Always check those emails on Snopes. ;)

theyve known about frozen water on mars for almost as long as theyve known about mars itself. (well had a good enough telescope to look at it)

south pole
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Marssouthpole.jpg

telescope picture
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/3..._300_245aa.jpg

I confess I already knew this (sowwy). But the title was catchy and the picture was much more dramatic. This is, after all, the IotD thread, and image counts.

I have some red / cyan glasses from spy kids 3D laying around so I was blown away looking at this anaglyph of the crater . But even crazier was this one at hi-res.

Strange, I tried the 3-D glasses and it looked like a hill instead of a depression. When I turned them around (cheap paper kind, rebend) and put the red lens on the left instead of the right, it looked great. No idea why?? :confused:

God is just screwing with you. Nothing to worry about.

Alas, the Anaglyph 3D Glasses Standards Committee has much work to do. In fact, I believe even the two images Slight posted use opposite standards.

No, you got it right. Yes, back in March it was the closest in 60K years. But THIS month Mars is again close, just not quite as close as it was before.

Chris

It's getting tougher and tougher to find a good hopkin leg these days, especially since I misplaced mine...

We've known for years that there was water ice on Mars, comingled to some extent with CO2 ice. What is unique about the crater is that it is all water ice, discrete and separate from frozen carbon dioxide. This crater is located one of the polar regions, however, making it kin to the ice caps we can easily see with a modest telescope.

Let me know when they find liqid water standing at the Martian equator. *That* will be exciting.

with ambient air pressure approximately 1% of what we enjoy here on our big blue marble, that water would sublimate (not melt->evaporate, since it's soooo cold. brrr.) But you're right on. That *would* be exciting. Very very.

If the water did [sublimate] , it would probably become part of the planet's "atmosphere" and never make it back to the ground. Obvously the planet hasn't had any major changes in climate in eons.
I thought I saw my uncle Cleve strolling around in the last image.... :D

Well we can fix that little problem pretty quickly. Hell, we can make it a ghetto in a couple of years, once we get there. :lol:

Get our asses up there and pump several trillion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, we'll have 'er put to rights in no time.

got any atmospheric rust converter?