NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows on Mars |
NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows on Mars |
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Dec 4 2006, 09:25 PM
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#101
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Guests |
Dec. 4, 2006
Dwayne Brown/Erica Hupp Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1726/1237 Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-6278 MEDIA ADVISORY: M06-186 NASA SCHEDULES BRIEFING TO ANNOUNCE SIGNIFICANT FIND ON MARS WASHINGTON - NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium located at 300 E Street, S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov. The agency last week announced the spacecraft's mission may be at its end. Mars Global Surveyor has served the longest and been the most productive of any spacecraft ever sent to the red planet. Data gathered from the mission will continue to be analyzed by scientists. Panelists include: - Michael Meyer -- Lead Scientist, Mars Exploration Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington - Michael Malin -- President and Chief Scientist, Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif. - Kenneth Edgett -- Scientist, Malin Space Science Systems - Philip Christensen -- Professor, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz. |
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Jan 6 2007, 08:36 AM
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#102
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
I don't know that the impact rate is enough to cause huge problems for individually pressurized buildings and facilities. On Earth, there are several hundred lightning strikes per second, many of which occur close to buildings and people. And yet, while there is a certain amount of damage (mostly to trees) from lightning strikes every year, rather few people are injured or killed by lightning each year.
Now, compare the frequency of lightning strikes to the frequency of impacts on Mars, and factor in the percentage of those which are large enough (those that make craters of, say, 100m or more in size) to blast you even if they don't hit you directly, vs. those which create craters of only 10 or so meters or less in size (which could land 100 meters away and not damage your habitat), and I bet you're far less likely to get hit by a meteor, or have your domicile destroyed by a close impact, on Mars than it's likely you would get hit by lightning on Earth. Also, look at the number of pieces of the space shuttle Columbia which fell onto a couple of towns in Texas. Out of all of those pieces, very few actually hit buildings, and *none* hit any human beings. Heck, I don't think there were any documented cases of any pieces hitting any animals, even. So, you can drop a good number of objects onto a fairly densely populated area without actually hitting anyone. Now, I grant you, if you built big transparent pressure domes on Mars, you'd increase the probability of a meteor causing a depressurization event... but I'd bet you're not going to see anything beyond relatively small metal tubes in Martian colonial building styles for quite a while... -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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