as Earth and perhaps Mars occasionally produced massive explosions beneath cratons, sending a very large amount of rock into low-earth orbit. These "verneshots" do not seem likely to be capable of escaping the gravity of their originating bodies without possessing a reasonably enormous amount of velocity.

Other writers posit that bodies such as Jupiter are capable of ejecting solid objects on trajectories that may threaten the inner planets. I referenced James P. Hogan's novel, "Cradle of Saturn", only today (and other times, lol), which demonstrates this theory in striking detail.

I found yet another book, via Google books that describes exactly what I mean:

Habitability and Cosmic Catastrophes
edited by Arnold Hanslmeier


"Let us compare the impact probabilities on Earth and Moon: the mass of the Moon is 1/81 of that of Earth, therefore, the impact energy on Earth is larger by that factor. Moeover, the cross section of the Earth is higher (13 times that of the Moon). We must assume that during the early phases, large impacts also occurred on the Earth and that these impacts led to ocean evaporation.

5.2.4.2 Evaporation of Early Oceans

It can be estimated that a collision with a body of 500km and mass larger than 1/10 that of Ceres could have vaporized a global ocean. Sleep and Zahnle [228] showed that impacting energies > 10(to the power of 28) J were large enough to vaporize the oceans. The atmosphere was left hot (2,000 degrees C) and dense (100atm). This caused the oceans the vaporize within a few months. The atmosphere was extremely heavy but could not escape into space. For about 100 years, the temperature on the Earth's surface remained about 1,500 degrees C. This had catastrophic consequences for possible lifeforms. The Earth also changed into an extremely hostile environment. The outmost parts of the atmosphere slowly cooled and due to atmospheric convection also the surface cooled. Within 2,000 years, the oceans attained their old depth again.

Rocks with traces of life or organic compounds could have re-seeded the Earth."

google books link to page quoted (http://books.google.com/books?id=PRqVqQKao9QC&pg=PA132&lpg=PA132&dq=meteor+impact+%22ocean+evaporation%22&source=bl&ots=6xPnj7Ca0Y&sig=pxNJTR4rJpqgxVrNxaTUB4a7ZZY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eBFrUvC5HqLJigKXg4CADA&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=meteor%20impact%20%22ocean%20evaporation%22&f=false)

____________________________________________

...It takes only 2,000 years for the oceans to return when a Hyperion object strikes a watered planet comparable to Earth.

This suggests to me that impacts may have happened many times in Earth's past. The fossil record tends to support the idea that ancient microbes were killed and repopulated many times, along with other creatures (fossils of aquatic creatures provide a fairly good look at this).

And most evolutionists say, "the ocean is our mother". It is indeed the womb in which the seed of life grows.

When a Hyperion object interacts with a planet bearing such an ocean, this spells a certain doom for life on that planet.

Yet as Michael Crichton said, "Life finds a way".

I might add more to this thread later, but wanted to speak about this topic before I forgot it all.


http://www.sfreviews.com/graphics/James%20P.%20Hogan_1999_Cradle%20Of%20Saturn.jpg

p.s. it's remotely possible that knocking a moon or two out of orbit so that they collide would cause a bad scene, kind of like the gravity assisted flybys that we were studying in the other two UFO threads this week...

i.e. crack the whip:


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Galilean_moon_Laplace_resonance_animation.gif

p.p.s. here is what NASA says about Hyperion:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini20110826.html


NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured new views of Saturn's oddly shaped moon Hyperion during its encounter with this cratered body on Thursday, Aug. 25. Raw images were acquired as the spacecraft flew past the moon at a distance of about 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers), making this the second closest encounter.

Hyperion is a small moon -- just 168 miles (270 kilometers) across. It has an irregular shape and surface appearance, and it rotates chaotically as it tumbles along in orbit. This odd rotation prevented scientists from predicting exactly what terrain the spacecraft's cameras would image during this flyby.

Personally, I wonder if Hyperion could have been produced also by something akin to a supernova -- could a super-dense piece of a star rapidly expand while cooling off and moving away from the former gravity source? What would a "star fragment" look like? Couldn't certain gases coalesce and form stonelike conglomerates, or even a pure substance of some type?

The way that the stone appeared to grow outward in all directions rather than in a sheet or a perfect sphere suggests rapid, asymmetrical expansion under rapidly changing circumstances (i.e. gravity and temperature).

Maybe I am just a nut!

[Tesseract]

In the strata under the Mediterranean sea there are halite (sodium chloride) deposits. These are or were believed to have been formed during periods where the Mediterranean sea essentially dried up. I understand there is some debate about how that could have happened.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

In the strata under the Mediterranean sea there are halite (sodium chloride) deposits. These are or were believed to have been formed during periods where the Mediterranean sea essentially dried up. I understand there is some debate about how that could have happened.

Wow! I would imagine there is some religious debate, too, which is why NASA might not be able to tell everything to the public :(

Thank you for sharing that info -- I should read about it! :O

Halite:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Halite-249324.jpg

[william r sanford72]

realy neat thread.i have ample fossils espl..crinoids and such that are so perfectly preserved that the texture of there skin and blemishes can be seen with the naked eye.This alone seems to suggest sudden and massive enviromental changes ocurred..not to long ago.some of the sediment layers are massive here.also very near the surface.in the spring some of these sediment layers grow a bit soft.thats where some of the best of my collection of fossils have come from.

[778 neighbour of some guy]

Holy crap:eek:, that rock looks like it has been used for target practice, a lot of those impact holes seem to have been made from the same direction at the same angle, even the craters are the same size in clusters, almost looks like the infamous carpet bombing results, didn't NASA crash al sorts of stuff on the moon for "experimental" purposes, I cant stop wondering what was really down there.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Hyperion_true.jpg/540px-Hyperion_true.jpg[/CENTER]

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Weird timing: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=45330


NASA Prepares to Launch First Mission to Explore Martian Atmosphere
28 Oct 2013
(Source: NASA/GSFC)

A NASA spacecraft that will examine the upper atmosphere of Mars in unprecedented detail is undergoing final preparations for a scheduled 1:28 p.m. EST Monday, Nov. 18 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) will examine specific processes on Mars that led to the loss of much of its atmosphere. Data and analysis could tell planetary scientists the history of climate change on the Red Planet and provide further information on the history of planetary habitability.

"The MAVEN mission is a significant step toward unraveling the planetary puzzle about Mars' past and present environments," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The knowledge we gain will build on past and current missions examining Mars and will help inform future missions to send humans to Mars."

The 5,410-pound spacecraft will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket on a 10-month journey to Mars. After arriving at Mars in September 2014, MAVEN will settle into its elliptical science orbit.

Over the course of its one-Earth-year primary mission, MAVEN will observe all of Mars' latitudes. Altitudes will range from 93 miles to more than 3,800 miles. During the primary mission, MAVEN will execute five deep dip maneuvers, descending to an altitude of 78 miles. This marks the lower boundary of the planet's upper atmosphere.

"Launch is an important event, but it's only a step along the way to getting the science measurements," said Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP) in Boulder. "We're excited about the science we'll be doing, and are anxious now to get to Mars."

The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, provided by the University of California at Berkeley with support from CU/LASP and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars. The Remote Sensing Package, built by CU/LASP, will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, built by Goddard, will measure the composition of Mars' upper atmosphere.

"When we proposed and were selected to develop MAVEN back in 2008, we set our sights on Nov. 18, 2013, as our first launch opportunity," said Dave Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at Goddard. "Now we are poised to launch on that very day. That's quite an accomplishment by the team."

MAVEN's principal investigator is based at CU/LASP. The university provided science instruments and leads science operations, as well as education and public outreach, for the mission.

Goddard manages the project and provided two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory provided science instruments for the mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, Deep Space Network support, and Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

For more information about the MAVEN mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/maven an http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Nancy Neal Jones
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-0039
nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Remember those cartoons in the kids' magazines, where readers had to add a caption and people voted on which caption was funniest?

Someone should help me write a few for this one: lol

http://imageshack.us/a/img191/2551/ldtm.png

"Hold on, I need to take this call"

"I don't think we should keep meeting like this"

"I'm trying to see it from your point of view, but it's so small!"

"Nice tinfoil hat -- was yours government issue?"

"I could use some better insulation for my tinfoil hat; can NASA loan me some gold?"

"I heard you guys were having some trouble in my head?"

[Hervé]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Hyperion_true.jpg/540px-Hyperion_true.jpg

Pyroclast?

... nah...

... that's Saturn's Grandma's needle-pad stored in Saturn's attic...


:jester:


Target practice for rifles or guns, after a canon ball hit it, seems closer to what one can see.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Hehe!

It kind of looks like a football made of cheese, to me... very -- no -- SUPER weird thing.

You know how lava in Hawaii shrinks when it cools off? I think one of the attributes that makes Hyperion so strange is that it looks as if it kept expanding while it cooled...

I could be wrong! :( lawl

We need some 3D of Hyperion, :)

p.s. without gravity to cause it to collapse, i guess lava in space would look kind of like Hyperion does

[Hervé]

Could be... similar in looks but the scale needs to be kept in perspective:

Those craters would be enormous degassing bubbles... kilometer-wide... that's a bit too big for cooled-down volcanic bubbling :)

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

No wonder NASA is scratching its head @ Hyperion -- those are very large (anomalous?) holes....
you'd almost expect to see the worm from Star Wars come out of one of them, lol

edit:

http://starwarsdatabase.weebly.com/uploads/2/8/3/1/283131/6391379.jpg

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Cidersomerset reports that India has joined the race to mars and is launching this month @_@ holy crap!

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?65119-India-s-space-based-revolution-Sending-Mars-Orbitor...&p=753395#post753395


India's space ambition takes off

Q: So, when the spacecraft takes off from the east coast of India, what exactly will it do
and how long is it expected to take?

A: Any mission to Mars has to be done in an opportune window and the imminent
window is November 2013, that is we need to get out of this sphere of influence of
earth by 30 November to ensure that we have the minimum distance between Earth
and Mars.

Now we are launching this Mars orbiter from Sriharikota in the east coast of India in the
first week of November and then the PSLV-XL (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) is used
for the launch which will put this orbiter into an elliptical orbit around the Earth... then
around the last week of November, we have a crucial operation, it's called the "trans-
Martian injection" where the spacecraft is directed towards Mars.

Then it is a long voyage of 300 days where the orbiter spacecraft passes through the
sphere of influence of the Earth... Then it goes through a long phase of heliocentric
flight where the orbiter spacecraft will be influenced not only by the Sun but by the
other planets too. Then as it approaches Mars... we have another major action:
capturing the orbit of Mars, which is on 21st of September 2014.

Q: After that how long will it take to get the readings or get the data that you are
hoping to get from there? How long will it take after September 2014?

A: Soon after the orbiter is put into the orbit of Mars, we would start the
experimentation and even before this orbiter reaches the Martian environment we would
be calibrating these instruments as it travels from Earth to Mars. But the most
important part of it is looking at the distances involved. It takes at least 20 minutes for
any signal to come from the Mars orbiter to Earth in some phases. It could be anything
between four to 20 minutes one-way.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24772147

gasp

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Please check out the new thread on Keppler-22B, the Bolivian Sun-Gate, and the metric system.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?65213-The-Mysterious-Bolivian-Sun-Gate-Habitable-Planets-and-Keppler-22b-s-Solar...

Teehee!

p.s. Love @ India

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Here is a Seattle Times/Washington Post article on how NASA just announced pretty much that um, we are 7x more likely to experience impact events than they thought last year.

They have upped the number of large space rocks in our system from 3 million to 20 million, i.e. objects of a size that may cause injury or concern.

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2022206844_asteroidrisksxml.html

Originally published November 6, 2013 at 9:00 PM | Page modified November 7, 2013 at 6:36 AM


Earth may be more vulnerable to asteroids than thought
Scientists are suggesting that the Earth is vulnerable to many more Chelyabinsk-size space rocks than was previously thought.


The New York Times and The Washington Post

There are scads of building-size, potentially hazardous asteroids lurking in Earth’s immediate neighborhood, according to studies that examined the airburst of a 25 million-pound asteroid this year over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

When the asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk in February, shattering windows for miles and injuring more than 1,200 people, experts said it was a rare event — of a magnitude that might occur once every 100 to 200 years, on average.

But a team of scientists is suggesting that the Earth is vulnerable to many more Chelyabinsk-size space rocks than was previously thought. In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists estimate such strikes could occur as often as every decade or two.

The prospect “really makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” said Peter Brown, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario and an author of two studies in Nature. A third paper by other scientists describing the Chelyabinsk explosion was published online this week by the journal Science.

Meteors about the size of the one that burst over Chelyabinsk — and ones even larger and more dangerous — are probably four, five or even seven times more likely to hit the planet than scientists believed before the fireball, according to the three studies.

That means about 20 million space rocks the size of the Chelyabinsk one may be zipping around the solar system, instead of 3 million, NASA scientist Paul Chodas said at a news conference.

The findings are helping to elevate the topic of planetary defense — identifying dangerous asteroids and deflecting them if necessary — from Hollywood fantasy to real-world concern.

A U.N. committee has been studying the issue, and next month the General Assembly is expected to adopt two of its recommendations: establishing an International Asteroid Warning Network for countries to share information; and calling on the world’s space agencies to set up an advisory group to explore technologies for deflecting an asteroid.

Sky surveys have already detected about 95 percent of the big near-Earth asteroids, those that are at least 1 kilometer wide, or 0.6 miles, and none are in danger of hitting Earth anytime soon.

But those are not the only ones to worry about.

“One kilometer is more than just dangerous,” said Edward Lu, a former NASA space-shuttle astronaut who heads the B612 Foundation, a private effort to launch a space telescope that could find smaller asteroids. “One kilometer is end-of-human-civilization kind of dangerous.”

The Chelyabinsk asteroid was about 65 feet wide. Undetected by astronomers, the rock came out of the glare of the sun and hit the atmosphere at 43,000 mph.

As it descended through the atmosphere, it broke into fragments, creating a series of explosions with the combined energy of about 500,000 tons of TNT, making it more than 30 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, although the energy in this case was spread out over a much broader area.

The shock wave blew out windows in nearly half the buildings in Chelyabinsk. It knocked people off their feet; dozens were sunburned by the blinding flash, which at its peak was 30 times brighter than the sun.

Most of the people who were injured were hit by broken and flying glass; no one was killed.

One chunk the size of love seat landed in frozen Lake Chebarkul, leaving a circular hole, as if shot with a bullet from space. Thousands of smaller pieces have also been recovered.

The new information on Chelyabinsk does not suggest the sky is falling, but it shifts the risk profile of asteroids, making Chelyabinsk-size events look more probable.

Brown re-examined decades of data compiled by scientific and military sensors. The scientific orthodoxy said a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.

“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown.

The paper in Science hypothesized that the Chelyabinsk asteroid is a piece of “rubble” from a larger body that had been broken apart by tidal forces from an earlier near-Earth encounter. “The rest of that rubble could still be part of the near-Earth object population,” the authors wrote.

A proposed B612 telescope, to be called Sentinel, is designed to find asteroids about 450 feet wide, although it will also find many that are smaller. Lu, the former shuttle astronaut, said the mission would cost $450 million: $250 million to build the spacecraft and $200 million to operate it for a decade.

Many of the Chelyabinsk-size asteroids would elude detection by Sentinel. Still, the residents of Chelyabinsk would have benefited from a warning Feb. 15 to stay away from the window.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.

:flame:

[sheme]

Good find Tesla. The plot thickens.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Good find Tesla. The plot thickens.

Thank you!

Since this thread was made, we've heard about MAVEN launch, India's launch, and of course, this weird asteroid study came out --

NASA is in an interesting position, I'd say.

At some point I hope they take the Mark Twain option (telling hard truth is easier than keeping track of falsehoods!).

:)

meanwhile, in Psychicville -- j/k

p.s. my favorite satellite is crashing :(

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/09/tech/satellite-falling/index.html?hpt=hp_t4

Re-entry expected shortly for European satellite
By Matt Smith, CNN
November 10, 2013 -- Updated 2316 GMT (0716 HKT) |


http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/131107154829-goce-satellite-story-top.jpg

(CNN) -- A 2,000-pound European satellite was falling gradually into Earth's atmosphere Sunday night but was still beaming back data to controllers as it neared re-entry, controllers reported.

The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer -- a European Space Agency satellite known shorthand as GOCE -- was barely a dozen miles above the scientifically recognized edge of space as its orbit decayed, the ESA announced shortly before midnight Sunday (6 p.m. ET). GOCE is expected to nose into the atmosphere and break up sometime before 8 p.m. ET, the agency projected.

"At an altitude of less than 120 km (75 miles), the spacecraft is -- against expectations -- still functional," the ESA said. The craft's "most probable" path for re-entry takes it mainly over the Pacific and the Indian oceans, and controllers have all but ruled out any chance that the spacecraft would come down over Europe, it said.

GOCE's orbit can be tracked via an ESA website.

The 5-meter (16-foot) satellite was launched in 2009 to map variations in the Earth's gravity in 3-D, provide ocean circulation patterns and make other measurements. Powered by solar panels and not-your-average lithium-ion battery, it lasted more than three times its expected lifespan before running out of juice on October 21.

In March 2011, the ESA added another role -- as the "first seismometer in orbit" -- when GOCE detected sound waves from the massive earthquake that struck Japan.

_________________________________

(it's the one that showed gravity anomalies/strange conditions prior to 3/11/11)

!!!

[McMaster]

This might interest you. It will try to explain how these sort of features might be "made"

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/03/08/the-electrical-etching-of-mercury-2/

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

This might interest you. It will try to explain how these sort of features might be "made"

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/03/08/the-electrical-etching-of-mercury-2/

Thank you for posting this.
Those craters are really something -- what a creepy idea, that huge lightning bolts jump from place to place on Mercury...

wiki says similar things about its magnetic field:


During its second flyby of the planet on October 6, 2008, MESSENGER discovered that Mercury's magnetic field can be extremely "leaky". The spacecraft encountered magnetic "tornadoes" – twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting the planetary magnetic field to interplanetary space – that were up to 800 km wide or a third of the radius of the planet. These "tornadoes" form when magnetic fields carried by the solar wind connect to Mercury's magnetic field. As the solar wind blows past Mercury's field, these joined magnetic fields are carried with it and twist up into vortex-like structures. These twisted magnetic flux tubes, technically known as flux transfer events, form open windows in the planet's magnetic shield through which the solar wind may enter and directly impact Mercury's surface.[71]

:O

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=45511

NASA Video Illustrates MAVEN Mission's Investigation of a Lost Mars
13 Nov 2013
(Source: NASA/GSFC)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKPrwY0Ycno

NASA has prepared a new video to illustrate its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission's investigation of dramatic climate change on Mars. Today, Mars is a cold and barren desert world, with no sign of life, at least on the surface. However, billions of years ago when the Red Planet was young, it appears to have had a thick atmosphere that was warm enough to support oceans of liquid water - a critical ingredient for life.

Liquid water cannot exist pervasively on the Martian surface today due to the low atmospheric pressure and surface temperature, although there is evidence for spurts of liquid flow that perhaps consist of a briny solution with reduced freezing temperature, according to Joseph Grebowsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Water under current Martian atmospheric conditions can be ice or sublimate directly into vapor without staying in a liquid phase. Grebowsky is the project scientist for the mission.

The video shows how the surface of Mars might have appeared during this ancient clement period, beginning with a flyover of a Martian lake. The artist's concept is based on evidence that Mars was once very different.

Surface features and mineral compositions suggest ancient Mars had a denser atmosphere and liquid water on its surface, according to Grebowsky. "There are characteristic dendritic structured channels that, like on Earth, are consistent with surface erosion by water flows. The interiors of some impact craters have basins suggesting crater lakes, with many showing connecting channels consistent with water flows into and out of the crater. Small impact craters have been removed with time and larger craters show signs of erosion by water before 3.7 billion years ago. And sedimentary layering is seen on valley walls. Minerals are present on the surface that can only be produced in the presence of liquid water, e.g., hematite and clays," said Grebowsky.

Estimates of the amount of water needed to explain these features have been made that equated to possibly as much as a planet-wide layer one-half a kilometer (1,640 feet) deep or more, according to Grebowsky. If liquid surface water existed in the past, then Mars' atmosphere had to have had a different climate that was warmer and a pressure near or greater than the current terrestrial atmospheric pressure at the surface.

In the video, rapidly moving clouds are employed to suggest the passage of time, and the shift from a warm and wet to a cold and dry climate is shown as the video progresses. The lakes dry up and freeze over, while the atmosphere gradually transitions from Earthlike blue skies to the dusty pink and tan hues seen on Mars today.

It's unknown if the habitable climate lasted long enough for life to emerge on Mars. "The only direct evidence for life early in the history of a planet's evolution is that on Earth," said Grebowsky. "The earliest evidence for terrestrial life is the organic chemical structure of a rock found on the surface in Greenland. The surface was thought to be from an ancient sea floor sediment. The age of the rock was estimated to be 3.8 billion years, 700 million years from the Earth's creation. No fossil evidence of life has yet been found from this period. The oldest claimed micro-fossils (found in Western Australia) date to 3.5 billion years ago. The existence of a potential life-nurturing climate on Mars ended near these times. A comparison between the two planet's life histories must be done with caution, due to the different chemical compositions of the surfaces (e.g., Mars' chemistry may have been more suitable early on than Earth's) and different volcanic and meteoroid impact histories. Also, the histories of life on either planet may not have been continuous. Catastrophic events could have killed off all life at one time only to have it start anew."

The video ends with an illustration of NASA's MAVEN mission in orbit around present-day Mars. MAVEN will investigate how Mars lost its atmosphere. Scheduled to be launched in November, it will arrive at Mars in September 2014.

There are several theories of how Mars was stripped of its thick atmosphere. "Hydrodynamic outflow and ejection from massive asteroid impacts during the later heavy bombardment period (ending 4.1 billion to 3.8 billion years ago) were early processes removing part of the atmosphere, but these were not prominent loss processes afterwards," said Grebowsky. "The leading theory is that Mars lost its intrinsic magnetic field that was protecting the atmosphere from direct erosion by the impact of the solar wind."

The solar wind is a thin stream of electrically charged particles (plasma) blowing continuously from the sun into space at about a million miles per hour. "The interaction of the atmosphere with the solar wind leads to escape by sputtering of atoms and molecules out of the atmosphere, electromagnetic loss process of the planet's ionospheric particles, direct escape of hot plasma particles or by chemical processes that produce atoms with escape speeds," said Grebowsky.

"Studies of the remnant magnetic field distributions measured by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission set the disappearance of the planet's convection-produced global magnetic field at about 3.7 billion years ago, leaving the Red Planet vulnerable to the solar wind," said Grebowsky.

"MAVEN has been designed to measure the escape rates for all the applicable processes and will be able to single out the most prominent," said Grebowsky. It will also work with other missions to examine the past habitability of Mars. "Previous remote Mars observations from orbiting spacecraft have observed the geological features that have been used to estimate the amount of water that did exist and have analyzed the global distribution of water ice and surface chemistry to infer that water was lost through time. Mars Curiosity rover has the ability to analyze the chemical composition of the solid surface, which contains information of the atmospheric composition during the formation of the planet, in particular the isotope ratios, the lower atmosphere composition, and the current gas exchange with surface reservoirs. MAVEN is going to measure the current rates of loss to space and the controlling processes. Given the lower-atmosphere information and the nature of the escaping processes, one can extrapolate from current conditions into the climate of the past," said Grebowsky.

The video is one of the most complex animations ever produced by NASA's Conceptual Image Lab, located at Goddard. "We have a lot going on in this," said Michael Lentz of Universities Space Research Association, lead animator on the project. "We have time-lapse clouds happening, the atmosphere and terrain are changing, the water is evaporating away."

Adding to the complexity is the incredibly detailed terrain. Close to three billion polygons - the basic building blocks of computer-generated scenery -- were used, compared to hundreds of thousands for a typical animation, according to Lentz. "We also used a wide Cinemascope aspect ratio to better showcase the landscape. All this stuff wreaks havoc on the computer system in terms of trying to figure out how to render it."

"Rendering is the process by which a computer calculates how to paint a scene, and things like the presence of water increase the complexity of the computations tremendously. The computer has to calculate how the light is hitting the water, how it reflects off the water, how it distorts what's under the water and is refracted by the water. We also used global illumination, a technique to give really realistic outdoor lighting so you don't have intense, sharp black shadows. You have a lot of bounce coming off, so if you have sunlight hitting one side of a canyon, that light then is reflected to the other side, so you're not going to get a black shadow there, you will instead get some of the color off the wall from where the sunlight is reflecting," said Lentz.

To complete the animation, the team augmented their existing "render farm" - a computer network -- with retired supercomputers. "The NASA Center for Climate Simulation is upstairs from our lab, and they routinely upgrade their supercomputers. We got their old machines and now have this new capability to create ultra-high resolution (4K) animations for a fraction of the cost of new machines, all thanks to this complex MAVEN video project," said Lentz.

"It's been a fun process despite all the hard work with it," said Lentz. "It was really cool working with MAVEN Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky, talking to him about what MAVEN is going to do and envisioning what Mars may have looked like with flowing water on the surface and things like that. To hear him talk about that and see how excited he is to get MAVEN off the ground got me really excited to be working on the piece for him. Now after working on it for so long, I'm excited to get the video out there and have more people see it. So far, it's just been shown to a handful of people on the project."

MAVEN's principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. The university provides science instruments and leads science operations, education and public outreach. Goddard manages the project and provides two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory provides science instruments for the mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, Deep Space Network support, and Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

Bill Steigerwald
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
William.A.Steigerwald@nasa.gov

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

CNN running Mars atmosphere loss story: @_@ :madgrin:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/16/tech/mars-maven-mission/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Lost world -- what happened to Mars?
By Amanda Barnett, CNN
updated 2:24 PM EST, Sat November 16, 2013 |


http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/131116104834-01-mars-maven-horizontal-gallery.jpg

(CNN) -- You may have heard it before: billions of years ago Mars probably looked more like Earth does now, with clouds and oceans and a much thicker atmosphere. It may even have had some type of microbes. But now it's a barren, frozen desert.

So what happened? Where did the air and water go?

NASA is launching a new spacecraft to try to find out. It's called MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution. It's the first mission dedicated to studying the red planet's upper atmosphere.

"We expect to learn how the modern Mars works, really in detail. To see its climate state, to understand how the atmosphere is lost to space -- how Mars may have lost a magnetic field -- to take that information and map it back in time, " said NASA's James Garvin.

The earliest liftoff time for MAVEN is Monday, November 18, at 1:28 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket will launch the probe into space on a 20-month trip to Mars. It's scheduled to arrive September 22, 2014.

The solar-powered probe is about the length of school bus -- 37.5 feet (11.43 meters) long -- and will weigh about 5,410 pounds (2,454 kg) at launch.
What killed Mars? New spacecraft will find out

"MAVEN will fill in a very big gap in our understanding of the planet by exploring the upper atmosphere and its influence on the Martian environment," principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, from the University of Colorado, says on his NASA webpage.

He says he's "excited that we're providing one step along the path of answering questions about whether life ever existed on Mars."
Jakosky's team will use the spacecraft's three instrument suites to try to meet three key objectives:

• Determine the composition of upper Martian atmosphere
• Determine how fast Mars is losing what's left of its atmosphere
• Determine the history of the atmosphere
Photos: Mars rover Curiosity Photos: Mars rover Curiosity

MAVEN won't make a cool, daring landing like the Mars Curiosity Rover, which has been roaming Mars for more than a year now. Instead, it will orbit between a low of about 93 miles (150 kilometers) above the surface to a high of about 3,728 miles (6,000 kilometers). It also will make five dives, flying as low as 77 miles (125 kilometers) in altitude.
NASA says the mission will cost $671 million.

Interactive: Mars exploration from Viking to MAVEN

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Oct 25th Tesla_WTC_Solution proposed:


I was wondering, in the context of objects like Hyperion, if Mars was not hit by a similar object sometime in its past, which caused the evaporation and loss of much of Mars' atmosphere and surface moisture. I wonder if such an impact might have weakened the ability of Mars to hold onto its atmosphere -- of course, the magnetism is different when you are dealing with a geologically active planet, but in general, striking a magnet makes it weaker!

That's a pretty horrible thought.

Nov 15th, Science.Time writers admit:


Space

What Killed Mars? A New Spacecraft Will Find Out

When Mars lost its atmosphere it also lost its water—and any chance of being a planetary contender. Now we may find out how that happened

By Jeffrey Kluger Nov. 15, 2013

science.time.com/2013/11/15/what-killed-mars-a-new-spacecraft-will-find-out/#ixzz2kqdDhFqh

What Killed Mars? A New Spacecraft Will Find Out

When Mars lost its atmosphere it also lost its water—and any chance of being a planetary contender. Now we may find out how that happened

By Jeffrey Kluger Nov. 15, 2013


http://science.time.com/2013/11/15/what-killed-mars-a-new-spacecraft-will-find-out/

The simplest explanation for the sad state of Mars today is that it was just too small to hold onto its air. Not only is Mars smaller than Earth by size, but also by mass and density, which gives it a gravity just 38% of ours. That would have made it easy for the upper reaches of the atmosphere to have simply trickled away into space.

Far more damage would have been done by meteor strikes during what’s known as the late heavy bombardment period, from 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, which would have blasted atmosphere away in great, one-way gusts. Earth, of course, got clobbered too, and while it surely lost some of its atmosphere, it hung onto much more.


CNN says today:


Lost world -- what happened to Mars?
By Amanda Barnett, CNN
updated 2:24 PM EST, Sat November 16, 2013 |


"We expect to learn how the modern Mars works, really in detail. To see its climate state, to understand how the atmosphere is lost to space -- how Mars may have lost a magnetic field -- to take that information and map it back in time, " said NASA's James Garvin.

It's always interesting to see things happen in real time :)

This stuff is 100x more interesting to me than predictions regarding some middle eastern pipeline.

What we need to keep our eyes open for, though, is a biased explanation from these scientists --
they tend to believe that what happened to Mars wasn't sudden, that the planet was doomed because of its size, and not because of a catastrophic impact event.

I am not an expert and have no real idea of how all this works, but the fact that this information about Mars and its past came to me so quickly, and without much interest in the subject, is strange -- considering that within a month of this thread, not one but two separate countries have launched missions to Mars in hopes of discovering the truth about what happened on the Red Planet...

Day 21 and counting, lol! I am curious to see how all of this plays out.
And I am a bit sad that we talk about all this stuff here on Avalon weeks and months before it actually happens, only for some major news network to make a cover story out of it all -- hah. :)

Avalon deserves to get more reads, considering some of the info is absolutely cutting edge, lol.
Seems like the news is just reacting to current events, not anticipating them.

Good journalism should do both! ^_^

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/18/tech/mars-maven-mission/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

NASA launches new spacecraft to orbit Mars
By Amanda Barnett, CNN
November 18, 2013 -- Updated 1838 GMT (0238 HKT) | Filed under: Innovations



(CNN) -- You may have heard it before: Billions of years ago, Mars probably looked more like Earth does now, with clouds and oceans and a much thicker atmosphere. It may even have had some type of microbes. But now it's a barren, frozen desert.

So what happened? Where did the air and water go?

NASA on Monday launched a spacecraft to try to find out. It's called MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution. It's the first mission dedicated to studying the red planet's upper atmosphere.


"We expect to learn how the modern Mars works, really in detail. To see its climate state, to understand how the atmosphere is lost to space -- how Mars may have lost a magnetic field -- to take that information and map it back in time," said NASA's James Garvin.

MAVEN lifted off shortly before 1:30 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, starting a 10-month trip to Mars. It's scheduled to arrive on September 22, 2014.
The solar-powered probe is about the length of school bus -- 37.5 feet (11.43 meters) -- and will weigh about 5,410 pounds (2,454 kilograms) at launch.

What killed Mars? New spacecraft will find out

"MAVEN will fill in a very big gap in our understanding of the planet by exploring the upper atmosphere and its influence on the Martian environment," principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, from the University of Colorado, says on his NASA webpage.

He says he's "excited that we're providing one step along the path of answering questions about whether life ever existed on Mars."

Jakosky's team will use the spacecraft's three instrument suites in hopes of determining three things about Mars:

• The composition of its upper atmosphere
• How fast it's losing what's left of its atmosphere
• The history of the atmosphere

MAVEN won't make a cool, daring landing like the Mars Curiosity Rover, which has been roaming Mars for more than a year now. Instead, it will orbit between a low of about 93 miles (150 kilometers) above the surface to a high of about 3,728 miles (6,000 kilometers). It also will make five dives, flying as low as 77 miles (125 kilometers) in altitude.
NASA says the mission will cost $671 million.

Interactive: Mars exploration from Viking to MAVEN

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

NASA admits that Mars was like a modern Earth only 4 billion years ago.
Something happened, something sudden, that destroyed these conditions and rendered Mars as "lifeless" as it appears today.

People should really ask, where did all that radiation REALLY come from?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/tech/mars-curiosity-rover/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Mars Curiosity rover finds life-supporting chemicals
By Azadeh Ansari and Elizabeth Landau, CNN
updated 12:07 PM EST, Tue December 10, 2013 | Filed under: Innovations

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/131210100906-gale-crater-mars-horizontal-gallery.jpg

(CNN) -- Curious about life on Mars? NASA's rover Curiosity has now given scientists the strongest evidence to date that the environment on the Red Planet could have supported life billions of years ago.

Since Curiosity made its rock star landing more than a year ago at Gale Crater, the focal point of its mission, the roving laboratory has collected evidence that gives new insights into Mars' past environment.

NASA scientists announced in March that Mars could have once hosted life -- at least, in the distant past, based on the chemical analysis of powder collected from Curiosity's drill. An area of the crater known as Yellowknife Bay once hosted "slightly salty liquid water," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters in Washington, said earlier this year.

Six new studies released Monday by the journal Science add more insights about these formerly habitable conditions and provide other new knowledge that increase our understanding of the Red Planet. The results were also presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Curiosity found evidence of clay formations, or "mudstone," in Yellowstone Bay, scientists said Monday. Martian mud is a big deal because this clay may have held the key ingredients for life billions of years ago. It means a lake must have existed in this area.

"This is a game changer since these are the kind of materials that are very 'Earth-like' and conducive for life," said Douglas Ming, lead author of one of the new studies.
Ming and his colleagues said they also detected nitrogen, carbon, sulfur and oxygen -- all building blocks of life.

The new findings mean the rover's $2.5 billion mission is "turning the corner," said John Grotzinger, a California Institute of Technology planetary geologist and chief scientist for Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory.

Grotzinger and colleagues found the habitable environment existed later in Martian history than previously thought. By studying physical characteristics of rock layers in and near Yellowknife Bay, they determined that Mars was habitable less than 4 billion years ago -- about the same time as the oldest signs we have for life on Earth.

The habitable conditions could have remained for millions to tens of millions of years, with rivers and lakes appearing and disappearing over time.

Curiosity also helped scientists figure out the age of an ancient Martian rock, as described in the new research. The rock is called Cumberland, and it now has the distinction of being the first whose age was measured on another planet through chemical analysis.

The rover used a method for dating Earth rocks that measures the decay of an isotope of potassium as it slowly changes into argon. Scientists determined the rock was between 3.86 billion and 4.56 billion years old. This age range is consistent with earlier estimates for rocks in Gale Crater.

Scientists say roughly 4 billion years ago, the environment on Mars wasn't much different from that of modern-day Earth. But things on Mars then took a drastic turn, and the planet was dramatically transformed from warm and wet to bitterly cold and dry, scientists say. In addition to the cold and dry conditions, scientists say the No. 1 reason life probably wouldn't have thrived on Mars is its extremely high levels of radiation.

Studies: Martian atmosphere was destroyed long ago

"The radiation environment on Mars is unlike anything we have on Earth," said Jennifer Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist and geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and an author of one of the studies. "We don't know if life on Mars could have ever adapted to the high levels of radiation the surface is currently experiencing."
Eigenbrode added, "This is a wide-open book, which we have barely started writing the pages of."

New radiation measurements will also be important to planning any human missions to Mars, scientists said.

"Our measurements also tie into Curiosity's investigations about habitability," study co-author Don Hassler of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "The radiation sources that are concerns for human health also affect microbial survival as well as preservation of organic chemicals."

Organic chemicals come from a variety of sources, including meteorites and comets, but they can also be indicative of life.

What's bad for us is bad for signs of life -- but these organic chemicals could still be hiding on Mars nonetheless.

Follow CNN science news on Twitter at @CNNLightYears

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Life to Return to Mars:

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/01/13/nr-brooke-mars-colony-heidi-beemer.cnn.html

She could be on a one-way trip to Mars

CNN Newsroom|Added on January 13, 2014
Heidi Beemer is one of 250 finalists to participate in the Mars One project to establish a human colony on Mars.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

In light of what happened (or didn't! lol) with Comet Siding Spring, which just passed Mars without causing much fuss, I would appreciate if some of the more scientifically-minded PA people would give a few moments to reading up on the relationship between planetary oceans and orbiting comets.


We've covered already:

~to evaporate a planet's ocean, one needs an object 500km across or possibly smaller.
we can call these "hyperion objects" because the size fits.

~comets are thought to seed planets with water and other building blocks of life.

~comets from the Oort cloud do orbit

~Comet Siding Spring has a million year orbit. meaning this comet has been in our system before and has likely interacted with life on Earth and Mars many times.

~comet Siding Spring will be back someday, and others like it.

~Siding Spring was THE CLOSEST encounter between a comet and a planet in our solar system, within modern recorded history.
although the egyptians might have some primitive account of this. another PA user posted a photo of a yellow stone scarab pendant made from glass formed by an alleged comet impact/detritus impact.


p.s. at the time of the making of this thread I did not know about Comet Siding Spring.

but please look at the following photo and understand that we missed fate by a matter of months.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--K8AQM82S--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/natpg3mqjmy96efwpeud.jpg

a few months' difference and earth would have been closer to Siding Spring than Mars was