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Little Green Plants on Mars?
moorhens writes "The BBC is reporting the first evidence for chlorophyll on Mars. Without chlorophyll, plants' green pigment, and photosynthesis, life on Earth would be limited to deep ocean volcanic vents and politicians."
But they are happy to use a non-peer reviewed press release to publicize their findings. The potential of plant life on Mars is amazing, but the way this news was released is pretty irresponsible.
Dammit, can we just send some people to Mars already? All this work with robots going around and looking at Mars and analyzing the soil and air and whatever is impressive but we'd learn a lot more if we could just send some people out there and have them do the collection and analyze everything and bring some of it back with them. People can travel a lot farther than the little robot rovers can and they can do it a lot more dependably and there's a lot more that can be done to analyze Martian soil and air here on earth rather than on site. Argh! Stupid polititians not giving stupid NASA enough money to build a stupid spaceship to go to stupid Mars. Well, hopefully this discovery will spur someone to go to Mars. Well, unless they end up not finding conclusive data.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
... but maybe you were just oversimplifying, since lawyers are larval politicians.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The fact that four out of six possible matches are on the spacecraft makes me really skeptical about the whole thing. Moreover, from reading the article, one might think they took just "any old picture" from the mission and ran it through some simple filter algorithms, to see if they found something interesting. Of course, such methods can be very valuable tools, especially at large scales, but this looks like a bit of overinterpretation to me. Plus chlorophylls?!? Come on, shouldn't we be able to detect those from orbital images or even Hubble, especially if they are so abundant in the soil?
--A Polar bear is a Rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
Personally, I would like to see a truly international effort to do this. After all, it just costs USD 4 billion for the first mission and 2 for each consecutive one (the "Mars Direct" program). That shouldn't really be such a big problem on an international budget...
Anyway, I think the Chinese space program must have aspirations of this kind already. It would be such a huge PR win for them.
--A Polar bear is a Rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
I'd be extremely interested to see their 'spectra' of the chlorophyll patches. I've worked with broadband astronomical imaging for a few years, and even straight forward accurate photometry can be fraught with subtle systematic effects due to the nature of the camera and the filters. My money is on scattered light from a combination of the sun-camera-rock position causing the measured colours to go skew, or an inorganic mineral with a similiar response curve to chlorophyll.
Of course, I can't go and look at the paper for myself because there is no refereed and accepted paper - releasing it as a press release when the work hasn't been peer-reviewed is just fucking stupid.
Sloppy. Damn sloppy.
Dr Fish
All of the detections occurred close to the camera. ... Close examination revealed that four of the cases occurred on the Pathfinder spacecraft itself.
I bet we just brought cloryphyll to Mars. I wonder if anything will come of it?
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
Looking for a particular spectral signature probably just means looking for pixels with RGB in a certain domain. Maybe they have some other channels too: IR and UV from detectors alongside the camera (that might explain the 'image registration' issues), so they're looking at multispectral images. Either way: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and pixels of a particular colour are barely even interesting - let alone extraordinary. Sounds like yet another scam to get funding to me.
-- SIGFPE
Since four of the six spectra were located on the pathfinder itself, the area around the site could have been contaminated by the little rover running around. It wouldn't take that much contamination to get a false reading.
The article says the claims come from Dr. Carol Stoker of Nasa's Ames Research Center. This is Nasa, so I wouldn't be so quick to shoot down these extraordinary claims. Nasa sent real men to the moon. It's not like they're claiming to have developed an anti-gravity device.
mmmmm..... cant wait to taste some Mars plants..... or even better some Mars animals........ mmmmmmmmm.....
I bet we just brought cloryphyll to Mars. I wonder if anything will come of it?
Wouldn't that be a hoot if the Pathfinder mission inadvertantly brought some terran photosynthesizing organism to Mars? Universities and think tanks having sunk untold amounts into the research and study of terraformation just to have it take place where NONE of them would get the credit?
(* Moreover, from reading the article, one might think they took just "any old picture" from the mission and ran it through some simple filter algorithms, to see if they found something interesting. Of course, such methods can be very valuable tools, especially at large scales, but this looks like a bit of overinterpretation to me. *)
It is not that much different than people who stare at images looking for faces, Snoopy, words, and other patterns. There are a couple of funky webpages devoted to "patterns" found by people with too much time on their hands using lander and orbiter photos.
I bet an Elvis image filter would turn up just as many matches.
People have been seeing "patterns" on Mars at least since the "Canali" days, where astronomers swore they saw strait, linear "canals" on Mars.
Too many false alarms WRT Mars.
Table-ized A.I.
(* Whether they work for NASA or not is irrelevent, really. NASA employs plenty of scientists, none of whom have much to do with sending people to the Moon or anything else in that vein. NASA's scientists are, on the whole, no better or worse than ..... *)
The statement you are replying to was meant to be humorous (and was IMO). You see, Nasa *did* actually spend money on some allegedly dubious anti-gravity research. Slashdot ran a story about it a month or so ago. Many classified the experements as no better than perpetual motion gimmicks.
Table-ized A.I.
here's a little theory i just thought up (that i'm sure is wrong, i just don't know why - yet):
in this article, they stated that they're looking at "two regions showed a chlorophyll signature in the soil around Pathfinder."
it seems to me that life (using earth as the only analogue) will evolve to fill it's surroundings. in the case of the earth, these are far reaching - from deep sea volcanic vents to below the earth's surface, etc. point being, life adapts in an attempt colonize new areas.
if there was life on mars now (which i *hope* is true, but i doubt for many reasons - this one included), would it not have expanded to be more than a couple of little patches accross a vast plain like this??
there are a few possibilities to reject this hypothesis, but none that i find convincing:
1) the *life* in question has just arrived/come into being, etc. or another way to put it is that it hasn't had time to radiate into the other areas yet.
i'm gonna use the 'what are the odds we showed up right when life started' argument against this here.
2) these two areas are 'special' in some way that they can harbour life, but not anywhere else on the plain.
as well as the 'what are the odds of us landing here' argument, i'd also like to point out the tenacity that life shows on earth to move into new ground - in this case (apparently) *very* similar to the two areas in question.
3) i'm sure there are other (and better) counter arguments, but i can't think of them so i'm asking you...
this post is not against this finding per se, it's more of a hypothetical question of:
"would we ever find tiny pockets of life on a planet (assuming sufficient time for life to evolve/expand)??"
Go Lakers!
The editor clearly did a poor job. The corrected version is below. In order to avoid introducing any editorial bias that might twist the author's intent, paragraphs where either included or deleted in their entirety. The only changes I made [in brackets] are three corrections of fact fully supported by later statements.
An analysis of data obtained by the Pathfinder mission to the Red Planet in 1997 suggests there could be chlorophyll - the molecule used by plants and other organisms on Earth to extract energy from sunlight - in the [Pathfinder spacecraft].
Researchers stress their work is in a very preliminary state and they are far from making definite claims.
A detailed analysis of the images of the landing site now reveals [four areas of the] Pathfinder that have the spectral signature of chlorophyll.
According to experts it might be highly significant - or could be just a patch of coloured [paint].
In Dr Stoker's study six regions of the Superpan matched positive for the chlorophyll signature.
Close examination revealed that four of the cases occurred on the Pathfinder spacecraft itself. But two regions showed a chlorophyll signature in the soil around Pathfinder.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I take back what I said about a scam. I had a look at the abstract of the poster on the web site. This is just a poster. This is no giant research project, it's just someone who's had the initiative to do a nice little analysis of old data and put up a poster about it at a conference. They're not making wild claims and all that's available online is an abstract. This is about as far from publication as you can get. This is truly terrible reporting by the news agencies.
-- SIGFPE
You are right, I conveniently ignored the initial investment in hardware (slight memory leak on my part!). However, the $50 billion you quote is not for the Mars Direct, but rather an Enhanced Mars Direct, a case of "double the size, double the cost". The initial investment should be between $20-$30 billion, with 2 billion per each mission (I am quoting Zubrin's book now, no more memory games!). This amounts to just 7% of the US military and civilian space budget.
--A Polar bear is a Rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
Chlorophyll wasn't invulnerable to huge lethal curie counts. With the surface radiation as high as it is I find it highly unlikely that ANY life exists on Mars. It would get cooked.
Two points--
Small one first: Pathfinder, as an intended lander, was heavily decontaminated to prevent it from carrying terrestrial organics. There exists a non-zero probability that it still carried some chlorophyll-bearing organisms, but the odds are small. The odds that it carried enough to be noticed are much, much smaller still.
Big point: spacecraft instruments are NOT lab instruments. While the spectrum from chlorophyll might be distinctive in the lab with a very precise spectrum, things get much hairier on a small spacecraft with mass and power limitations. Spectra in planetary science are often too poorly resolved to really uniquely identify the source. Generally, we use some knowledge of the surface characteristics to help narrow down the candidates. (For example, you can bet that the spectrum of Venus's surface has no water in it, so that's out as a surface material.) That some mineral might look, through bad luck and trick of data, like chlorphyll at the spectral resolution that Pathfinder managed doesn't seem that unlikely.
It would be quite funny if the Chinese hacked together a solution on this one, or maybe did a combined effort with the Russians.
Seems like the USA is the place everybody is holding back on the possibilities of space, it is the Russians who are up for opening up to tourism, the Chinese who have the big dream for their country, Europeans doing a solid commercial job of launching satellites down Guyana way.
Oh, Don't forget it is Yuri's night this Friday...