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Mars Rover Sniffs First Hint of Water?
mhw25 writes "It is reported that the Mars rover Spirit is already well into its scientific mission, and may be detecting hints of water. The mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer has returned its first image, with probable evidence of carbonates and hydrated minerals. We may know more after the rover rolls off its landing base, after making a 120 degree turn to avoid the airbag blocking its front ramp, to start analyses on soil from Thursday or Friday. An ongoing intrigue is already developing - a scientist reckoned that some of the soil around the airbag 'looks like mud, but it can't be mud'."
Where there is water, there may also be a brewery. These Martians may be eons ahead of us..
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An ongoing intrigue is already developing - a scientist reckoned that some of the soil around the airbag'looks like mud, but it can't be mud'."
In a bioengineering course I took once we were playing around with various materials prior to creating various cements and I found that many very fine grained ultra dry powders exhibited qualities one might presume were qualities exhibited in mud. Specifically, the appearance of folding up in waves like there were some bonding force holding things together when pushed. Applying various degrees of static charges to the materials appeared to amplify these effects allowing for clumping as well.
I am curious though as to why they dont think it could be mud if they are indeed suspicious of water being present?
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There is water on Mars. The ICE CAPS were first noticed about FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
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If there are martians, they're most certainly living underneath the unforgiving surface. I would love to see Rover snap a pic of someone peeking his head out from a hole in the ground.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
The rover may soon be the first to go mudbogging on Mars... So that is why Bush wants to go to Mars.
Water is believed to be a pre-requisite for life.
Well, that and a 1x4x9 ebon slab.
The coolest voice ever.
"It looks like mud, but it can't be mud.
I skimmed the article, and did not see it explained anywhere. Why, exactly, can it not be mud?
Thanks in advance!
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Isn't that what commets are primarily composed of? I fully expect H2O molecules to be present on Mars and every other planet. This should not be a suprise to anyone.
Mars lander stuck in mud. News at 11
Prediction for when the rover finally starts to rove: The good news: It finds water. The bad news: It sinks and vanishes in the mud.
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it is clear that it is very different from any of the three previous Mars landing sites explored by Vikings 1 and 2 and Pathfinder. For example, those plains all had about 20 per cent of their surfaces covered with rocks. Around Spirit, the figure is just three per cent.
Looks like our previous visits have made them clean up for company.
The coolest voice ever.
It's below freezing on the surface (no atmosphere to retain heat). Not to mention that whole thin atmosphere thing doesn't provide enough pressure to prevent liquid water from boiling away anyway.
Mud is water spatially mixed with soil, but not chemically bonded. It would freeze (as we saw in Boston, when they froze the soil for three years straight to prevent it from collapsing during the Big Dig).
--Dan
It looks like mud, but it can't be mud.
Yeah, just like that picture of a rock from mars looks like a face but can't be a face, and that picture of that smoke looks like the image of satan, etc...
So what if it just looks like mud? It's a freaking lo-res black and white photograph! I'll be intrigued when you say It feels like mud and is a mixture of soil and water, but it can't be mud!
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But it will probably turn out to be a mirage.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Oil that is, looks like mud but doesn't require water. First thing you know old Jed's a millionaire!
I've been looking around various sites, but mostly keeping up with news about Spirit through google news. What is THE best site for up to the minute reports?
Not to announce major scientific discoveries in the press before they have been properly peer-reviewed?
If they tried to keep it under wraps, the Area 51ers would be accusing NASA of a coverup. Besides, it's pretty tough to keep any sort of secret these days, and it's probably better to put out some bad info and have to retract it than having leakers with their own agendas putting out a distorted and fragmented view.
to conclusions based upon early data before the rover has even "hit the road." We'll be getting more and better data.
As an example. One of my geology profs was studying an outcropping of calcium-rich meta-igneous rock (meta basalt). He kept finding a mix of calcium oxalate minerals on the surface of the rock in numerous places, but couldn't understand how they would be a weathering product. Oxalate minerals are unusual in nature.
Then it dawned on him. Oxalates are common in kidney stones. He bought a live trap and captured several wild rats. Then he kept them in a lab and realized they like to urinate in the same place. What appeared to be a strange chemical weathering reaction was actually just evaporated rat urine.
Point is, first impressions may be incorrect and additional data and study leads to more accurate conclusions. Sometimes those later conclusions are more interesting (or comical) than the original hypothesis.
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Last I heard they'd found bound water, and the surface was a lot hotter than they expected it to be. In the last image release I notice they show a graph of the temperature (presumably up near the Pancam) at ~1m above the surface - the great thing about Mars' atmosphere is how quickly it get's cold the higher you get - i.e. very. Like, your feet could be warm and your head would be a solid block of ice.
:)
The kinda cool thing is the TES data shows a current temperature map at surface level - you notice at Gusev Crater (where spirit is, about 15S, 185W - so basically around halfway down the right edge of the picture) the temperature is somewhere around 0C, +/-10 degrees or so.
The *really* cool thing is, when they were getting ready to make the rover stand up and strut its stuff, they went through extra checks and testing on Earth because the landing site was a lot warmer than they expected - there's every chance that it's above 0 there, in fact, there's every chance that (on the surface at least) Spirit is enjoying much better weather than I am right now.
It's common knowledge that Mars' equator regularly gets up into the positive numbers, even up above 20c, the only real question as to the feasibility of liquid water in these regions is whether there is any ice left there to melt, or if it is all up at the poles (or underground). Due to the low triple point of water on Mars, and the theory that it's just coming out of an ice-age, there's every chance there is no liquid left around there to melt, but there's certainly a chance there is.
Fortunately, we have a rover up there that will be able to tell us for sure in a few days
Actually it would probably boil first. Freezing is a much slower process. The lack of atmospheric pressure would get to it long before the temperature ever did.
Big deal, mud on mars.. wake me up when the hot three-breasted mutant alien chicks are wrestling in it :)
All and all, I don't understand why a range of microscopes has not been standard issue on all Mars lander missions.
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Why not ask the prop guys?
...and not a scientist, I've always wondered...Why do we feel like all life *needs* water? Who's to say the martians don't live on nitrogen or uranium or plaine old red rocks? Or that they don't thrive on some yet undiscovered stuff.
/. :), but it always seems silly to me when NASA keeps says "we need to find the water to find the life!" Says who?
I know I don't have a clue what I'm talking about (hence posting to
Maybe the soil in the area of the rover was once mud (before it was frozen) and the bouncy air bags were so f**king hot when they bounced on the ground that it melted the mud and left funny patterns?
Of course... by now though, it'll be frozen again.
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Aren't there certain bacteria that can survive the long, harsh trip through space? What if they were attached since liftoff, survived the trip through space, survived the burn in the thin atmosphere, and wound up being deposited in a somewhat moist area? Even if there wasn't MUCH water, if there was SOME water, they could, in theory, manage to survive slightly under the surface. Even the tiniest petri dish could wind up with a breeding ground for life on Mars and so long as there's some atmosphere to contain the water and the gases emitted by the bacteria, it could be a spark for future life on Mars.
Sorry if I'm rambling illogically. I'm not well versed in the Martian atmosphere, so feel free to shoot my naive, young hopes down if I'm totally out in left field.
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I guess The Beagle got too excited on entry and wet all over the damn planet.
And I thought my dog could wizz for a long time...
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Not this old argument again (referring to several of the above posts, but /. won't let me simultaneously reply to several).
The permanent Martian ice caps are just that, water ice. They expand and shrink seasonally, with much of the winter increase being CO2 ("dry") ice. In the Martian summers the poles are too warm for CO2 ice, in the Martian winters, too cold for some of the atmospheric CO2 not to freeze out. (So yes, at any given time, one pole is mostly water ice, the other mostly (covered with) dry ice -- except in spring and fall when the CO2 is changing poles -- which is also when you tend to get planetary dust storms. Imagine that.)
This has been more or less known since some astronomer first pointed a spectrometer at Mars, and largely confirmed by subsequent observation and exploration.
The only real discussion is the percentages of same, and how much (if any) water or water ice is in the soil further from the poles.
-- Alastair
Oh, PUHLEEEZE. Not more lame conspiracy theories. Heck, maybe the lander is just out in AZ somewhere, eh?
/. community ranged across the entire bell curve, but this is a new low, even for here.
If you REALLY believe that the US govt could maintain a fiction on such a scale, without word ever leaking, then my posting this is probably a waste of typing.
If you want access to the raw data streams, file a FOIA request. Or go build a 'scope and listen to them for yourself. You can be _pretty_ sure the latter signals aren't doctored. Unless, of course, all this 'data' was simply pre-programmed before launch, right?
I knew the
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It would evaporate. IOW, vaporize. IOW, transition to gaseous form. This effect can actually be observed by boiling water at different altitudes. At sea level, water boils at around 100C. At higher altitudes, the boiling point is less, due to lower atmospheric pressure. Mars is just a really extreme case (ie, VERY low atmospheric pressure), and as such, the water would boil at a relatively low temperature. Possibly low enough that, rather than freeze on the surface, it would evaporate.
is if Rovers camera spotted a fossil in the 'mud"...
Scan for life, Mr. Data...
As for the low atmospheric pressure, the triple-point of water is 6.1mbar, and Mars' surface atmospheric pressure varies between 3-10 (or thereabouts) - Gusev, being a crater in the lowlands is probably at the high end of that scale, and comfortably above the triple point of water.
I could be wrong of course, but let's see over the next few days what comes back from spirit (I'm not saying we'll find water, just that we may very well find conditions where water *could* exist in a liquid state)
Even once it has been released into the peer reviewed world, it will be sensationalized. How many times has there been a panacea cure for cancer published in Science? If you read the NYT, you'd say dozens. If you read Science, you'd say never.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
You can see here that natural processes most likely have occured in a similar manner Mars as they do on Earth. The rover is going to check out these rocks tomorrow or the next day if all goes well. It is exciting to see discovery and the scientific process in action. Who knows maybe water is very common there and thats what eroded this hole into this rock. In any case, sooner or later we are going to turn up water on mars, find life, and reaffirm how precious life on earth in its abundance indeed is.
Maybe they should put some sort of a wedge on future rovers. After landing, perhaps the first rover act will be to turn over the egress pad and sniff underneath to see what the landing stirred up.
Sorry, vacuum will not cause water to decompose into hydrogen and oxygen. It will remain water molecules, albeit very disperse ones. Breaking the molecular bonds between H and O in water requires an input of energy - electrical as in electrolysis or thermal - creating a dissociated plasma (very high temperatures). Vacuum is not sufficient to break molecular bonds.
This is what P-T diagrams are all about. Here's one for water. Note that there is a region where you can go straight from solid water (ice) to water vapor (steam) - sublimation. This is what would happen, in short order, to ice on mars. Unless, of course, it was bonded to soil or another molecucle (hydrous form) rather than being molecular water.
But I'm not a chemist...
I've been looking around various sites, but mostly keeping up with news about Spirit through google news. What is THE best site for up to the minute reports?
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH).
This site has TONS of great links, animations, movies, cartoons, news, and everything else. I hit it and branch off from there many times a day.
Most spacecraft, especially those which are on missions to other planets, etc. undergo strict procedures to prevent the scenario you have mentioned. The contamination of other celestial bodies is not desired, especially if there is a risk of eliminating existing life in the process. This is why Galileo was flown into Jupiter to destroy it, because the chance of it crashing into Europa (which has life potential) was to great. I wonder, however, if we'll ever try to terraform planets such as Mars or Venus using bacteria, algae, or other methods to produce a livable atmosphere. If we don't discover any life on Mars, but find enough water, I think that would be the next logical step.
Wouldn't it be kind of funny if the rover rolls off the platform and becomes stuck in this "Mud"?
I'm guessing that it may be possible that there is thermal activity just under the surface of the landing site which is keeping the surface warm enough to have "mud" and possibly some sort of underground water deposit that is seeping through the ground in this area...
But I guess the NASA scientists are better at this than my arm-chair quarterback approach...
Then again, I can just see the press conference..."We found water on Mars"..."The rover got stuck in the mud"...
Utter rubbish. Water doesn't dissociate into hydrogrn and oxygen just by being boiled. The interatomic forces holding the molecule together are not broken. You can make it dissociate by electrolysis but it does not happen through boiling. If it did it would be quite inadvisable to light a match anywhere near a kettle, given that a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen is just a bit flammable!
Each water molecule is polarised (quite strongly as it happens): although it is overall electrically neutral, one end is rather positive and the other end is rather negative. You get residual interactions between the positive end of one molecule and the negative end of the next one along. When the water molecules are extremely cold they are held in a lattice structure by these residual dipole moments. This is ice. When you add some heat the water molecules jiggle around, and eventually have enough energy to break the lattice and move around freely, though they are still attracted to each other because of the electrical dipoles. This is water. Add some more heat energy and the jiggling water molecules move so fast that they have enough kinetic energy to break out of the energy well of the intermolecular bonds. They can move around at will and each molecule can go where it wants. This is water vapour. The temperature at which these changes occur depends on pressure for reasons that you can go and look up.
What you see as steam when a kettle boils is actually liquid water that cools and recondenses into countless tiny droplets above the kettle's spout.
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carbon life needs water to form hydrocarbons which are the building blocks of the complex molecules of life.
its hypothesized you could base life on some other elements (like silicon), but since we've never seen it, we wouldn't even know *how* to look for it, much less recognize it if we did, short of a silicon based life form seen moving around...
-
or it's turned into energy (ala fire, explosions)
Not to be pedantic, but they are both chemical reactions, and so incapable of destroying matter. What you'll get is one bunch of compounds (eg carbon) turning into another (eg carbon dioxide).
It requires a nuclear reaction to actually annihilate matter and turn it completely into energy. The energy released in a chemical reaction comes from breaking/making bonds between atoms and molecules, not from breaking down the atoms themselves.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
How are we supposed to know that any of this evidence or these results are even real?
You can't. You're a conspiracy theorist, and can't be convinced of anything.
the MER team knew the exact results that they wanted this mission to produce years before launch
And similarly, you conspiracy theorists have already decided that the Mars landings which haven't even begun being built yet are fake.
The tone I get from the writeup and the linked articles is really misleading; they make it seem like the rover team is claiming to have seen evidence of liquid water *right now* on the surface. I've been watching the daily JPL briefings since touchdown, and they've never made such a claim. The geologists have been using terms such as "mud-like" to express the mechanical behavior of the soil, not its content. The other evidence for carbonates, etc., only hints at liquid water *at some point in the past.* Think many thousands/millions of years ago, not last week.
At each conference they've been careful to explain that there are many competing theories at the moment, only *some* of which require the action of liquid water. I guess that didn't really filter through to the media, though. If you get NASA TV in your area, check out the briefings. They're broadcast live at 9am PST, 12 noon EST, repeated on C-SPAN 1 around 4pm EST (usually), and are very informative, presentations and questions alike. Except for one reporter from Astronomy Magazine, who alternately makes me laugh and throw heavy objects at the screen.
The prevalence of Hematite on Mars strongly suggests there was an abundance of water on the planet at some point in its history. Hematite, an oxide of iron and a compound chemically similiar to rust, forms in the presence of water.
Of course, Mars may have been bombarded with a bunch of Hematite asteroids, but it seems unlikely given the absence of craters.
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH).
This has links to tons of great information, images, QuickTimeVR, 3d images, videos, history, cartoons, and lots more about Mars and this MER Spirit mission in particular. Great as a springboard to look up more info as these issues (mud, water, etc.) come up.
. . . I am very interested in eventually moving to Mars. It would be a bonus if there were lakes, so I could go ice fishing, but you can get the full "ice fishing experience" without them.
My real question, as someone who has camped outdoors in very cold temperatures, is this: could the combination of a shallow (half-meter) trench, a heavy-duty lean-to, and a heavy-duty sealed winter sleeping back (along with oxygen, of course) get one through the night?
Also, as Minnesotans are well-known for their masochistic, 'can-do' approach to weathering winter weather, are there any Minnesotans planned for the manned Mars mission?
And then, having said that, he remembered the word "valency"...
:-)
It's not exactly that the atoms themselves are slightly charged, and I no longer trust my memory of Chemistry enough to explain further. Suffice to say, it is the electrostatic force of attraction between the protons and the electrons that bind the hydrogen and oxygen atoms together to form water molecules. It's more like they "share" an electron each, though, than that they're charged.
The water molecules *are* charged, though, due to their shape - they form a sort of shallow v shape, with the oxygen at the point and the hydrogens at the end of the "arms".
And now, I'll stop wasting your time, let a real chemist take over, have my hot chocolate and go to bed
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Following his theory:
Maybe temperature in the poles is low enough that freezing occurs before boiling.
Then, water in other latitudes would evaporate, get transported to the poles by wind and freeze there. Accumulating over time, drying the rest of the planet and drawing a nice white pole.
Disclaimer: I have no idea that could be even feasible.
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Water has three states:
solid (ice)
liquid (liquid water)
gas (water vapor)
Steam is actually an aerosol form of liquid water. In other words, it is microscopic liquid water droplets suspended in the air.
Steam quickly evaporates, i.e., converts to water vapor.
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11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Anyway, the quote was elicited only when one of the reporters there asked "to me it looks like mud, any chance it could be". The reply was that although it might look like mud, it couldn't be, followed by a description of the behavior of fine particles (they can flow, etc.).
I'd say that to use this as a quote that "scientists say" it looks like mud is a bit disingenuous.
Opinions my own, statements of fact may contain errors
It's not mud! It's not mud! It's quicksa
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The typical earth airbag combusts hydrocarbons -- making co2 and water... What was in this airbag? I think hydrocarbons are a poor energy carrier per weight -- so maybe their airbag was a h2/o2 one? in any event -- possible contamination from airbag, anyone?
You're on the right track. As I understand it from a Sedimentary Petrology course I took, we also classified material as mud based on the size of grains apparent. We use something called the Wentworth Size Class. Mud is generally composed of clay to silt sized grains which range anywhere from .00006mm - .0530mm in diameter. When these grains solidify, they form Mudstones, Claystones and Siltstones.
Mud traditionally implies an element of H20 though, so I think scientists would have to be somewhat anal about classifying it as such. The implications for saying water can currently exist at the surface of Mars is quite staggering for all sorts of scientific reasons.
Judging from the pictures (though I have nothing to scale it too), much of the material looks very very fine grained, in the realm of medium grained silt to clay sized particles. But without the presence of H20, that is all they are, just silt or clay (note, using the Wentworth Scale, clay indicates the finest grains).
Now the processes that created these fine silts and clays are very indicative of having sometime of wet environment that broke down materials into these fine grains.
Fahrenheit is well suited to the human condition on earth.
That's why when talking about robots on mars its utterly absurd.
0 F is roughly the coldest temperature people most people experience in
I'm Canadian you short-sleeved wuss!
I bet you've never walked out to find that all the humidity in you nose froze up all at once when you inhaled...some people never lived.
And I think that most of humanity actually lives in tropical climes, where 0F pretty much never happens.
and 100 F the hottest (obviously there are greater extremes, but we're talking about the bulk of the population).
We have this newfangled thing called "fire" nowadays, gets quite a bit hotter than 38 degrees (what you'd call 100)...
Ovens also happen to work very well on the fahrenheit scale (200 F - 500 F).
Yeah, I tried to set an oven to 200 celcius once and the fabric of space time caved in! It was the darndest thing!
Seriously, devices work well with the unit they were designed to work with? Wow! What an insight!
Basing temperature on a random molecule's states at a specific atmospheric pressure is fairly arbitrary and has little to do with the human condition.
Yeah, random.
I mean, its what we are mostly made of! And if you don't drink any of it for 3 days you die. 70% of our planet is covered in it. Yeah, it has SO little to do with the human condition! Hell, most people have never even seen water! Totally random, totally unrellated to the human condition.
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Could possibly be clay. The Mini-TES website at Arizona State University has some slides of Mini-TES data. In this particular slide they're showing an unidentified mineral that definitely looks like it has bound water.
First, I grew up in what I consider a conservative Christian home and I have spent a lifetime trying to overcome the misconceptions, prejudices and outright falsehoods feed to me as a child. That does not mean that ALL Christianity treats knowledge, science and scientific inquiry with the same disdain, but I certainly experienced the depths of ignorance that is possible in Christianty.
& oe =UTF-8&safe=off&q=christian+denominations
The Institute for Creation Research, ICR, a conservative Christian group, would have you believe otherwise. In fact, they would hold that you are not a true Christian unless you believe the Bible to be absolute and inerrant.
See their comments on life on other planets here:
www.icr.org/bible/bhta31.html
Also, note that I said conservative Christians, considered to be a small but influencial part of Christianity. There are many denominations to Christianity -- Baptists, Evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, Church of Christ, etc., so perhaps you need to look it up yourself:
www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8
Despite what you say, many Christian groups, conservative or otherwise, view exploration for life on other planets anywhere from skepticism to outright heresy and have used their influence in the current administration to steer policy that is in many ways hostile to science and independant investigation.
My comment was that I am surprised that more attention has not been drawn by religious groups on science that has the potential to bring some of their most treasured tenets into disrepute. There are implications to life on other planets beyond their scientific discovery, you can't call me ignorant for pointing that out.
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