Temperature and pressure at Gale, Suitable (for short periods) for liquid water? |
Temperature and pressure at Gale, Suitable (for short periods) for liquid water? |
Sep 30 2012, 03:23 PM
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#1
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 62 Joined: 11-July 11 Member No.: 6058 |
Just a quick query from someone with no background in science. Obviously, MSL has AFAIK not returned evidence of recent (i.e. years/decades) liquid water in its vicinity; however, I was interested by the following graphs:
08.21.2012: First Pressure Readings on Mars http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4501 08.21.2012: Taking Mars' Temperature http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4502 The first indicates that the pressure between 15 Aug and 18 Aug never dropped below c. 690 millibars; the second shows that, for a period of a couple of hours on 16 Aug, the temperature rose above freezing. If water had been present on the surface, then, would it have been liquid during this brief period? The pressure and temperature seemed to satisfy the conditions for liquid water as I understand them (indeed, the pressure seems to be high enough (just) on a 24-hour basis to allow for the presence of liquid water). Thanks in advance for your opinions (corroborative or not!) on this. |
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Mar 7 2013, 02:14 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1465 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Columbus OH USA Member No.: 13 |
Took a look at an air temperature curve from the uncalibrated REMS data.
Sol 10 data file (comma-separated): http://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/mslrem_0001...00ACQ____M1.TAB Column descriptions: http://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/mslrem_0001/LABEL/ACQ.FMT Extracting the columns for the two boom air temperature sensors B1_AIR_Temp and B2_AIR_Temp yields this plot for sol 10: I picked sol 10 because it can be compared with a calibrated air temperature plot released during one of the telecons: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/mult...a/pia16081.html Not sure what's going on with Boom 2, but comparing the Boom 1 curve with the calibrated curve shows a good match shape-wise up to sol 10.6. At that point it looks like for some reason they drew a straight line to the start of sol 11. Anyway, since the minimum of the calibrated curve is about -90°C and the maximum about 3°C, and the min/max of the uncalibrated curve is -9512/2028, a rough formula to convert the Boom 1 uncalibrated values to °C is: T = 0.00806*n - 13.3 -------------------- |
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Mar 7 2013, 07:20 AM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2431 Joined: 30-January 13 From: Penang, Malaysia. Member No.: 6853 |
Took a look at an air temperature curve from the uncalibrated REMS data... Many thanks for pointing me in the right direction Joe. Hopefully the anomalies on the temperature values from the other boom are not an indication of more issues with the REMS instrument package. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long for the calibrated data to be issued. |
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