Water, Mars & Herschel (everyone else can, why can’t we?)Posted:
May 27, 2010 The first set of results from the Herschel Space
Telescope have been flooding out over the past couple of weeks*,
so it’s about time they got a mention here. Rather than
rehashing one of the many press releases, I thought I’d focus on
an interesting result that I doubt will get much attention – the
detection of water vapour (and carbon monoxide) on Mars with the
spectrometer within the SPIRE instrument. I have to be upfront
about this; the reason why you probably won’t hear much about
this is that detecting water on Mars, whilst important for
understanding its water cycle, is nothing new, though it is only
present in small amounts (900 parts per million according to
these observations). It was first seen in the Martian atmosphere
in 1963, and since then has been extensively studied with many
different observatories. The Opportunity rover even sent back
images of cirrus clouds that are very similar to those we see
here on Earth: So w