The Final Frontier

In what is no doubt a calculated move by the crack marketing team in charge of promoting J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, "scientists" are now claiming that there is in fact frozen water hidden on Mars. Sure....

This seems to be a cyclical phenomena. Every other decade or so "scientists" will decide that there is water on Mars, and that human life might just be sustainable. This goes all the way back to the late 19th, early 20th centuries when the fissures visible on the surface of the planet were theorized to be river canyons. That theory is what helped people like C.S.Lewis and Edgar Rice Burroughs to craft their fantastical Martian worlds. Of course, "scientists" being the fickle sort that they are, eventually decide that, no, there really isn't water there. Those poles that looked capped in ice are really just frosted over with frozen nitrogen and children's broken dreams.

With the Earth supposedly on the verge of collapse, according to Al Gore and Roland Emmerich, it makes sense that the NASA "scientists" would be turning their collectively useless minds back to Mars and deciding, based on "science", "Ground-penetrating radar used by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter", and probably a few too many drunk viewings of Red Planet (Val Kilmer and a killer robot!) that it is possible to send people to Mars where they could drill into these magical underground reservoirs and take Hope and Change to the stars. NASA has become a big, crooked-toothed, joke.

Let us recap today's world shall we? Obama has been elected President of the United States, Pirates are going crazy over in Somalia, and there are underground glaciers on Mars that could support life.
Here is the rest of the Mars story:
"In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars," said Holt. Scientists on the 12-member research team surmise that the frozen water deposits are remnants of a Martian ice age millions of years ago. Because water is one of the primary requirements for life, scientists said the frozen reservoirs are an encouraging sign of extra-terrestrial life. The buried glaciers reported by Holt and his 11 co-authors lie in the Hellas Basin region of Mars' southern hemisphere, and scientist said even larger frozen water reservoirs may exist in Mars' northern hemisphere.

"The fact that these features are in the same latitude bands -- about 35 to 60 degrees -- in both hemispheres points to a climate-driven mechanism for explaining how they got there," said Holt. Another member of the research team noted however, that a basic mystery about the glaciers remains unsolved.

"A key question is 'How did the ice get there in the first place?'" said James Head of Brown University. Unanswered questions also persist, Brown said, about what might be contained in the frozen water.

"On Earth, such buried glacial ice in Antarctica preserves the record of traces of ancient organisms and past climate history," he said. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA.