Wow...

Does it strike anyone as odd that a planet that can be seen with a backyard telescope wasn't discovered sooner?

That image of Mars is one of the most beautiful sights I've seen in a long time ... Thank you for bringing it to everyone's attention!

That's called preconditioning. They have found life on Mars, but in order to avoid a culture-shock they slowly prepare us for the discovery with that silly water story. Well, perhaps not...

this image looks like an image made in terragen or vue d'esprit (or any of those landscape generators).
i do not understand the shiny edges of the supposedly water pool. what is the light source supposed to be? why does it look like shiny plastic?

wheter or not there is water on mars is another question. but this image doesnt look like anything to me besides someone having fun in easy to use softwares, rendering fairly low quality images.

I have to agree with Fuzz--that Mars water image looks mysteriously "Photoshop'ed" or "Quark'd" to me--though I do hope the story to go with the image can be provable.

This picture was taken by the Mars Express and has a front page story on the European Space Agency's (ESA) website. These are the people behind the Mars express and I really dont see how or why they would put a fake picture up on their site.

here's a link to the story:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808BE_0.html

If you still think it's fake... why? It seems obvious from pictures of Mars that it has or had water that flowed and carved all these channels.

Also, if you know of a landscape generator that can produce pictures like that or better, please let me know. Ive used Terragen and it comes no where near that.

The Planet X is exciting, Ive always hoped we would finally find a planet bigger than Pluto, and we have! Although.... it isnt the real "Planet X" as apparently it's a rogue planet that comes deep inside the solar system in its orbit. I'm not so sure about that hehe.

But the major thing about this is.... apparently it's likely that there are 100s or even over 1000 pluto sized objects out there, and perhaps some as big as mars. But all of these are Kuiper belt objects, like Pluto.... so either we have 8 planets... or we have 10+ I'm leaning to say we have 8.

Thanks for providing a link to the article from which the Mars water picture originates.

About Planet X, what I find most fascinating is that "Scientists say it is three times as far away as Pluto, in an orbit at an angle to the orbits of the main planets."

[source here]

For those doubting Tom's, this image and the story is in every major newspaper and scientific publication. Here is the latest google results:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=water+ice+mars&btnG=Search+News

surreal

This is not another planet. Pluto is also NOT a planet, it is a planetiod. We very well may find more planetoid bodies floating around IN A DIFFERENT TYPE OF ORBIT THAN NORMAL PLANETS.

Good point, John Tate. I suppose it's healthy to keep in mind that many things exist in the universe that are functionally and structurally different from what we find in our local neighborhood. Not surprising then.

Its interesting that the water was found in an un charted crator, it does look fake but i hope and more than positivly believe its real. Pre-conditioning that there is life on mars? How do you know they found life?

well you wonder how something so big could have gone unnoticed for so long... but the situation is that they had to wait until Mars's summer to let the carbon dioxide evaporate before looking for frozen water.

I think scientists have assumed life on mars ever since the discovery of the meteorite in antarctica from mars that had organism fossils carved through it. I dont think there's any hidden conspiracies otherwise they would have hidden that meteorite from the public.

so the shinyness could be a result of ice formation. ok, could be. it still looks like a fake image to me, but it doesnt have anything to do with whether or not there is life on mars. i am fairly sure i could replicate this image liquis (i am more familiar with vue d'esprit than with terragen), and i'd make sure to send it to you if ever i decide to do so;)

one thing i find amusing, is that it seems that every few years, they do find supposedly signs of life on mars. i remember as a kid, going to the planitarium. after seing a movie on mars discoveries, i asked "what do they mean by "life""? i felt it to be human presemptiousness, to look for signs of "life", when we ourselves define what is or what is not "life".
i am 50% sure there either was, is, or will be "life" on the planet at some point.

anyhows. they find new planets, astral bodies, animal species, chemical coumpounds, waves, particules, universes, very regularly.
oh coolios:) wwweezzzz!!!!

i wouldnt say anything about "conspiracies", since i do not believe in such a concept, but only in groups of people gathering and making plans around a good wiskey.
but hey, they did fake the first moon landing, so why not. science is a BIG business, one needs funds, one needs proofs for those funds to be signed..etcetc..

business as usual:)wweezzzz!!!!

Firstly lets believe that the photo is for real.
OK so its white in color, lies around like snow and is also kind of melted but how can you be so sure that its H2O and not frozen CO2 or 'frozen' something else ???

I'm a bit suprised at the level of skepticism on this issue. So let me lay it out a little bit.

As for why this wasn't 'discovered' earlier - several possibilities - one - this formation is likely a seasonal pheonomona, and because of its small size, it wasn't noticed by probes up to this point. Because of its close-to-polar location, most probes were circularing mars at a much smaller inclination, and any views of this region were from far away. This Eurpeon probe is providing the most DETAILED, and HIGH-RESOLUTION photots yet. All of the photos that I've seen from it are unprecendented in their level of clarity and resolution. Because of its polar orbit, higher resolution cameras, durability (remember - most probes have failed to orbit mars in the last few years), means this is the first time this region was photographed at the right time and at the right place with a sufficient level of resolution to spot this wonder.

As for knowing whether its water or not - that's simple spectroscopy. How else are astronomers able to tell the composition of other planets and stars? They use the science of spectroscopy to identify what are chemical signatures that effect the wavelenths of light they reflect or emit. Using this technology on future, more powerful telescopes will allow us (hopefully) to spot earth-like planets aroud other stars (i.e where they have oxygen and H2O signatures).

One thing I think needs to be pointed out about that Mars photo - it really IS a computer generated image. Go read the ESA article(link posted by liquis). The picture is merely a rendering from data from their High Resolution Stereo Camera, so that would account for all the shiny edges and plastic looking terrain and "ice".

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