Evidence Of Water On Mars

mondrian writes: "Space.com is reporting that NASA will announce next week it has found evidence of water on the Red Planet." And an Anonymous Coward writes: "The BBC is reporting that NASA has found unconfirmed evidence of water springs in the Valles Marineris, the deepest feature of the Martian landscape. Apparently this is liquid water, not the frozen water that most were expecting to be found at the poles. If confirmed, the search for Martian life will take a big change in direction because of this."

Comments

Eternal youth?

[chowda]

Could it be Ponce DeLeon(?) was on the wrong planet?
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www.chowda.net
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So...

[Goldberg's Pants]

They've found water on mars, and sugar in space. So basically the universe is made of sugar water then. :)

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Re:So...

[joemaller]

Now all we need is a coffee planet and I'm all set.

Glub, glub.

[Alex Pennace]

What a breakthrough! One shouldn't discount the possibility of little microbes swimming about in the water. A space probe would be in order, provided NASA figures out what a meter is.

More Info...

[LordStrange]

Nasawatch has some more good coverage of this.

Let's follow this to it's conclusions

[grappler]

I believe Dan Quayle had some very probing, worthwhile thoughts on this:

"There is water on Mars, which means there is oxygen. Since there is oxygen, this means we can breathe."

We need this person in a decision-making capacity where space exploration is concerned.

--
grappler

Re:Let's follow this to it's conclusions

[IHateEverybody]

Is that from a song?

Unfortunately, no. It's from a man who was once one bad Japanese entree away from being President of the United States.

Galapagos Squared

[shren]

If there were to be life in that pool, regardless of what evolutionary level, can you imagine what the benefits to science would be? Einstein's visit to the Galapagos yielded the results it did because the ecosystem was almost completely isolated from the outside.

Anything found in the pits of Mars would be completely isolated from Earth's biosphere. Not a couple dozen miles of ocean - completely isolated. Would it have DNA? Cell membranes? Mitocondria, which many theorize to be a symobite within the cell, almost a seperate lifeform? Does the lighter gravity of Mars let the cell size be larger? Does unicellular life have more possibilitites on Mars because of this increased cell size? Or is it all a question of surface area? Or, is there no life at all?

We can conclude nothing about life on other planets because we have only one sample. Earth. Surely it's a bargain to go to Mars and double the sample size, and if there were to be life on Mars, it'd likely be here.

Millions of questions, and maybe a few answers...

Re:Galapagos Squared

[rgmoore]

Anything found in the pits of Mars would be completely isolated from Earth's biosphere. Not a couple dozen miles of ocean - completely isolated.

Actually, this is not correct. We know that the Earth and Mars are capable of exchanging meteorites; we've found Martian ones here on Earth. It also turns out that such meteorites would not necessarily be sterilized by the heat involved in blasting them out of one planet and re-entering the atomosphere of another(!) and that bacteria could very easily survive being freeze dried and floating through interplanetary space for a few thousand years.

That means that the early Earth and early Mars were not biologically isolated. In fact, if we find life on Mars (or traces of extinct life) it's quite likely to be similar to life on Earth, at least to the extent of having the basic biological features (i.e. DNA, proteins, sugars, cell membranes, etc.) in common. This is because it's actually more likely that life started once on one of the two planets and was transported to the other than that it developed independently on both planets.

Re:Galapagos Squared

[babbage]

" Einstein's visit to the Galapagos..."

Ahh, was this before or after Dawrin quite his job in the Swiss patent office? I can never keep track which came first... ;)

Re:Galapagos Squared

[babbage]

"...more likely that life started once on one of the two planets..."

True if and only if the development of life is a rare, freak occurance. It's entirely possible, however, that it is a natural and even likely result of a series of reactions that occur constantly in primordial type conditions.

Amino acids, for example, seem to be abundant in the cosmos. They have been found in comets, for example, as well as dispersed in the interstellar gases. The late Dr Sidney Fox did an experiment in the fifties in which he showed that various mixtures of amino acids would, when gently heated in solution, gradually (minutes) coalesce into what he called "proteinoid microspheres" -- structures that in many ways resemble bacterial fossils found in precambrian rocks in Australia and northern Canada and Greenland.

These spheres may not count as life, of course, but they show many properties of it -- they grow, metabolize materials from their environment, reproduce, respond to stimuli, etc. The main thing that divides them from life forms as we know them today is the lack of RNA -- it just isn't present here. But otherwise, these spheres seem, to me at least, to be a very likely precursor to life as we know it.

What's really interesting to me is that these spheres are really easy to produce -- mix, dissolve, bunsen burner for a minute or so (a catalyst only -- heat isn't required but it speeds things up considerably), then go get some lunch. By the time you get back, the solution will be filled with the things. The only reason that these structures aren't found today is that, being protein, they're food to other organisms so they never last long enough to fossilize. But, I think there's ever reason to believe that they can and probably will be found in abundance wherever the conditions are right. All that's needed is a pool of brackish water and time; Mars has had plenty of time, and now it seems like it has the water as well. My guess is that structures of at least this complexity are going to be found in abundance when we get there.

Maybe now we'll finally see some progress towards getting people up there, and on a semi-permanent basis at that. This kind of exploration is going to take a lot longer than the "footprints & photos" type stuff we did on the Moon...

Re:Galapagos Squared

[babbage]

This got a five score for being informative? Eh??? Maybe I wasn't playing it with too straight of a face after all :)

Re:Galapagos Squared

[TheSync]

While it is true that you get amino acids when you subject a mixture of simple hydrocarbon gasses to heat and/or electricity, the ones you get are the easiest ones to make. There are other amino acids that are more energetically complex that cannot be made, and no one has ever generated anything that came close to being RNA/DNA.

What this experiment shows is that there is a rich amount of simple organic building blocks given a particular kind of early earth atmosphere chemistry (the details of which are still sketchy, other atmospheres could have dramatically reduced amino acid production).

The big question is how did these amino acids, and the tough-to-make amino acids come together to form the DNA/RNA based life we have today? The predecessors of organic life may have been inorganic clays that became self-replicating and only later began working with organic molecules. No one has a clue as to the real beginnings of life.

Re:Galapagos Squared

[SteveM]

Anything found in the pits of Mars would be completely isolated from Earth's biosphere.

As others have pointed out the Earth and Mars have exchanged meteorites. Earth has also sent probes to Mars. It is thus possible that any life we find on Mars originated on Earth.

A microbe from Earth was fom on a Surveyor lander by the Apollo astronuats (sorry I don't have a reference). Thus we know microbes can survive in space and make the trip to Mars. It is not clear that they could survive the decent through the Marian atmosphere. And such spacecraft are routinely sterilized these days.

But the possiblility does exist that we have contaminated Mars.

Steve M

the obvious

[iso]

people seem to be missing the obvious mix here: sugar + water mean only one thing: we can now make Kool-aid in space.

- j

Big news for space fanatics

[Alpha State]

Hopefully this will mean far more interest in the exploration of Mars. In fact I would go so far as to predict that this discovery makes a manned mission to mars in the nearer future far more likely, not to mention easier.

And if life is found (which seems quite possible considering the strange places micro-organisms have been found), goverments around the world will be slavering to try to get their hands on a possible new biological weapon. Er.. I mean, to try to find out where it came from and whether it's related to life on Earth, of course.

Look Deeper

[zivzulander]

Come on, folks. This is NASA's bid to continue it's funding. Let's be serious here. We live in an era when American students rank 15th in the world in Math/Science/Knowledge in general. The adult population isn't much better. Most people will say "...why don't we solve the problems here on earth, first?!! " Politicians (thou great comptrollers of the Almighty Public Pursestrings) want votes and will gladly agree in order to get them. In a political environment like this, if you want to continue funding space research, you got to come up with things that can get you on the from page of the tabloids:

HEADLINE: NASA FINDS OCEAN ON MARS! PLANS TO EXPAND NEW HAWAII RESORT!

This is just a sad truth. For NASA to get to Mars, we need a space station and a moon base. This is going to take time, money, a lot of political schmozzing, and more time. Thus, they got to keep the fire stoked.

Re:Look Deeper

[paul r]

A moon base and a space station aren't needed.

A moon base would just be an extra gravity well to go in and out of on a trip to Mars. It doesn't buy you anything in terms of making the trip any faster or cheaper. Conceivably you could use it if you never wanted your ship to come back to earth but just getting to Mars won't need it.

A space station is about the same though perhaps a bit more useful. The thing that you have to remember is that you have to get things to the station one way or another. Whether it comes up on your ship or another one it's not any cheaper to get it from the station. You might as well just loft it up there before and rendezvous with it a bit later.

What would really be helpful is a heavy lift rocket. We used to have them in the apollo era but NASA let their last two new ones (atlas class I believe) rust unused in front of some NASA buildings. That would let us get bigger payloads off to Mars.

Re:Look Deeper

[gargle]

I saw this debate between Al Gore and Bradley sometime back (when Bradley was still in the running). A member of the audience asked whether either of them would commit to sending a manned mission to Mars if they were elected President. Al Gore said (in his typical, sleazy, spineless crowd pleasing way) something to effect of "There are much more important things here on Earth, like medical care (the pet topic of the time)." But what took the cake was the hearty round of applause the audience gave him for this statement.

Re:Look Deeper

[ZanshinWedge]

do shut up.

I hate the "let's settle everything here on Earth." line. It's lame. First off we never will settle everything here on Earth, nor should that be our main concern. If we concentrate solely on survival, making sure every human on planet Earth is well-fed, clothed, and safe from danger. What have we become? What would we give up for this? Our art? Our exploration of the unknown? Our soul? That which makes us human and not animal? Second, far more money is spent on wellfare, social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment, and other social services than are spent on space exploration. In fact, the amount of money spent by the US government every year on "helping humans on planet Earth" is probably far more than has EVER been spent on space exploration, including the Apollo program.

Currently there is a little robotic spaceraft orbiting Mars. This spacecraft is called the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). It cost about as much to build, send to Mars, and operate as 1 or 2 top of the line fighter jets. It's entire cost is less than one dollor for every person in the United States (this is not on a yearly basis, this is a fixed one time cost that pays for the entire multi-year mission of MGS). Personally I think this is a very small investment for something that gives us so much information about the majesty and diversity of even our little corner of the universe, what the chances for life are in the rest of the universe, and even what it means to be human.

If you won't give your dollar entrance fee to this great exploration (actually it's more like half a dollar), then I'll gladly take up your share.

Additionally, I would like to point out that we do not need a moon base, a space station, warp drive, flux capacitors, or what-all to get to Mars. There are very good designs that can allow us to send humans to Mars for well under 40 billion dollars (US). This seems like a lot of money, but keep in mind that this is the whole cost (including adjustments for expected cost overruns, etc., worked out over over the length of such a program, this comes to less than 4 billion dollars per year) and it pays for over a decade of exploration (and many person-years of people actually living on and exploring Mars!). The US spends somewhere near 300 billion dollars every year on defense, and over 1 trillion dollars every year on social security etc.

Re:Look Deeper

[torpor]

You happen to have a reference on social spending handy?

The Internet is a funny thing. Just this morning I was having a discussion with some friends about the Mars program, and why we need to put money into it, and the same tired old "we should feed people first" argument came up. I happen to *know* that we spend more on social programs than we do on the space program, but I don't have any hardcore references.

So, you got any? I'd really like to continue this discussion with my friends, but it sort of went flat when I couldn't produce any hard evidence. They both seemed shocked that I'd even consider that we spend trillions of dollars on social programs...

Re:Look Deeper

[jafac]

Maslow's Hierarchy.

Food and Shelter are a bit higher priority than Self-Actualization.

-
Also, when space exploration is done by greedy government contractors who don't really give a rat's ass about the science, and are more interested in bilking taxpayers with behind-schedule and overbudget projects - it kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the propaganda that it was all about exploration and advancement of humanity, when really it was a pissing contest between the Soviets and the US, as in, we can lob more and bigger nukes than you can.

Personally, I'm all for humanity exploring space, and expanding to the stars, but I really think that as a race, we have a whole buttload of growing up to do first.

If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!

You go to school in Kansas???

[child_of_mercy]

Einstein's visit to the Galapagos?

perhaps you meant Darwin?

Re:You go to school in Kansas???

[FreeUser]

Of which the school system in Kansas is a shining example, a school system in which evolution is no longer required to be taught (and hence won't be, as it is considered "controviersial" by the religious right despite mountainous piles of evidence supporting it).

What it means...

[krystal_blade]

If you think about it for a minute, the bed of this water would be THE ideal place to gain information on Mars.

That water probably follows a high tide/low tide like we do, (maybe with not as much enthusiasm, but hey)... Which will erode the rock and strata around it, giving us an excellent way to guage the planets evolution. Just like we do with our ice core samples in Antarctica.

Given a lack of Oxygen in the atmosphere, and much of it tied up in an iron oxide mineral (hence the color red), theres a good possibility that IF anything died in that water, it would be preserved for quite some time.

Now that we have a starting point, we can start searching for water migratory patterns from and to that body... Discovery of underground springs, sedimentary layers, and possibly even point to an extinct water cycle on that planet. With a river cutting channels through rock, the study of that planets formation will become much easier, as (just like earth) you can begin to add plate tectonics into the picture sooner. Underground springs and aquifers could, using nanotechnology, be explored providing a map of the martian underground.

krystal_blade

Life: Good possibility...

[NoWhere Man]

If they really have discovered H2O on the planet Mars then the possibility of life being there is extremely high. This doesn't mean little green men, but microscopic organisms. Only sure fire way to prove it is to successfully send something over there to take readings. And we haven't been to successful with that. So its all a question of when.
Maybe by the time we do, those little microbs will have evolved into little green men.

WTF? I Submitted This 5 Hours Ago And Was Rejected

[Phrogman]

I submitted this story, with a link to this brief article 5 hours ago and it was rejected. I don't want to whine, but its a shame to see the same story posted as news HOURS after it broke, but quoting a different website.

The only effective difference between the posting on Spaceref.com and Space.com is the fact that the former is more cautious about what is effectively still a rumour, and the later is willing to declare it fact when we won't actually know most of the details until they make the official announcement.

Message from Mars

[quintessent]

The following message was received from a radio telescope in South America and decoded using a massive experimental cluster of Palm computers:

Hello. This is Mars. We noticed you've been looking at our water. Feel free to visit, but be prepared to pay our very expensive water park entrance fees. Also, there will be an airport fee assessed for each passenger landed on our planet.

By the way, that last probe you tried to land here is in our custody. We already patented spacecraft 4,000 years ago, and we will naturally expect to collect royalties on the numerous patent violations you have committed over the last few decades.

In addition we have noticed several transmissions made by past probes of sounds and images which had been previously copyrighted.

Finally, we have taken note of the large amounts of space junk produced by your planet. As 90% of our population are attorneys, they have really been looking forward to such an attractive source of lawsuit revenues.

Please enjoy our planet. Bring your own sunblock, and try not to pollute the water.

If We Find Microbial Life...

[istartedi]

...there will always be a nagging doubt about where it came from. I mean, what if we didn't sterilize one of our previous probes properly?

Now, the first thing that leaps to mind is that they would be able to recognize the DNA of the microbes as being either common to Earth or not. OTOH, how fast could Earth microbes mutate to adapt to Mars?

For that matter, how do they sterilize probes anyway? Is it really safe to assume that the cold vacuum of space kills all microbes?

So, I hope they find some really funky 3-eyed lungfish flapping around in the mud down there. Then we'll know for sure.

Re:If We Find Microbial Life...

[rgmoore]

Now, the first thing that leaps to mind is that they would be able to recognize the DNA of the microbes as being either common to Earth or not. OTOH, how fast could Earth microbes mutate to adapt to Mars?

This might be harder than you think. There's some reason to think that Martian and Earth life developed once and was transported between planets, so there should be some similarity. OTOH, that's going to be pretty slight, since it happened billions of years ago, while even rapidly mutating bacteria couldn't change that much in less than a century.

For that matter, how do they sterilize probes anyway? Is it really safe to assume that the cold vacuum of space kills all microbes?

Actually, sterilizing a space probe is pretty tough, but being really sure that it's been completely sterlized is much harder. To sterilize it, you just sterilize each piece independently and assemble them in a sterile environment. To detect any bacteria that are living on the things can be quite difficult. A couple of people in my group at work are actually collaborating with the people at JPL on approaches to confirming that the spacecraft are actually sterilized. The head of the group over at JPL has a cool title (I can't remember it exactly) like "Chief of Planetary Protection". They just got done presenting on the topic at the meeting of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.

NASA and Conspiracy

[Hrunting]

No one else seems to have thrown this out, so I figure I may as well. Does it seem odd to anyone else that at a time when the Mars program is coming under attack from all sides for ineptitude and wasting taxpayers' dollars, NASA releases this startling evidence?

And, in case you didn't read the article, they're not finding rivers, lakes, or even pools. They're talking about some seepage, either from the floor of very deep canyons or the sides of cliffs in said deep canyons. Not be over cynical, but NASA has a hard time locating a probe correctly on the surface of Mars. Is it really accurate to say that they can detect tiny amounts of seepage? I have a feeling that these findings are quite ambiguous and one possibility is that they're seepage, but it's neither the only nor the most likely of possibilities. Couple that with the extreme thinness of the Martian atmosphere (which prevents liquid water from existing at the average elevation) and the fact that the atmosphere is not that much thicker in the canyons and you have the makings for an incredible disappointment the likes of which haven't been seen since Viking.

But leave it Slashdot to blow it out of proportion. Perhaps we should wait until NASA actually makes the statement until we make plans for wakeboarding on a foreign planet, no?

Re:NASA and Conspiracy

[sgt101]

disappointment the likes of which haven't been seen since Viking.

What? Viking was a triumph.

Honestly, people who see a disappointment in the stagering acheivement of sending a 60's tech era probe 90'odd million miles and then soft landing it and then getting it to do experiments, essentially by clockwork and to cap it all, just to prove that it wasn't a fluke, doing it again ;are beyond redemption.

You sad little freak of nature.

Re:Slashdot: The Fountain of Knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

*Grin*

The above post should be read to the tune of Baz Lehrman's "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen" speech.

Insightful, yes, funny, but when you're 11, you shouldn't be reading on /. all day. Go out and program! Write your own version of Pac-Man, complete with homing missiles, explosions, and profuse gore.

(Rant: )

Once you start on Slashdot, there's no going back. You start getting Karma, then you start craving more. First you post stuff that's insightful, maybe informative... after a while it trickles down to a few points of "interesting" here and there. "5"'s become rarer and rarer, then you do the unthinkable.

You resort to humor. All out "hope they don't think this is a troll", karma-whoring humor, the kind that only flies on Slashdot.

And before you know it, Slashdot is your browser's home page, and it starts taking up all of your free time. All of a sudden, there's precious little time to program, and you can forget about keeping your pretty GPA above C-level :-).

I broke 90 today. Karma that is. Weeks ago I've stopped reading /. all the time, but the Karma keeps pouring in. I feel dirty. I'm a karma whore. I've only been on this frickin' forum since November, and I'm at 90+ karma. I could troll all day and all night for a week and still post at (Score: 2) by default.

I've moderated 6 times, mostly on weeks when I was too busy to post.

People think I'm funny, insightful, interesting (and overrated, but those moderators suck! ;).

These are presumably rational adults, and I'm not even 18!

It's with this in mind, that I've decided to take a vacation from Slashdot. That means checking /. no more than three times a day. Three shall be the number of the checkings, and the number of the checkings shall be three. Check thou not 4, neither check thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out!

Okay... sorry, just letting off steam.

And that also counts checking my "User Info" to see how much Karma I've gotten. Honestly, the stuff's pretty much useless once you reach 25, and can post at Score: 2. Of course, it's always nice to have some padding in case the moderators get bitchy.

And no more than 1 post a day from me, either. Maybe two if I'm on a roll. But that's it, except on days ending in "y". Then three's the limit.

I'm gonna sit down and program, play video games, go with friends to see movies, maybe get a <gasp> j-o-b, and maybe find a like-minded member of the female species to play videogames with, or whatever it is you're supposed to do with the opposite sex.

I'm going to code a decent game or two this summer. Maybe just one if I actually succeed at finding that elusive MOS. (You can bet your ass they don't hang out in chat rooms!)

I'll update my personal web page. Read more books. (An even 50/50 between reference manuals and sci-fi/fantasy novels).

Just as long as I can refrain from posting to Slashdot. Hey, maybe this means that I can finally disable cookies on my browser. (Mozilla's still crashy, even M16, so I can't use it for day to day stuff. M13 was good, though, and I did use that as my main browser for a time.)

Maybe I'll even update my Sourceforge project.

Whatever I do, I've just got to stay clear of this forum... it's addictive. As one reader's sig says, "I miss my free time, Rob". I agree so wholeheartedly it's not even +1, funny anymore.

I do have a suggestion, though. Weight the karma based on the posts you're trying to achieve.

If you think too many people are clowning around, make a "funny" post worth .5 karma and an "informative" post worth 1.5. If you think it's getting to dry, post a silly story and reverse the above. Change it around, but keep posters aware of the current settings.

And get rid of that damned "overrated" markdown. Moderators should be given better tools than "overrated" to articulate exactly what is wrong with that post.

Finally, kudos to the best change I've seen in /., that is the change of the default threshold from 0 to 1. ACs (and, yes I'm being hypocritical right now, but bear with me) keep getting lamer all the time.

So, I'm out of here for a while... tomorrow I'm going with a group of close friends (some of whom are actually, Females, to see Titan A.E., regardless of what Jon Katz may think of it [IMO, Katz himself is proof that just because someone bashes something/someone, it doesn't mean that they deserve that criticism.] Jon, kudos for Hellmouth and Geeks, both of which I strongly identified with. Keep cranking out stuff like that, and leave movie reviews to videogame-playing, anime junkie coder types like CmdrTaco :-).

And a big kudos to the Geeks In Space. Love the show (and no, I'm not taking a vacation from listening to GiS! Crank out that episode 31!)

Ahh... in the morning I get to decide whether to use SDL, Clanlib, or GGI for my game. So many choices, so little time. And, of course, it'll be GPL'ed so all y'all can enjoy it :-).

Good night, Slashdot. See you less often, for the time being.

But please don't take it personally. (It's not you, it's just me... I think I need more space... it's too much of a commitment... can't we just be friends? ;-)

Feel free to moderate me into oblivion, or to leave it at the default AC score of 0. It really makes little difference to me, and honestly the impact you'd be making either way is negligible. Nobody reads at zero anyway, unless they want to see posts like this one.

Perhaps we need to get rid of "topics" as they're known, and have a giant message board for all stories. That could get interesting.

Your poster geek-in-training, the kind who's going to keep free software alive as the old demigods fall off the 'Net... signing off.

Forget the Kool-Aid

[Hewligan]

Look, everyone here seems to be thinking suger + water = Kool-Aid. This is all well and good, but there are bigger issues at stake. The real issue is: If we can find some intergalctic yeast, we can turn the universe into one gigantic brewery. Now that's practical science. Suger + water + yeast = FUN!

Re:goddamnit "its conclusions" .. "its", not "it's

[Trepidity]

Do you ever see words such as "their's", or "her's"? Then how in the name of Hell can you possibly think that "it's" is appropriate in this context?

The problem is that, unfortunately, I do see words such as "their's" or "her's" a lot lately...probably for the same reason that I see "it's" used incorrectly a lot (and probably by the same people).

People, Plurals and possessives do not have apostrophes. Thank you.

Serious Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

If water is to be found on Mars, especially liquid water then there may be a hope for life on the red planet yet. However, for life to survive this liquid water must be fairly stable, in other words it cannot be freezing and evaporating but must remain liquid for extended periods of time. Considering the annual mean temperature of Mars it is very doubtful that this could be the case, but then who knows. Life has turned up in some interesting spots on the earth that no one every thought could happen. Just my two cents...

Nathan P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
Domains for $15

Re:Serious Implications

[garoo]

Well now, I wouldn't entirely agree with that. I'd totally agree that if this water was prone to evaporating entirely then there could certainly be a problem, but I wouldn't think that merely freezing would be so annoying- it seems that simple organisms can normally survive merely being frozen.

So if you had organisms that had evolved there previously, and they were relatively simple creatures (anything up to bacteria, I'd guess, nothing really sophisticated) they would survive being frozen.

I'd really like to meet a Martian bacterium. Anything that could survive on this dehydrated, frozen planet (humidity equivalent of a hundredth of a millimeter of rainfall according to NASA) must eat sulphur and iron oxides for breakfast...

If there ever was life, I'd expect to find some evidence of it. It's not easy to sterilize anything, assuming it had a chance to evolve in the first place... and even if they are all dead, maybe we'll find them encased in resin somewhere (Jurassic Park II: They're Back, and This Time, They're Martian).

Re:Serious Implications

[Reggyt]

IMO life on Mars is possible. We have here on Earth, many single celled organisms living in places which only a few years ago were considered sterile.

Your statement about the stability of water is fair, though to my knowledge of life here on Earth, freezing is less of a threat to life than dessiccation.

Another significant thing about this discovery and the recent discovery of simple sugars in interstellar gas clouds (Slashdot post today ); is the theories describing the introduction to earth of the chemicals of life by meteorites are now being rethought as I type. It would appear that the sugars and maybe other more complex organic molecules where present when The Earth was first formed.

This has interesting consequences.

[Nicholas Vining]

One of the more interesting ramifications of this and the sugar article is that it shows just how much we can learn about space without ever actually going there ourselves.

The water was discovered by an orbiting satellite, and the sugar was discovered by analysing radio emissions, of all things. So we can prove that it's there without actually looking at them ourselves.

Moral of the story: It's very possible that funding Space Exploration with people isn't as important as funding cosmological research, which seems to get results far beyond anything we could imagine. The fact that we can discern that there's sugar in the center of the galaxy and water on Mars when we can't even travel there is really impressive.

Besides which, if we sent an astronaut to Mars they'd probably get his height wrong. :)

Nicholas

Possibly Already Contaminated

[Greyfox]

Apparently it's currently next to impossible to guarantee that a spacecraft will not carry terrestrial contaminants. It's entirely possible that our previous probes to Mars may have contaminated the environment there. If we find life there, we can't really be sure it didn't originate here.

That's probably why the martians keep shooting down our spacecraft...

Re:Possibly Already Contaminated

[Dreamweaver]

Sure, except that we've not landed anything in any of those places, or even near them, and the soil would have about the same effect on earth bacteria as bleach..


Dreamweaver

Re:Possibly Already Contaminated

[TrevorB]

That's not 100% true. We can probably be pretty sure that if the life is dramatically different than Earth life now, that:

1) The life did not come from Earth
or
2) The life did not come from Earth recently

Where recently is anywhere in the last 100 million years from now.

If any found life was not composed of DNA, that would be an extremely strong indicator that it evolved on Mars. If it did have DNA, but was rather different, either it came from Earth by metoer depost, but a long time ago, or that Earth and Mars were biologically seeded from a common source.

Has anyone done calculations on how much DNA the Earth distributes/will distribute over time? Is it limited to space probes propelled out of the system by rockets, or do Earth meteors guarantee that a large amount of (dead) biomass leaves the system after we're all gone.

Actually, when you think of it, the largest amount of biological mass distributed into space by man today is likely from the excrement and urine of astronauts and cosmonauts. By now, there's got to be a few hundered kilograms of shit up there... :)

(I know, on Mir and Skylab, they store the stuff and ship it back down...)

Re:goddamnit "its conclusions" .. "its", not "it's

[grappler]

I know. Man, you're anal. I just have a habit of using an apostrophe when using the possesive form of a word, and of course in the case of "it", this is wrong. My mistake, lack of proofreading. Sorry.

On a side note - who moderated me down? That's not a troll. Look at my post in the last thread - that's a troll (and proud of it!) Dan Quale did actually say that, and I think it's relevant.

--
grappler

what?

[delmoi]

That was about the funniest thing I've read in quite a while.

Isolation is relative

[rgmoore]

It is possible that the building blocks of life are seeded in every solar system by comets that have passed through some of those organic/sugar cloud things mentioned in the other /. article.

It's certainly possible. There's been a fair bit of serious discussion that part of the reason that life started as rapidly as it did on Earth (basically about as soon as it could survive at all) because it was seeded with amino acids and stuff from comets. Those comets obviously coalesced from the same nebula that the solar system did, and thus the material in them antedates the solar system.

But there's a big difference between picking up organic matter from outer space and actually picking up living organisms! That organic matter was probably randomly distributed between the handedness of various asymetrical biomolecules. That means that the "choices" made by Earth life (i.e. left handed amino acids and right handed sugars) were just random. Deeper details, like the number and identity of DNA bases, amino acids, etc. could be radically different and still support viable life.

In contrast, life transported from one planet to another would not just retain its choices about which handedness of molecules to use, but also a host of other things. Some of those things include the basic structure of the cell, translation tables to convert DNA sequences to protein sequences, and even some amount of the sequence of highly conserved portions of the genome. Believe it or not, you could probably find actual genetic links between the Human genome and the genome of Martian bacteria if, in fact, they came from a common origin!

Contamination

[Anonymous Coward]

While contamination with earth-derived microbes probably should have been a concern with all landers, with the presence of liquid water, this becomes much more significant.

Probably quite a few microbes that might contaminate a lander would be able to multiply in that environment. And, while temporarily contaminating a small patch of arid soil in the middle of nowhere on Mars with previous landers might not have been a huge issue (there are lots of other patches of arid soil that can be studied and good reasons to believe that microbes would not spread easily), there are likely to be only very few spots where liquid water is present, and any contamination there would be very serious.

Let's hope NASA will be able to handle this one very carefully. Cheaper, faster, and better should definitely not be the guiding principle for an action of such profound importance.

you don't have to see the water...

[T.Hobbes]

.. you just have to see its effect. specifically, you can use your trusty ol' neutron spectrometer on the surface of an object (like the, say, mars), and - by analysing what bouced back to you, infer, as well as one can when orbiting, the existance of water. This has already been done with the lunar prospector, and could conciveably be done with the Mars Global Surveyor, as it is already mapping the surface from orbit.

all jokes about the polar lander aside, nasa has a pretty good record of knowing what they're talking about. if they do announce this, they deserve at least initial trust.

We do *not* need a space station, nor a moon base!

[torpor]

As I have so recently found out, neither of these things are needed to go to Mars.

Read Zubrins "The Case for Mars" for details on why.

Re: US Federal Budget

[ZanshinWedge]

An intro to the US Federal budget and a basic breakdown

The FY 2000 Federal Budget of the US

A citizen's guide to the federal budget (pdf), in there you will find a break down of US government spending: 15% National Defense, 17% non-defense discretionary (this is stuff like the NASA budget, spending on dams, national parks, federally funded cancer research, etc., basically everything that's not an entitlement or national defense), 27% social security, 11% interest on the national debt, 11% medicare, 6% medicaid, 6% "other mandatory" (federal retirement and insurance, unemployment, farmer subsidies, etc.), 6% "other means-tested entitlements" (stuff like foodstamps, children's lunch programs, etc.), 6% reserve spending social security reform. Total spending, about 1.7 Trillion dollars.

In the last link you will also find:
General science, space, and technology: 19 billion dollars
...
National Aeronautics and Space Administration: 14 billion dollars.

Note that the US spends 10 times more on Medicare alone than it does on NASA.

Also, note that this doesn't take into account spending of any individual states, which includes a substantial amount of spending on various "helping humans stuff".

ak

[Cally]

The picture used to illustrate this is unlikely to be what this rumour is about. It's a southern hemisphere crater; the BBC story is talking about the bottom of Valles Marineris.

As the Mars Global Surveyor's raw dataset is up on the web the assembled /. hordes should be able to identify something, perhaps. http://barsoom.msss.com/moc_gallery/watables/mc18- M04-wa.html is a list of images from the general region.

Enjoy !
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my

context map

[Cally]

context map of what /might/ be the general area.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my

Re:Dark Side of the moon...

[Maurice]

The Moon has a dark side with respect to Earth only. Otherwise it has a day, which is about 28 Earth days long. The day on Mars is longer than Earth's by something like half an hour.

Let's not jump the Martian gun.

[Shadowmist]

Mars has basically two temperature settings. Either chilly-temperate or damm freezing cold. If there was water on the bottom of Mariner valley exposed to sunlight it'd evaporate. If it's not exposed to sunlight, it's ice. The Hellas depression is the only place low enough in elevation for liquid water to exist for any period of time and as far as I know, not even ice has been detected.

It's the height of idiocy to use this as a basis for a mannned mission at this point. If despite what I said liquid water does exist, it'd make more sense to plan a Martian "Landsat" type program. Unlike the Moon, Mars is too far away and too expensive to actually send people without a very good reason to expect something other than what the Mariners, Viking, and Pathfinder have found to date. Not too mention that we've never landed spacecraft in territory that will present the kind of difficulties that Mariner Valley poses.

If it makes a case for Mars, it's for stepped up planetary science, not a monetary debacle of a manned mission with no more scientific merit than Apollo.

Life on Mars = Religion is a hoax?

[Xrkun]

I was wondering if anyone had any comments on this aspect of finding life on Mars. If there is life elsewhere, would that invalidate Christian dogma? I know this is a grey area. Will Christians simply deny the evidence like they do with evolution? Would they make up some excuse like they did for Y2K? Will they come out with a new revised edition of the Bible?

Genesis 1:15 and 3/4 "and God created planera on Mars and saw that it was good."

Re:Life on Mars = Religion is a hoax?

[darrenford]

Would they make up some excuse like they did for Y2K?

What excuse for Y2K? You are confusing Christianity with idiots. I saw alot of people with no ties to religion demonstraing the same Y2K stupidity. The TV Christians will latch onto anything that gets them air time. And they are no different than any other profession that relies on fear and doom. Why do you think the anti-virus companies screamed death & destruction? They were just as bad if not worse than the TV Christians.
Personally, I think that if you are going to believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing God (choose your capitalization), you would be stupid to think one little planet in the vast universe would be enough to keep him (choose your gender) busy.

Extraterrestrial booz

[roman_mir]

Sugar found in space, Water found on Mars - Production of cheap interstellar alcohol will create need for more AA groups!

Life likely on Mars

[Barbarian]

Here's an interesting point: When people talk about whether water would be liquid or solid on mars, they're referring to pure, 100% distilled water, not brine or any water with salts in it. When there are dissolved substances, the freezing point is depressed, so water could be -10 C during the day and still liquid.

Also, on Earth, there is a plethora of water below the surface, although you would not want to drink it. It's usually saturated in salts like calcium or sodium chloride, carbonates, and sulfates. However, even 10 km below the surface of the Earth, in hot conditions and high pressures, 0bacteria thrive in these conditions (as they do in the Hydrocarbon deposits as well).

Given that Mars has plenty of surface evidence of (geologically) recent free flowing water, the scientific community would be remiss to assume that subsurface water does not exist. It likely has a lot of brine belows it's surface, perhaps rich in Iron salts.

Also, there are moons of Jupiter, like Europa (which is basically 10 km of ocean from what we can see on the surface) and Ganymede (with a lot of hydrocarbons) where conditions that bacteria and simple one celled life require exist. Given that we have already learned that bacteria in hostile environments on Earth (Antarctica, for example, in very dry and cold conditions) can hibernate for millions of years, it's conceivable that rocks knocked loose from Earth from the occasional large meteor (i.e. asteroid or comet) could transport bacteria to Mars and elsewhere. I think that if life did not evole there, it was transported from Earth by this process (or perhaps even the other way). Some people have speculated that bacterial or similar life found on Mars or elsewhere within this solar system is completely different from that found on Earth -- I would postulate that it is probably no more 'alien' that what we might find in the ocean near black smokers, that big underice lake in Antarctica (can't remember the name), or a barren, cold, high altitude mountain.

--

Evidence of water on Earth?

[dsplat]

Using the same kind of instruments and analysis, can they find evidence of water on Earth. Then when we actually go look at the spot in question, is the water there? It seems like that would be a useful, and relatively inexpensive confirmation of the method used.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the location in the pictures is a good candidate for a landing site for an upcoming probe.

Remember your chemistry...

[TrevorB]

Remember also that the 0C Freezing and 100C boiling points of water are also a function of atmostpheric pressure. As pressure goes down, I think both these points go down, until they reach a triple point, and the freezing point and boiling point are the same thing. When the pressure is this low, there is no liquid water. You go straight from gas to ice, ice to gas.

I'm feeling crappy today and can't make it to my bookshelf. Can anyone go get a chemistry book and verify the temperature and pressure of the triple point of water? Does the freezing point of watter go up or down with decreased pressure (I don't recall at the moment, water has some seriously weird properties that make it unlike other liquids...)

Can water exist as a liquid with Mars atmospheric pressure? If so, over what range of temeratures?

Re:Remember your chemistry...

[chialea]

the real debate right now is whether it's the partial pressure of water vapor, or the total pressure of the apmosphere that makes a difference. if it's the total pressure, it can pull it quite effectively over the triple point, especially in deep canyons, where the atmospheric pressure should be much greater than on the surface (and 3 meters in the air -- you get quite a nice gradient). I'm not sure which side of the issue I fall on (yet), but it's an interesting argument.

I'd post some references, but I'm a little busy :)

Lea

Re:goddamnit "its conclusions" .. "its", not "it's

[grappler]

I didn't have it word for word, since it was from memory, but here's the full quote:

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/11/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

http://www.realchange.org/quayle.htm

--
grappler

Re:goddamnit "its conclusions" .. "its", not "it's

[SMN]

Wrong. The plural of acronyms (in reality, we're using the exacmple of MS more as an acronym than as an abbreviation) and numbers always use an apostrophy. That's why we have an apostrophy in "the 70's," for example.

I wish I had a site I could refer you to this, but I don't. I just know that I corrected my own English teacher for this, who promptly looked it up and found that I was correct. Trust me.

it hasn't crashed since then

[delmoi]

I used to get uptimes of several days, however recently I've been rebooting more often.

But, if you want to judge me based on my computer's uptime, go right a head. It simply means that you are not the kind of person who's oppinion matters.

Dissenting opinion (the above is NOT flamebait!)

[knghtbrd]

First, the above isn't flamebait. It's a valid concern for the way in which some may view any such discovery of microbial life.

Now, I shall offer my (dissenting) opinion:

While it is quite possible to suggest life found on Mars may indeed have come from Earth, its existance on Mars today would have a very profound impact. If it came from Earth, it likely didn't come from a probe. Another post I read above notes that Earth and Mars have collectively traded cosmic objects in the early days of both planets. It is quite likely that microbial life may have gotten started there. Or such may have started on both planets or on Mars and travelled here or .. well, we'll never know for sure, hence your belief there may be such doubts.

What is exciting, however, is that if even microbial life is found on Mars, we will have discovered life on Mars! If it came from Earth, so be it - it is life nonetheless and that says a lot. Such a discovery would mean that on the only two solid planets we have gotten a good look at, we found life on both.

A bit more perspective: Scientists agree that if Earth, one of billions of billions of planets out there contains life, somewhere out there is another planet that contains life. Arguably, a planet whose life is intelligent, possibly as much as or moreso than we are. But the chances are considered to be low considering that the universe seems somewhat hostile to life given that planets like Mars and Venus are extremely common and planets like Jupiter even more.

If there's life on that big red dirtball, those odds of finding more established life out there go up. We think there may be water on Europa, but that's probably several decades from confirmation. Life on Mars may be confirmed before some of the people reading this are out of school.

The scientific community is almost positive we aren't alone. Proving that will be cool. (I believe it's a question of when, not if.) Proving that life is common enough to be found right next door is even better.