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Evidence Of Water On Mars

Posted by timothy on from the ok-ok-enough-already dept.

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."

4 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Galapagos Squared by shren · · Score: 5

    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...

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    Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
  2. NASA and Conspiracy by Hrunting · · Score: 5

    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?

  3. you don't have to see the water... by T.Hobbes · · Score: 5
    .. 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.

  4. Life likely on Mars by Barbarian · · Score: 5

    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.

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