Look at the 'necklace' (feature C) in the leftmost and second from bottom image. The image is presented the other way around here than I have seen it before (I know it's not a new image) and while I know that a low Sun angle will be exaggerating things to a degree, I'm struck again by how otherworldy looking those boulders are.

Looking at the upper left hand quarter of the image I linked in my previous post I can see a couple of steep sided pits... could they have formed through a process like that?

The boulders on the neck almost look wind carved in this shot. Is it me or do they seem to be lined up, like the tips of ridges? A couple of them have protrusions near their peaks that are similar to wind carved formations I've seen in the Scottish highlands.

Thank you, I've been packing for a family holiday so time has been a bit short for me. Looking at that, and the larger images on the esa site, it seems the 'jets' roughly originate from an area of the bright white deposits which has a family of large boulder-like features scattered about. While I like the idea of 'smokers' the first thought I have is that the boulders are more heat absorbent, get the sun easier because they stick up, and the emission is caused by sublimation of material around their bases...

I don't suppose there are any images with a regular exposure length taken near then time of the over-exposed one? It'd be intruigingn to narrow down which part of the neck the plumes are coming from, even just which side.

There may not be any unambiguous vents (yet!) but looking at this image of the comet's outgassing I can see three, maybe four, distinct plumes. They all seem to come from sources distinct but near to each other, which might imply a more vent like outgassing than generalised sublimation

Do the zones of most emission roughly coincide with those that receive the least sunlight?

There's certainly nothing to forgive, I think your skepticism is entirely warranted! But, if we look past the iffy connection to the phoenix mission and its 'blobs', I think this is a meaningful piece of experiment - even if the interpretation isn't all it might be: Such salts as are found on Mars can interact with near surface ice to produce liquid, even under current atmospheric conditions. If soils with much higher concentrations of such salts are ever found, or existed in the past, then such brine-y dampness might have played a role in the history of some areas. And ruling out the idea of deliquesence leading to the formation of surface liquid, even in highly salty soils, is a useful result to.

Pardon the thread necromancy, but this seems like the best place to mention this paper from the university of Michegan. They demonstrate, using an environment chamber, a plausible mechanism whereby Martian ice could melt to form droplets of liquid water, under present day conditions.

For those without access, here's the press release.

My main criticism is that the salts used here only occur as a few percent by weight in any Martian soils we have examined. Nothing rules out higher concentrations, but fairly finely distributed grains of such salts would make Mars very mildly damp, not wet!

The ice thought to be in the shadowed polar craters is usually attributed to cometary impacts or the solar wind combining with oxygen in lunar rocks. The bbc article is talking about chemically bound hydrogen in magma that solidified billions of years ago. The hydrogen may be from ( and so indicitive of) water abundance in ancient lunar rocks, but may alsio be from other sources like the solar wind or other H bearing materials. Lastly, to quote that article:

Bolding mine.

It sounds to me less like a confirmed number for ancient lunar water that is less than previously thought, and more like there is now reason to doubt any estimate of ancient lunar water based on apatite H content. Less than the terrestrial levels of hydration would fit better than terrestrial levels, but it doesn't sound like they have a really firm idea of how much.

Plus: The Moon is (apparently) 95 million years younger than the rest of the solar system, although some dating methods disagree.

So we may actually have more questions about the Moon than ever, which will please lunar geologists!

My apologies for the thread necromancy, but this article (on getting tholin constituents to dissolve in liquid ethane via isopentane) didn't seem worth starting a thread on its own. I don't have the chemistry background to know if this is a process that would occur on Titan, but I think the melting point of isopentane is a little too high for Titan temperatures. However, if there is one pathway to get tholin to dissolve in liquid methane/ethane then perhaps there are others?

Venusian 'glory' hints that cloud chemistry is still not understood. Here's the (pay per view) paper.

Hurrah! Let us hope Yutu has made it through the night without too much damage. Good luck to the mission control team.

Mods: Understood.
Rest well little rabbit, may your memory be honoured by many successors.

Thanks Phil. It's good to know the lander is designed to run for a year. I was as much wondering if the Chinese space agency would consider the lander investigations worth the effort and money of running on their own, or if they were just a sideshow to the rover that would be kept going as part of the overall budget of rover/lander mission, but not as just a lander. Paranoia, perhaps, but sometimes these things are politically influenced and the reasons why experiments are turned off aren't always clear.

I'm going to have to uncross some things for Yutu, I'm starting to ache...…..

[MOD NOTE: Let's be careful about rule 1.2 here.]

I've no news I'm afraid, but I do have a question: The lander itself has instruments for UV astronomy and plasmasphere investigations. If Yutu has gone to the land of eternal crunchy lettuce, how long will the lander mission continue to run without the rover?

Visibility will depend on the exact nature of the sources to some extent, won't it? I mean that a diffuse source will be much less visible than a concetrated, point-like one?
While this isn't exactly a discovery on par with finding a duplicate Earth hiding behind the Moon, this is a nice little appetite whetter for Ceres. And it does confirm that there is probably a fair bit of water ice there.

I stumbled across this on the bbc science and technilogy site: Water carved gullies on Vesta? I'm just bringing it up to make the point: Features that are very suggestive of a water like fluid occur even on worlds where the idea of ANY liquid surface water strains the imagination.

Considering the abundance of icy objects that may harbour subsurface water in the solar system (and therefore other star systems) I think a mission to definitively confirm/deny the presence of an ocean, characterise it as much as possible, and investigate its chemistry (if possible) has scientific merit aside from just the hunt for space squid beneath the ice.

That said, the target doesn't need to be Europa, and all else being equal Europa may not even be in the top five icy targets of interest for such information gathering*. However all things are not equal, especially in times of constrained budgets. I would wait and see if this 'plume' is an old faithful or a bathtub bubble before I begin worrying that resources spent on a putative Europa mission might be getting taken from more deserving causes......

* I wonder if there's any chance that, post DAWN's arrival there, even Ceres might climb higher? Odder things have happened, and there is some evidence for a water plume over Ceres pole too.....

A habitable environment without life would be very useful as a comparison to habitable environments with life. Not as headline and budget friendly perhaps, but scientifically just as good.

I'm more or less of the same mind: I don't see any specific reason why they shouldn't be caused by some kind of brine...but I see no reason why they should be, brine just being one of a great many alternative explanations. I think this story is really riding in the wake of the discovery of ancient habitable conditions at Curiositie's site.

Thank you!


Moderator note: Two topics merged. Quote added at the top of this post to make its context clear.

This seems like the relevant place to post this (could be wrong): Water plumes from Europa? Apologies if it's already been up. The link to the Science article at the bottom doesn't work for me, does anyone have a working link to the original? Cheers.

Going into space to learn about the insides of Earth - fascinating!