NASA Selects Mars Landing Sites

carstene writes "NASA has announced the finial landing sites for the upcoming mars rover missions. Looks like they are going looking for water in a dried lake bed and a promising site that looks like it contains hematite."

Comments

Re:Hematite?

[eggstasy]

If you remember the controversial meteor of martian origin that was found a while ago, you will also recall that the alleged signs of life were iron crystals of a kind that is usually, at least on Earth, only produced by bacteria.
Hematite is an iron ore. It's logical to assume they're looking for more rocks like that one, which could point towards the existance of life on Mars, past or present.

Re:Hematite?

[young-earth]

Check out the article which explains that researchers now

think that there is now abundant evidence that most and probably all of the magnetites in ALH 84001 formed because of shock heating of carbonate. Faceted magnetites resembling the supposedly biogenic magnetites are crystallographically oriented in the carbonate lattice and could not have formed inside bacteria. We infer that ALH 84001 magnetites differ from abiogenic terrestrial magnetites because terrestrial carbonates never experienced the unique impact history of ALH 84001.

So if NASA is looking for hematite in order to prove something, they'll just be proving that the rocks they found got banged around.

Somehow that seems like a colossal waste of time and money, so hopefully they have some more noble, or more useful, reason to pick that location.

Not biological

[barakn]

Gray hematite can precipitate out of hotsprings here on Earth, and spectroscopic evidence has been found of gray hematite on Mars. NASA is looking for evidence of ancient hotsprings on Mars, which would only point to liquid water, not life.