Water, Water on Mars and not a drop to drink

I’m excited about the prospect of confirming there is water ice on Mars. Mars has seasons, polar caps, and planetary tilt similar to Earth’s. It’s course is twice as long as Earth resulting in seasons that are twice as long. Even though the atmosphere is extremely tenuous and primarily composed of carbon dioxide there are thin, wispy cirrus clouds that occasionally come into view during the seasonal changes. These tenuous clouds are composed of water ice. All this exotic beauty and the allure of very tiny amount water that exists on Mars has us dreaming of another place for mankind to live if only he could prod things along and add a bit more of water to possibly make the place habitable for people.

Such is the dream of scientists and astronauts.

Unfortunately the track record for the rest of the planets in our Solar System has been that they are hostile in some shape or form whether or not there was water present. Mars on the other hand has been sort of enigmatic being there is active weather there and there are these elusive channels that seemingly hint at being carved out by water in the past. There is just something that bugs me about Mars. Particularly that the planet seems to be in perpetual state of rusting. Scientists have admitted that they have no explanation for this perpetual rusting. This is why the soil, if you must call it that, is orange-red everywhere you look. It is mostly ferric oxide and the planet is in a perpetual state of rusting day after day eon after eon.

So if you are looking for water why go looking in a rusty well. Something in my gut tells me that these telltale springs that have sprung up in the past have percolated through an abundance of compounds that are comprised of such elements as arsenic, selenium, antimony, and course iron. Once we get on Mars and eagerly go about melting the Martian ice we probably be shocked that the stuff is more toxic than the runoff from any earthly chemical plant that we could imagine. So we before we going making any celebratory toasts on Mars we better send it to the lab first.

This entry was posted on June 6, 2008 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Mars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.