Testing, testing, testing 123 ..

EDIT to add : [/sup] seems to work where [super] doesn’t.

@ 47. NoAstronomer : Durn! Okay, I’ll have to find a copy of that one.

I’m so disappointed. The ‘water over your head’ reference is from the Robert Heinlein novel ‘Podkayne of Mars’. In which the eponymous teenage heroine, having lived her entire life on Mars and about to embark on a trip to Earth. frankly disbelieves that such an immense quantity of water could possibly exist.

Mike.

I hope whoever gets there will have had some serious astronaut training (http://www.amazingsuperpowers.com/2009/06/astronaut-training/) SCNR

Or maybe the Fireswamp with its Lightning Sand and ROUSs?

Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t believe they really exist.

but I think there’s also free oxygen streaming off Europa unless I’m mistaken. (Which I could be, natch.)

But not this time :

Observations with the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph of the Hubble Space Telescope, first described in 1995, revealed that Europa has a tenuous atmosphere composed mostly of molecular oxygen (O2). The surface pressure of Europa’s atmosphere is 0.1 μPa, or 10 [superscript]minus 12 times[/superscript] that of the Earth. In 1997, the Galileo spacecraft confirmed the presence of a tenuous ionosphere (an upper-atmospheric layer of charged particles) around Europa created by solar radiation and energetic particles from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, providing evidence of an atmosphere.

Unlike the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, Europa’s is not of biological origin. The surface-bounded atmosphere forms through radiolysis, the dissociation of molecules through radiation.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Atmosphere

Plus see :

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v373/n6516/abs/373677a0.html original paper abstract.

Whilst a quick search shows that Europa isn’t alone :

http://www.space.com/9599-saturn-moon-rhea-surprise-oxygen-rich-atmosphere.html

As it turns out that the Saturnian satellite Rhea has an oxygen atmosphere too!

****
PS. Can you do superscript (higher letters) here & if so how? Scientific notation, ten to the minus twelve times became 10-12 times on cut’n'paste transfer which I think rather alters the intended meaning!

Mars weird? Guess so. Personally I think the Earth is probably the weirdest place we know of. It just doesn’t seem that way because we live here. I understand that on earth you can find…

- Molten rock. Yes, rock actually melts.

But then there’s Io which has turned itself inside out through volcanism and continues to do so.

Venus may well be volcanic & cyrovulcanism occurs on Enceladus and Triton and maybe Charon too.

- Free oxygen molecules.

A trifle unusual that, I’ll grant you – but I think there’s also free oxygen streaming off Europa unless I’m mistaken. (Which I could be, natch.)

- Layers of rock, many meters thick, made out of the remnants of living creatures.

Could possibly also be true of Mars, Europa and maybe other places – we just don’t know yet!

- Sometimes liquid, or even frozen, water falls out of the atmosphere.

As it does on Titan (methane rain) & Venus (sulphuric acid rain, possible metal “snows” if I’m remembering past reading right) then there’s Pluto where the whole atmosphere boils off the surface, expands out and then freezes, snowing out back again out every Plutonian year!

- Pools of liquid water so deep that if you stood in them the water would actually be over your head*.
Mike
* Someone MUST get that.

That’s a Dune reference there right?

I understand what your’e getting at there however & generally like what you’ve said but just pointing out some minor points.

Strangeness / weirdness is relative.

@29. Gary Ansorge : Did you know that stuff will dissolve glass(if you wait long enough).

Umm.. no I didn’t. Thanks. That’s the something new I’ve learnt for today. Water dissolves glass eh? Wow, I must clean my windows and wash my glass cups less often! Good excuse that.

@17. Joseph G : I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars); I highly, highly recommend it.

Seconded by me. Those are awesome books indeed – very high on my favourites list with lots of good astronomy in them too.

When I was a kid I expected to see people land on Mars in my lifetime – probably around the late 90′s & by 2010 at latest. Now, well I still *hope* to see that but I’m nowhere near as confident & I fear I’ll have to live a *lot* longer to witness it. Sigh.

Yes! The Mars trilogy is fantastic! I stumbled across Red Mars at a used book store and finished reading it that same weekend. Then quite some time later I found myself at yet another used book store and they had Green Mars and Blue Mars.

Pictures like this really show how something can be so familiar, yet so foreign. If humans ever make it to Mars, I can only imagine what it would be like to get used to the different environment!

Or maybe the Fireswamp with its Lightning Sand and ROUSs?

OMG! FREE OXYGEN? That stuff is nearly as reductive as Fluorine. A nasty element for any hydrogen based life form to deal with,,,

“Pools of liquid water so deep that if you stood in them the water would actually be over your head*.”

Liquid H2O? Did you know that stuff will dissolve glass(if you wait long enough). I was in just such a concentration of H2O once. Fortunately, I was wearing an environmental suit at the time(scuba gear).

Gary 7

Aurora, -ae is feminine as expected, but chasma, -atis is neuter (because it’s a Greek loanword, and the Romans kept the original Greek grammatical gender).

IIRC, there was a fairly recent study that found that a small surface layer of free water molecules on ice is what makes it slippery, not pressure or friction.

- Molten rock. Yes, rock actually melts.
- Free oxygen molecules.
- Layers of rock, many meters thick, made out of the remnants of living creatures.
- Sometimes liquid, or even frozen, water falls out of the atmosphere.
- Pools of liquid water so deep that if you stood in them the water would actually be over your head*.

Mike

* Someone MUST get that.

Then it strikes me: my god, that’s really another world.

“Stev-o 2.0 here, and this is ‘Communications-dish-sledding down a 2 km ice escarpment!’”
*garbled cries and thunks on the radio*