[extropy-chat] ASTRO: Water on Mars

[Robert J. Bradbury]

Kevin asked a question about water vapor on Mars.

I believe you should google on water/Mars/climate and look for an article
by Bruce Moomaw.  I think a month or two ago he went to an in depth
conference on the current understanding and wrote at length about it.

Apparently Mars may go through both orbital cycles (in terms of
distance from the sun) as well as shifts in its spin axis that
create rather different climates over long time scales (millions
of years?).  The result is that the "ice" caps tend to melt
and relocate their position on the planet.  During such events
there would tend to be a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere.
At this time however the atmospheric water vapor content is
very low (much lower than that over most deserts on Earth).

I'm not positive but I think the articles were on spacedaily.

Robert