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The Dirt On Mars, In Words And Pictures
An anonymous reader writes "The Spirit rover's first soil analysis reveals some puzzling features about Gusev crater. The region seems to contain the greenish silicate mineral, olivine, which usually is considered water-reactive and thus volcanic in origin. For olivine to be found in the soil may point to rock formation during a drier period in martian history, even with strong evidence for sampling in an ancient lakebed. A second puzzle is why the soil seems so crusty. After the rover arm pressed soil down, the top layer of dust hardly moved, a finding that suggests something may be binding the dust like some type of salt or thin cement." For even more and better Mars pictures, read on below.
mlyle writes "I've spent a few hours hacking together some software to deal with the Mars Exploration Rover imagery at JPL. The software puts together a webpage and RDF feed of new raw imagery as it is posted to the JPL site, along with technical information decoded about how the picture was taken. It also produces stereo anaglyphs and color images that NASA has not seen fit to convert and make publically available. Be sure to also check out the ultra high resolution image of the lander as viewed from Spirit."
Any particular reason NASA went with a B&W CCD for this one? I seem to recall earlier Mars missions being in full color -- then again, it may have been this 'pseudocolor' stuff as well.
levine
There are some puzzles and there are surprises
One unexpected finding was the Moessbauer spectrometer's detection of a mineral called olivine, which does not survive weathering well
It doesn't survive weathering well in Earth like conditions. Mars, on the other hand, has extreme and totally different climate conditions and it should not be a surprise that minerals exhibit different properties.
Free XBox, PS2
It seems the best the NASA guys are hoping for is evidence that there was once water on the planet. According to the news this would prove that life was once possible there. My questions is... what does that do for us?
Evidence that dinasaurs once roamed the earth isn't taking us towards bringing them back. From a casual observer this seems a pointless exercise, but I'm sure I'm just not informed enough, can someone help me out?
It would be interesting to see if mining on Mars would be a feasible (and cost-effective) venture. With the apparent iron content of the soil (hence the rust-red color), it may be a good source of mineral content for mining operations. The hard (and expensive) part would be the transport of mined material back to Earth. Could the cost be overcome by the benefits?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I mean, they're the ones who are always talking about the windstorms that plague the planet, yes?
And for how long have these windstorms been occurring? Millions and millions of years?
So it seems reasonable to conclude that the dust/soil on the planet is going to be fairly homogenous by now.
They talk about the rock abrasion tool and the various spectrometers and what not, but the tool I'd like to hear about is the shovel. The dried lakebeds on Mars are no doubt little different than the dried lakebeds on Earth. To get to anything really interesting, you need to dig.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Interesting, as the marks of the airbags are clearly visible on all pics. Or am I missing the point of a rover-arm having less force than a bouncing-lander-in-an-airbag?
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
...which usually is considered water-reactive and thus volcanic in origin.
If it's water-reactive why does it mean it's volcanic? I don't know anything about minerals but that doesn't sound logical to me.
Developers: We can use your help.
First of all, unless you have overwhelming evidence of life on mars, you need to have evidence that life was possible. If you know that it was possible, then you might devise ways of checking if life did exist. This is assuming of course that water is essential.
Why search for ancient life in the first place? There's a chance that it would help explain the origin of life on earth. Future missions would be devoted to figuring out how life came to be. If both planets had life completely independently (no rocks with bacteria flying through space) it would tell us that it's very likely there is life elsewhere in the universe.
Either this solar system is extraordinarily friendly i nterms of having life supporting environments, or, life friendly environments are common throughout the universe.
The latter will be a more popular choice, as it suggests we could be in store to come into extra terrestrail life, be it intellegent or not, at some point, should we become a fully fledged space fairing race.
Finding water on Mars will also make setting up colonies much easier, as transportation of water to extra-terrestrail bases will be expensive and tricky.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I find it interesting all the rocks in the pictures look small enough for any human to pick up and throw. I don't see any large outcropping of boulders and such. Why isn't the variety of the rock sized greater?
-Oy Vey
I've just seen a TV documentary about the rovers. One thing they had was an animation showing the differences between the first rover and the new ones. It was the old rover coming off the lander and then growing, parts being added etc., afterwards documenting how the thing has to fold to fit into the lander again, all on some blue grid surface. Does anyone know if this animation can be seen on the net somewhere?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
OK, there's microscope, spectrometers, cameras on the rover.
Do they have a brush or scraper? Or is the rock grinder the only physical tool?
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Also, there is the grand philisophical question involved. Are we the reason for the universe? Did God create all of this just for us or are we just another form of life in a freak universe?
The existence of life outside of Earth is as huge a revelation to religion as the debunking of the Earth-centric model of the solar system. The spiritual ramifications are enormous, but not often talked about.
If there is life on Mars, then suddenly Darwinism takes a huge leap and Biblical creationism, at least the most common interpretations, takes a step back. Then if there is/was life on Mars, then why not on other planets, which have been found to be far more common than we thought. And if there is life all over the universe, then it isn't too far a leap to say that some of it has evolved into sentient life forms. And now we have to ask if other intelligent, self-aware creatures have a soul. Do they have an afterlife?
This goes on and on. Needless to say, more than scientists and geeks are interested in the findings of these missions.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
I read at one of the links that "Olivine is also found in many iron-nickel meteorites. Not just as small grains but as significantly sized crystals sometimes occupying over 50% of the meteorites volume."
I do not know anything about minerals really, but if the lander is exploring a crater, couldn't this come from the meteorite that created the crater in the first place?
True ravers don't need drugs
You know... I have a theory, looking at our sun with its orbiting bodies, and the moons orbiting *those*, we can work out the average number of satellites a given body (over a certain size) has - in this case it works out to about 10 for our solar system, an average of 10 moons per planet (I think? I worked this out a long time ago, maybe more moons have been discovered since then) - from that I made the small leap that "any celestial body over a certain size" (i.e. large enough to be classed as a planet or bigger) or more accurately "any body with a great enough gravitational pull" will have an average of 10 orbiting moons.
:D
trying it out on the only star we really know enough about - Sol, we see we have 9 planets which is close to average. Some stars I'm sure will have zero, and some may have 40, but if I'm right, we'll find all stars have an average of 10 planets in tow.
Outside of that (and back to your point), it doesn't really matter how many of those planets are hostile to life, with a hundred stars we clock in at somewhere around 1000 planets - some of those have got to be a pretty close match to Earth, right? Now do the maths for a billion stars
The only way we'll have all the answers is to send up a team with some (live) geologists and full kit... But, that's probably 30-50 years away realistically.
There is actually a green sand beach on the big island of Hawaii.
It is little known, and difficult to get to, but a long drive down
an unpaved road, and two or so mile hike will get you to it.
I once met an minerologist gathering samples there.
He told me the beach was green because of a large olivine vein
which was eroded over the years by the ocean waves.
pics: http://www.techfreakz.org/blacksand/
I think the real reason we're going to Mars is to evaluate it for inhabitation. The moon doesn't have enough gravity to walk on, Venus is too hot, and Mars is cold but sounds quite livable - heating is much easier than cooling - as long as you keep everything inside a space station and hermetically sealed. Then you can make a big ecosystem greenhouse, add extra lightbulbs that shine by putting some solar panels out in the desert outside the "bubble". Also if the polar regions are made of CO2 + H2O, then even if you get a leak in your big bubble, you can replenish your atmosphere with oxygen from electrolyzing water - but we need to get helium or nitrogen from somewhere, because, though humans can breathe 100% oxygen, it's very dangerous because the trees would catch on fire spontaneously in it. Hydrogen cannot be used either, because it's also a bomb ready to blow - just think of the Zeppelin baloons. Perhaps we'll have fusion tamed soon, making helium out of hydrogen as a byproduct. Not much, but enough to patch a leak, and also gain enough energy to heat the martian globe with it. Helium is actually good for you, as deep sea divers use it instead of nitrogen. Just imagine all martian humans talking in that high pitched chipmunk voice from helium! (Becayse velocity of sound is greater in it, so for same length dimensions the velocity/length=frequency is higher.)
So anyway, some of the real paranoid people can go live on Mars, and in case of a global nuclear war or sickness outbreak there'd be a chance that humans survive either on Mars, or on Earth. Remember the dinosaurs? They just diappeared.
But actually, as of now, nuclear weapons are a way to peace, because nobody is willing to pull the nuclear trigger because on earth there are no winners, everybody dies. Hence the great pacifying effect especially if you don't believe in 7 virgins waiting for you in afterlife, and stick to this life as long as you can. But if you got Mars and Earth, now martian people won't care so much about earthly ones, and vice versa. Interplanetary war, dude. The good thing is that you got like 10 minutes for light to pass between Earth and Mars, and everything else travels slower through this huge distance, and you can peek through telescopes at an incoming bomb and shoot it out of the sky with them patriot rockets or laser cannons. You'll probably have weeks to prepare to make up your mind whether it's a passanger cargo coming at you or a nuke, unlike on earth, where if someone pulls a cruise missile trigger, it gets to the destination in an hour. That's why it's important to have space stations around both Mars and Earth, so the incoming cargo would pass through a checkpoint at a safe distance.
I'm all for Mars exploration, and sooner or later it will happen. There is an overpopulation problem on earth anyway, so we could ship the extra to Mars. But you couldn't really do it by shipping the prisoners there as the Brits did to Australia, cuz the crazy ones might mess up the carefully controlled bubble. At least in Australia inmates didn't have much to mess up, comparatively speaking.
Not knowing a good comment to reply to in order to post my two bytes, I am going to do it here.
Duke University Medical Center undertook a study about the power of prayer. They had a randomized selected group of patients to be prayed for by christian, jewish, and muslim clerics -- and a control that was not prayed for.
Neither group was measurably better than the other.
Therefore, prayer didn't make a difference.
I live on an active volcano which, in some erruptions, produces large quantities of olivine (peridot) crystals. We can see the crystals not only on dry land, walking on various older (tens to hundreds of years) flows... but more interesting is Green Sand Beach in South Point - Green Sand is an old cone that sits at sealevel, partially within the water. The sands are a stunning and sparkling olive green and one can find crystals from pin-head sized up to small stones (every now and then someone finds larger gem-quality pieces).
Since it's well known that olivine can appear within certain types of volcano flows - i'm confused to the water reactive portion - we certainly find olivine in/near/around water (I do consider the pacific ocean to be water). Furthermore, portions of this island receive upwards to 200 inches of rain a year - and there's plenty of olivine.
Can someone explain to me why the presence of olivine somehow precludes water? It certainly doesn't here in Hawaii (though perhaps on a much larger time scale, it does?)
Why must people bring God into EVERYTHING. The big bang is sort of dubious in my eyes too, but more plausable than god. There are SEVERAL decent arguements theorizing the big bang, and only one decent argument prooving God, that being the dubious ontological one postulated by Anselm.
Answers do not have to prevent your head from "going into meltdown", the universe is a big place, time is huge, and even the smallest building blocks of matter are more complex than a person can wrap their heads around. Why should the begining-of-it-all be a simple answer, like a man with a beard who got bored and created us all. Which is not probable in the slightest. The only probable Christian creation myth is that of St. Augestine, which is not a very happy picture, but is the only one that answers the question of "before god". God becomes mindless in this, the universe was created, existed, and ceased to exist in a single blink of the creators eye, meaning that there is no free will, leading to other problems. (Evil, for one)
This is not the proper place for theology and philosophy though. This is an article on finding life on a foreign body. If said life is found, or traces of it, it may just start the long process of answering the all-important, and eternal, WHY.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
No, if life is more universal it does not presuppose "a devine somebody-or-other", it would just mean that life is much more common than we thought. Evolution of life is not Earth specific in any way shape or form, actually it is quite easily generalized that life can be formed anywhere where conditions are permissable. Several prevalent theories actually do dictate an interstellar origin of life, by a nondevine seeding.
Actually, we owe most all of our science and technology to the long-term effects of those wonderous greeks. Science as we know is a direct result of Aristotle, most of the Christian dogma is a direct result of Aristotle as well. And early christian theology is a heavy borrower from Plato. Sure, even if in the dark-ages much of the actual writings of the Greeks were lost, the actual influence lived on.
Killing Osama, as the original post recomended, is a ultimatly futile gesture anyways, long or short term, due to Americas worstening reputation. The only fix for our political problem, and those who would blow us up, is a LONG-TERM policy fix. Everything could be lost by History, the world could end tomorrow, so by your reasoning there is no point in even short term fixes, since the short-term may ultimatly be too long.
I'm not thinking of long-term in a technological sence, I'm thinking of it in a spiritual and philosophical sence. Things that shape human thought are ultimatly more important than things. Sure the V2 opened the door for many things intellectual (most unrealized), it proves to be a TOOL, and not something that changed people themselves.
And, BTW, we didn't kill Hitler, he managed to do that himself.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I find myself wandering; "If we find life on Mars will it be related?"
Meteorites originating from mars do land on earth. Surly rocks from earth have found there way to mars. Perhaps taking life with them? We are losing some of our outer atmosphere all the time, surly some microbes must escape also? They would face the cold vacuum of space and all that radiation, dieing a cold lonely death. But give our microbe a big enough rock of the right type, and there would seem to be some hope of survival.
Have you got a relative on Mars?