New image of the leak, before & after:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/marswater_mgs_big.jpg

By "waking" Mars, do you mean heating up its core? Do you want to get the core spinning like Earth's might, to charge up the magnetic fields? Because seriously, even a big meteor won't resurrect Mars's tectonics. Even if there's heat transfer, it won't be anything near what it would take to get it going again like it was, and we'd have to do it again eventually. That won't be a popular action, if Mars is populated. This is, of course, assuming we won't in the future discover some new un-heard-of scientific principles that completely change the way we look at these things. I'm talking on the scale of, "Whoa, we're not the center of the universe? The Sun doesn't circle the Earth? Earth is round?" It could happen.

Ok. My last post to this thread will be :

"Get your ass to Mars!"

"But first, beat the crap out of Sharon Stone!"

sure looks wet to me... and as someone or another said... the solar system is chock-full of freaking water... so I don't get the "controversy" actually. if there's water, it surely can be heated within Mars and under certain conditions it could be expelled. big deal... now, back to practical things like slamming xith roids into planets.

erm... you smoke lots of pot Chaos? we were talking about radioactive heating, eh. crash a xith roid into it? You were the first to reference building a reactor weren't you? and what's this about a round earth? the earth is by no means "round" (and I will be generous here and internally translate that to spherical). the earth is in fact an oblate spheroid, and a lopsided one at that. Just you go try kicking an oblate spheroid around, if you want to see the difference.

And we don't need no stinking magnetosphere. (plus... I'd like to see some evidence that mars doesn't have one. but none of that newscientist crap eh... mr. caulfield is surely right... death to all tabloid scientists! as we talk about terraforming... hehe)

so now.... the thread dies nonsensically just as i predicted. (maybe?)

Evil Flying Monkeys of the world... Unite!

it depends on the definition of running water. does one molecule moving on the ground count?

No, that's "Walking Water", VN. (Hi, by the way)

Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2006, from Bad Astronomy

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/27/the-top-ten-astronomy-images-of-2006/

I like #7, and #5 blew me away.

(#2 is on topic)

Dude, the one of the shuttle & ISS against the sun (#5) is simply outstanding.

And, I had the #1 image as my screen desktop at home for a while. That's a great image!

Thanks for the post, Whistler.