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Martian Rock Found In Morocco
daeley writes "The BBC is reporting that a rock found in 2001 in Morocco is originally from Mars, similar in composition to the 1977 Antartica find. 'The meteorite would have been blasted off the Red Planet by an impact and may hold clues to Mars' watery past... scientists say the fragments are magmatic rocks. Magmatism is the main process by which water moves from the core of planets to their surface.'"
We have rovers on Mars collecting data that has no chance of being contaminated by a meteorite impact, travel through space and terrestrial processes.
I'll take data from the horse's mouth.
Rock on, Rovers!
Bacteria are particularly tough and anaeorobic species can surivive in the interior of rocks for an obscenely long amount of time without access to outside nutrients. Maybe sometime in the primordial past an impact could have sent one rock plummeting to mars. The planet is seeded...suprise...
What's next? Are we now going to find out that the rocks being analyzed by Spirit are actually from earth?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
What you are calling "science" is really science reporting. Science reporting summarizes the real science and leaves out the qualifiers and statistical information from the original published peer-reviewed work. Science reporting frequently offers broad and sweeping conclusions of hard fact from original work that only reports on evidence that such a conclusion may be true. Even science textbooks are basically summaries of the original research and omit the nuances. Science reporting is a hollow shell of real science.
To understand what the scientists are really saying you have to go read and understand the original articles.
Imagine a large asteroid hitting mars. There will be BILLIONS of pieces sent into an orbit similar to mars, many of which will then be gravtationally tossed into other orbits by mars itself. It's not hard to imagine many many of these eventually landing on earth within the billion years or so since then.
There are alot more than 6 pieces that have been found, these two people just happen to collect ALOT of meteorites and happen to know how to recognize a martian one. Of course it sounds like too much coincidence to be true when you think only 6 have hit earth and all been found by the same people, but in reality thousands and probably millions have hit earth, and many have been found and not recognized for what they are. It only makes sense that the people who know how to recognize them would find the most.
From the article: The team that found it was led by experienced meteorite hunters Carine Bidaut and Bruno Fectay, who have now found six rocks from Mars - a record.
Interesting that they seem to know *just* where to find Martian rocks.
It's also really interesting that the last big hoo-rah about finding "a rock from Mars" here on Earth coincided with Bush Sr's proposal for a mission to Mars. What's really amazing is that these discoveries are so strongly correlated to Congressional consideration of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for Mars research! (Perhaps we should fund a $40 million NASA/CBO research study to determine if this correlation can be linked to any sort of causality? Hmmm?)
There is absolutely no real evidence that these rocks are from Mars, and in fact, NASA very quickly backed away from defending the Mars origin theory when pressed to provide scientific backup. There is absolutely no substantial reason to believe that ALH84001 came from Mars, other than that it sure seems to help get funding.
Of course, if we go to Mars, it should be without NASA - how we could think that a government agency with a worse operational safety and efficiency record than the Post Office should run a Mars mission is beyond me. I've worked at NASA, and belive me, the only real soultion is to bulldoze the entire organization and start over - even thenm you'd need to wait ten years before starting over to avoid the revolving door effect...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Exactly! how else can you get easy karma (+4 in this case!) and really, how many slashdot posts are truly original?
It doesn't really hurt any as long as you change the phrasing and/or copy it from an ac
As I always say "don't sweat the small stuff!"
--Joey