Outerspace Ocean Exploration Puzzle Pieces Come Together

Image Source and Courtesy Space X

International News report…”February 10th...SpaceX Dragon Capsule returned to Earth with successful Ocean Splashdown...February 20th "the  2 billion USD mission NASA mission to Jupiter's moon Europa is gathering momentum as it looks into target plumes of water vapor”... March 5th NASA communicated its research suggests Mars once had more water than Earth’s Arctic Ocean.

Scheduled as plan, green light across the board and moving fast Human Outerspace Ocean Exploration is a go. 

NASA communicated that their team of scientists has determined that a primitive ocean on Mars held more water than Earth's Arctic Ocean. The study assures that the Red Planet has lost 87 % of that water to space. 

So what happened to the water on Mars? And more importantly perhaps why? Is this water celestial phenomena part of a wider universal hydrological cycle? 

“Scientists have been searching for answers to why this vast water supply left the surface,” NASA stated. 

The NASA Goddard's Institute explained that the estimations of the basin of the ocean of Mars was conducted through complex ground-based observatories and calculations which aimed to   measure water signatures in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. Science Magazine released the observations and computations of the team. 

“Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space,” said Geronimo Villanueva, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper stated. 

Goddards´ own explained that calculations set a ocean environment covering most of surface of the planet with depths varying from 450 feet.to a mile.

Ocean science conducted on Earth could have some answers for the Mars Ocean Mystery. On Earth the photic layer of the ocean´s water -where sunlight penetrates ranges from 650 feet to 3.2 thousand feet. The energy and interaction of sunlight when passing waters may vary by distance but would still affect an ocean in another planet. Sun light in Earth´s ocean is the basis for the main food webs which depend on light, and basis of the evaporation cycles on Earth regulating global weather patterns. 

If water was lost to space then it did so through evaporation or related events. But what triggered the event? 

“With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than was previously thought, suggesting it might have been habitable for longer,” Michael Mumma, a senior scientist at Goddard and the second author on the paper stated. Ecological ocean metamorphosis is to the day not rule out for Mars oceans. Earth´s ocean have changed dramatically due to the activity of the most smaller organisms, similar events can be expected to occur in other planets.  

Sunlight interaction by itself is unlikely to have triggered oceanic retreat at a planetary scale. Rate of retreat and other key information is still missing in the puzzle of water or on Mars. Even a minor variation in the rotation or dynamic angle of orbit can also be possible cause for an entire ocean to retreat. Until serious research is conducted all that is left is theoretical guessing. 

But back on Earths waters -still abundant hopefully, Space X continues to move in the development of technological tools for the mission. Outer spàce ocean exploration has diverse components, most are mental, creative of intelligence and scientific nature, others are more engineering challenges, much like the soft and the hardware and when it comes to hard core hardware Space X is breaking the limits of what can and cannot be done. 

Tech Times reported on February 10th that Space X got “Third Time Lucky” when complñeting successfully the DSCOVR launch and its splashdown on the Pacific Ocean. On the same days Space X Robotic Dragon capsule recently complete atmosphere reentry raging swift to Earth  wrapping up a successful cargo mission to the International Space Station. Those inside know that luck has nothing to do with the success of Space X. The company has been sleeving up and working hard across the globe completing missions in record times, with more than a dozen missions locked down for the year, alliances with NASA, NOAA and the US Air Force, dockings and returns to the International Space Station and developing reusable rocket technology GPS equipped to land down in the Ocean instead of sinking dead into the waters depths. 

Space aeronautic sector still has to figure out how to work with the weather and not against it. Weather has been the component which has challenged missions take off and splashdown as well as Ocean Landing and Recovery. Weather suspensions and weather cancellations are not new for the sector but the technology which Space X aims to develop requires incredible precision. To land a reusable rocket such as the Falcon 9 -inspired by the Delta rockets made famous by Lockheed Martin on an ocean platform has proven to be the challenge. Ocean weather and atmospheric weather an issue which the company will eventually have to resolve to be able to operate more stably and with wider windows of opportunities both for launching as well as splashdown and ocean landing. 

“The plan was to have this land on a sea platform but SpaceX has warned ahead of time that it is not expecting to recover the rocket because of the weather that caused the delays and the presence of big waves near the landing platform,” International Press reported.

"We are experiencing just such weather in the Atlantic with waves reaching up to three stories in height crashing over the decks," SpaceX said. "The rocket will still attempt a soft landing in the water through the storm, producing valuable landing data, but survival is highly unlikely."

The exciting aspect of launching these type of rockets is that they set the foundation for the development of new spaceships and rocket accessories. The European Space Agency ESA has also noted the route in which outer space exploration heads with their IXV spaceplane. Despite only operating at sub-orbital ranges the space plane conducted a flawless launch boosted by Vega Rockets and splashed down, and was recovered in the Pacific Ocean somewhere near Galapagos basins.

NASA also teamed up with colleagues from Europe for the study which revealed the estimates of historical ocean basin volume in Mars -planet which still holds water in form of ice in polar latitudes.

“The new estimate is based on detailed observations made at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the W.M. Keck Observatory and NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. With these powerful instruments, the researchers distinguished the chemical signatures of two slightly different forms of water in Mars’ atmosphere. One is the familiar H2O. The other is HDO, a naturally occurring variation in which one hydrogen is replaced by a heavier form, called deuterium,” NASA communicated. 

By comparing the ratio of HDO to H2O in water on Mars today and comparing it with the ratio in water trapped in a Mars meteorite dating from about 4.5 billion years ago, scientists can measure the subsequent atmospheric changes and determine how much water has escaped into space.

The research team was especially interested in regions near Mars’ north and south poles, because the polar ice caps hold the planet’s largest known water reservoir. The water stored there is thought to capture the evolution of Mars’ water -acting like an archive which scientists would like to get their hands on. 

In 2016, a Mars lander mission called InSight will launch to take a first look into the deep interior of Mars. The agency also is participating in ESA’s 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions, including providing telecommunication radios to ESA’s 2016 orbiter and a critical element of the astrobiology instrument on the 2018 ExoMars rover. NASA’s next rover, heading to Mars in 2020, will carry instruments to conduct unprecedented science and exploration technology investigations on the Red Planet. The NASA Europa Clipper Mission is also causing enthusiasms in the community. 

“...pieces of the puzzle of the outerspace ocean exploration continue to rise, witnessing them break news reveals a historical time which is a priceless privilege to witness”.