Slashdot Mirror
Brine on Mars?
Bagels writes "A new article on MSNBC (coming originally from Space.com) reports that the both Rovers may have struck water in the form of brine. The Opportunity rover found hints of salty water in the trench that it dug, and scientists note that the Spirit rover is currently digging a trench of its own to investigate the soil that clings to its treads, suggesting the possibility of moisture. The brine would only be small amounts of water mixed with salt, which can exist in liquid form at very low temperatures. More images are available over at NASA's rover site." Reader
frovingslosh would like to add: "I'm just hoping that when you get around to posting one of the many stories that the rover has found mud on Mars that you might include a link to the slashdot article where I predicted this but got moderated as 'funny'." Done!
There is water on Mars. The ICE CAPS were first noticed about FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
More breaking news as it becomes available. Thank you.
Scientists now believe that advanced colonies of Sea Monkeys once inhabited Mars.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
...there's shrimp!
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Natural progression of this would tell me that there must be some tuna up there too.
- Jonathan :)
No tuna is safe.
I believe this is obvious proof that Mars used to have oceans. Yes, oceans. And because they had oceans, they had life. And because they had life, they had Elephants. Only they weren't called Elephants. They were called Marlaphants.
Yeah, Marlaphants.
Anyone taking bets?
clifgriffin > blog
Not this old argument again
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.
I'd be interested to see what kind of hardware/bandwidth NASA have cos they serve up images and movies 24/7 and never seem to get slahdotted...
Jokes, aside, let's not forget that this could house some microbial life, at the very least. Just look at our ocean's seabed around the vents.
Hey George, Mars called, and they're running out of shrimp!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
And so begins the great Martian Salt Trade.
..why did it not evaporate?
The atmospheric pressure on mars is pretty low, which means that any liquid water (which this apparently is) will be vacuum dried to gas and move into outer space.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Here's a New Scientist article from January which argues for the presence of brine.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Coming soon - Bonanza 2012, starring the head of Lorne Greene: Mars - the new frontier, thousands of fortune seekers stake their claim on the red planet, hoping to make their fortune panning for frankfurters.
Now there will be salt mines for the riff-raff when I take over Mars.
--- Ban humanity.
Maybe it's leftover salt from Martian civilizations de-icing their driveways...
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Rover is picking up hints of Martian Cities made entirely of Gold off in the distance. Spanish mercenaries, get ready!
Great findings, but it seems somewhat obvious that there can't be clean fresh, salt-free water on mars if the hypthesis that most of it evaporated away is true.
Else, all the rocks would only contain non water-soluble materials - hard to imagine.
Speculation: The salt content of the water is probably be linked to the water content in atmosphere. The average evaporation rate for the brine into the atmosphere should match the rate of hygroscopic attraction of water from the atmosphere.
My guess, one of these days one of the Mars rovers will stumble on upon Bikini Bottom, and be treated to the whimsical antics of SpongeBob, Patrick, Plankton, and Squidward. Come on, there's no space helmet wearing sassy squirrels like Sandy on earth. If there were, would I be sitting here typing?
So what you are predicting is Martian rats with salty urine. :-)
--- Ban humanity.
This would be much much more exciting if they found spice.
:)
Other rover was actually taken by a sand worm.
In other news, new rovers will roll without rhythm.
The parent is right; the "+5 informative" grandparent is just wrong. We have known for some time that at least the north polar cap was composed mostly of water ice.
r _040123.html
References:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-9.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/express_wate
so ... what ... you're telling me that these million dollar tinkertoys are really just up there sniffing rat piss?
damnit. i want my money back! i already -know- enough about rat piss and i don't care if there's any on mars!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The very small particle size of Martian dust makes it likely that it sticks due to static charge. If the soil were moisture laden you would expect it to rapidly dry out and crust over (change appearance) on the wheels of the rover.
an ill wind that blows no good
If you're playing against the LGM on their server!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
why the heck havent they toddled over to the face? :( ...cause they've already determined that the face (ready for a shock?) isn't actually a face.
I hope they rust-proofed the Rovers.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
So the Rovers are not in Morocco/Sahara after all...
No need to thank me, just not doing my (real) job.
Get some Triops for that swank pad, you'll be so happy you upgraded!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
If you dig a trench in the sand and find salty water, you should start running because the tide is gonna come in any minute!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Stop the importation of Martian Dihydrogen Monoxide now! It's threatening the Earth's Dihydrogen Monoxide industry!
This raises the possiblities of halophiles living on Mars. On Earth, halophiles can live in up to 35% salt solutions. Pure water would kill these creatures --causing them to aborb water until they burst.
Its no wonder that Viking found no clear evidence of life on Mars, the low-salt water in Viking's nutirent broth probably killed any halophiles.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I don't understand why people get all worked up by a rock formation that looks like a face when viewed from the right angle. We have those here on Earth too. Anyone who has seen the "Old Man of the Mountain" in New Hampshire (before it collapsed anyway) can attest to this. It really looked like a face too. (Lincoln's face in my opinion.)
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
pft, im with the conspiracy camp on that one ;)
(simply for the idea!)
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Where did you steal that text from? I'm guessing a google on some key sentence fragments will turn up something.
Who would have ever thought, that one of mankind's thus far highest achievements would be building a robot to dig a trench somewhere far away, hoping to discover salt water.
Maybe if it digs deep enough it'll find an aids vaccine.
Cool. Thanks for the hint. Are they also common in eurpoe where I live?
You mean there might actually be water on Mars, meaning that there's oxygen, that we could extract and breathe?
If only someone had mentioned this possibility before.
So what you're saying is... that we shouldn't just piss on Mars? ;)
just to really look like a wierdo, im replying to my own message :)
I wonder if they thought about finding water, and getting stuck in it - is this why they sent TWO to be there at the same time? Can anyone make out a winch on the rovers??
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Brine? Brine means pickles? Pickles means Mars was (or still is) inhabited by a highly evolved race of cucumbers? Earthlings eat huge quantities of pickles on burgers? Meaning McDonald's could be considered a weapon of mass destruction? So now Mars will declare war, great, this is just what the economy needs...
Yes, I believe Europe does offer a wide selection of women from which to choose.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
It's because on Earth, rocks are just rocks. Whereas on Mars, they're a sign of an ancient civilation who were peaceful, wise, who will one day return from the outer reaches of space to bring us the benefits of their great knowledge. And certainly not fry us with their flying saucers and death rays. Honest.
Ultimately, it's for the same reason that any wisdom from the 'east' is automatically assumed to be of value, no matter how shoddy it may be. Rather like Lobsang Rama, whose philosophies were embraced but who turned out to be a plumber for Plympton.
So now we know where all those pickled odities you find in redneck bars come from. I knew those things floating in brine must have come from another planet.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
When drilling for oil, there are often pockets of salt-water which need to be disposed of. This is done by drilling a new hole to another formation porus enough to accept the salt-water and pumping it down there. Wouldn't it be interesting if the rovers discover an old drill site and we find out (in Hoganesque fashion) that Mars really is the remains of a single catastrophic ecological disaster.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Hey if the martian face looks like a face then this piece of dirt does too. Wow! There MUST have been a civilisation...
The cost of Bush's Mars mission just went up 200%... to pay for a space hardened desalinization plant.
I think they should take a picture at night so we can see what Mars' moons look like.
Rather than having the rovers scratch the surface or look at billion year old craters what they should do is send a large lump of heavy metal (say, 500 lbs) to Mars and, with it protected by a heat shield, slam it into the surface like an meteorite. Not having to account for parachute wind drift they could be pretty accurate with such a targeted blow and the result would be a small -fresh- crater. The crater could be observed by sensors in orbit and a rover landed in the vicinity shortly thereafter. Both the man-made meteorite and the rover could be sent together and initially orbited so as to allow time for a precise hit and accurate rover reentry.
======= ~\_/~\_O Burmese
dunno ... i last had some when i lived in LA, but now i've moved to germany i have no clue where they are to be found, though i -think- i saw a triops kit in a toy store once, so i imagine they're available.
... just a wild guess, you know, nothing educated about it at all. the fact that triops are so hardy and old and shit ...
it seems to me, if there is life to be found on mars, it'll be Triops-like in nature
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
What about the pyramid then? Or are they afraid of disrupting the martian mind-control equipment inside it?
*Ajusts tinfoil hat and looks about shiftily*
So, does this mean, here in the US we all get free jumbo shrimp now? I mean, paragraph five specifically says, "ocean water", not an ocean.
Deimos and Phobos, while closer (23459 and 9378 km) to Mars than Luna is to Earth (about 384400 km), also have much smaller masses (1.8e15 and1.08e16 kg) than Luna (7.35e22 kg). [source]
Tidal forces (being a function of gravitational differential) are an inverse-cube function on distance, and linear with mass, so that would be a tidal force about 1/99th that of which we're used to. (Disclaimer: I am not a Physicist, but I share a house with one.)
While this is Mars, the concern isn't completely insane. If the rover's in position to get a 1% response from the Martian equivalent of the Bay of Fundy, we'll be needing yet another Mars probe, and someone at NASA should be needing a new job for putting it there.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..? If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them? It is impossible for the layman to look at the closeups we've been seeing and understand how big the field is.
why is Slashdot never slashdotted? :rolls eyes:
Hasn't anyone else noticed this?
The mars face has returned!
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Maybe... just maybe, Mars was similar to Earth some-umpteen-billion years ago. And Earth will be like Mars in some-umpteen-billion years.
I'm willing to take an entreprenurial risk and say we're overlooking the real moneymaker here... and that's Venus... once Earth moves out of this cushy orbit, Venus is going to move in. A couple billions years after that... Hot Venutian Chicks on my beaches.
awwwYEAH.
If I had points.
That sounds like an interesting idea.
Never even mind "how do we get the lump of material up there", aren't there meteorites or other space-junk that we could snag on the way?
I suppose a solid block of metal has a better chance of reaching the surface, but since mars has a really tenous atmosphere, just how likely is a meteor to reach the surface, I wonder...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
(The other planet being Earth.) 'Torn fabric' puzzle on Mars
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Indeed, I've found an abstract from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on the subject.
i bet-ya, next their going to find
...
insects on mars. it's prolly gona
be some kindda scarbaeus thing.
all very exciting. really to bad
beagle didn't make it. it would have
had a drill
Some moderators are clueless.
The parent was marked redundant, when in fact it was second post (and was posted at the same time as the first post).
Apparently the moderator saw the reponse to the first post which also mentioned sea-monkeys.
But, if you look at the times of the postings, you will see that the response to the parent was actually about 20 minutes after the 2nd post.
Please moderators... Use the redundant mod appropriately.
(And, no. I'm not the poster of either comment.)
I suspect that snagging a suitable astroid and lugging it to Mars is much more complicated and expensive then sending something from here. The rovers themselves weigh over 400 lbs (on Earth) so sending a 500lb chunk of metal is no big deal. I'm sure some scientist could quickly calculate how big and what shape such a thing would need to be to maximize results in such an experiment.
======= ~\_/~\_O Burmese
Mud huh? Next time they'll have to send a Hummer instead of those wimpy electric vehicles.
You stick a couple of 100 million dollars worth of water detecting apparatus aboard a rover, and how do you eventually find the wet stuff? Right, it sticks to the tires...
Doh!
based upon the reference time periods in rational and unbiased, totally informed discussions found between HERE
and HERE
Nah. They just don't want to bother Sutekh.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Everyone always warns you to always refuse the underbody-coating option, I'm sure NASA was trying to keep costs down when they went to the rover lot. Maybe those salesman really are correct after all...
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
signs of life on Mars, and since it's likely that (being scientists) some of them are Monty Python fans, I humbly submit that the project should be called...
"The Life of Brine".
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
No, no, no don't go to the Pyramids of Mars - otherwise you will disturb Sutekh - last of the Osirans!
Best wishes,
Mike.
NASA scientists have just reported receiving a shocking image of a Marlaphant!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"For purposes of Long John Silver's offer, an ocean is defined as a single body of water, the surface area of which equals or exceeds five million square kilometers."
No free shrimp yet...
The sprit rover has now also dug a trench in "Laguna Hollow"
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
This means our astronauts will have an unlimited supply of table salt!
Apologies to Most Extreme Elimination Challenge:
AAAAAAAsssstronaut!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Because if they were sent to the polar ice caps, they'd probably get stuck in an ice-crevice or snowdrift upon landing. And you don't want to land on mountains or rough terrain either.
Even if there were lakes or oceans on Mars, you wouldn't want to land on them because the probe would be constantly bobbing about, making satellite communications extremely difficult.
So that leaves flat, soft sandy deserts as your only choice.
Administrator O'Neill: Are ya ready engineers?
Engineers: Aye Aye, Administrator!
AON: I can't hear you!
ENG: AYE AYE, ADMINISTRATOR!
AON: Ohhhh.... who's driving around on a planet briney?
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: Along with his good friend Opportunity!
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: He's grinding at rocks with his robotic arm...
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: Hoping his file system does him no harm!
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
All Together: SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS
AON: Spirit.... Squarepants!
Is this what passes for NASA news now? Everything is "may have," or "could be," or "might be." Will we get follow-up reports when they do the testing to confirm the news is, "is not," "could not," and "no bloody chance?"
Not only did the rover find a liquid brine on Mars, but evidence of fossilized "pickled egg" like objects and old discarded kegger cups were found.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
does that mean there are electric eels and Kraken too?
Who I seemed to think was Sean O'Neill.
Where the hell did I get that from?
So why is it taking them so long to determine if the sticky ground is briny? The same goes for those strange round pebbles that they found. Have they even begun to drill/scoop samples for testing? What's with the delay?
That means that NASA can start putting cool mudflaps on future rovers. You know, those flaps with the naked ladies on 'em? R-r-r-r-r baby!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
There can't possibly be any life on mars.
The club scene is a barren landscape, and the whole place is just one big red light district.
http://sea-monkeys.com/
The opportunity costs are too high for this to be feasible. If we're throwing 500 pounds of anything at Mars, it's going to be a little more sophisticated then a hunk of inert metal.
This would be a feasible experiment if slinging 500 pounds of material around the Solar System were something we could do causually, so it's not like it's a bad idea, but at our present stage of development, we'd want that 500 pounds to be probes and satellites and sensors and such that are more useful for making things other then holes.
What happens if the rover DOES find water? Would it sink or would it float? Logic dictates that if it floats, it is therfore a witch and must be burned.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I want whoever had hidden my shiny roundmarbles on Mars to come and tell me the truth.
I lost these things since the first grade, sniff, how am I supposed to get them back from there?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Brine on Mars?
Of course! And you can find Martian Life here.
I get the impression it is about the same you can do with a cheap webcam at the same focus distance. I took some interesting pictures of bugs with a Philips webcam that can focus at about an inch.
Banjo?? Banjo!?!? BAAAANNNNNNJJJOOOOOO!!!!
One sea monkey... one super (hero) vitamin....
Beer has been proven conclusively to be a brine pre-cursor.
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
0 rows returned
Question: If you take viruses or bacteria from Earth's extreme regions and leave them on Mars, will they survive?
They BOTH found it? Maybe the rovers are just leaking some of their antifreeze?
I really wish that the majority of global space efforts would go towards designing and constructing a space elevator already. This is really what they need in order to get things rolling in outer space. The major hurdle is getting anything we construct here on earth off the surface, past the atmosphere and out past orbit....If a successful implementation of space elevator were to exist we could simply raise our payloads out past the atmoshere and snap together prebuilt space cruisers in space. Then we could really have some serious space travelling. Unt il then we will just piddle around with the Xprize and trying to get chunks of metal off the earth's surface....we're still stuck in our sandbox with our pale and shovel...how depressing. If only more effort and funing were to go toward space instead of missiles and chem weapons, etc...sigh.
Dry stuff. Wiggle. Rub. Static. Clumping?
Also, someone asked "if you took an earth extremeophile and plonked it mars, what would happen".
It might burst and die. It might dry out and die. It might use its energy reserve and die. Its innards might freeze and die. Its DNA and proteins might get fried by the radiation and die. (Notice how many of these involve the word "die"?).
There are one or two genera that might just have time to kick their sporolation apparatus into action and retreat their important bits (mostly tightly packed DNA) into a dry, tough husk. But thats as good as its going to get I would think.
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
No mudflaps, but I want to be the 1st to go 4-wheeling on Mars...tho I think the moon would be better for rock crawling...lower gravity, more interesting rock formations (at least so far as I've seen).
Why am I doubtful that life is there now? Because life is agressively pervasive. Once a life form can eek out a foothold in an environment it will exploit it to the maximum effect. The only example we have so far is our planet but the effect of life on Earth profound and blantanly obvious! There is hardly a spot any place where some life form of one type or another has exploited the environment around it and thrived leaving evidence something was once living there. Life doesn't hide. It spread like wildfire.
So if life on Mars exists now it should be easy to find. So if there is brine type life on Mars it should be easy to find because natural selection would kick in leaving the heartiest lifeforms left to spread as far and as wide as possible. You should be able to find large clusters of the stuff all over. So why haven't we yet? Maybe we aren't looking in the right spots. Maybe we don't have the right scientific tools out there yet. The point is that if life has a foothold anywhere on Mars is should be obvious when we stumble across it.
Actually, its too bad the rovers have a limited range.. and too bad we dont know where Beagle 2 crashed. If Beagle 2 crashed anywhere near Opportunity we would probably see the man-made crater that was mentioned in the parent post.
....move along....nothing to see here....
makes you wonder how the water got there ...
...
in the first place and mean if it's prone
to "evaporate"
considering the formation of a planet being
quit a "hot" excercise
Long John Silver's has purchased an insurance policy to cover the anticipated cost of the free Giant Shrimp redemption, should NASA announce the discovery of conclusive evidence of an ocean on Mars between now and February 29, 2004. In the event NASA makes an official announcement that conclusive evidence of an ocean has been discovered on Mars prior to that date, every person in the U.S. will have an opportunity to obtain one free Giant Shrimp at participating Long John Silver's restaurants in the United States. Redemption will take place on Monday, March 15, 2004, from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. Additional information and offer details will be made available to consumers on the Long John Silver's web site and in press materials, should this event occur.
Who else thinks frovingslosh has some deeply incriminating pictures of Michael?
Gases do move into outer space. Gravity slows down the process, but it doesn't stop it. When you get to the outer atmosphere, the velocity of gas atoms and molecules follow a predictable statistical distribution, dependent on their atomic mass and average temperature. Many atoms and molecules will reach escape velocity, and diffuse away from the planet. What do you think happened to the atmospheric helium on Earth?
Molecular weight of helium: 4
Molecular weight of water: 18
Gases escape over geologic time if the mean particle velocity is more than about a tenth escape velocity (if I recall correctly). Light particles at a given temperature (defined by average particle kinetic energy) move faster and so are lost more readily. Heavier particles are moving more slowly, and so are lost at a _much_ slower rate (the tail of the Boltzman distribution is exponential).
The real reason Mars has relatively little water is that water is broken up in the upper atmosphere by interaction with solar UV. While water may not be light enough to escape, hydrogen definitely is (molecular weight 2, and weight of an atomic hydrogen radical formed by a UV event is 1). This mechanism works on all of the planets (especially the inner ones) to strip their atmospheres of hydrogen.
Mars has a less active geology than Earth. We get hydrogen compounds (including water) replenished from volcanic sources. Earth also has a much higher escape velocity, which means that hydrogen is lost less quickly when formed (and has longer to recombine to form chemicals with higher molecular weight).
Both of these help explain why Earth is wet and Mars isn't. On the short term, however, water stays bound in Mars's atmosphere just fine. Those ice caps that migrate seasonally via atmospheric gas transport aren't all CO2, you know.
You can find a number of documents online discussing why Venus did get stripped of most of its water, despite being heavy and having a fairly active geology.
...some shot glasses, limes, and Tequila!
If true, I can guarantee that Fraternities the world over would spend every nickel they have in order to host the first ever "Mars Shooter Bash!"
No mudflaps, but I want to be the 1st to go 4-wheeling on Mars...tho I think the moon would be better for rock crawling...lower gravity, more interesting rock formations (at least so far as I've seen).
Most of the places where probes and landers land are flat to reduce the risk of landing problems. I am sure there are some pretty interesting features on Mars. Orbiter photos even suggest some spikey Arizona-like rock formations. Of course all the hyper vacationers will probably ruin them all one of these days.
Table-ized A.I.
Just have the U.K. send another Beagle, and wait for the crater! :-D..sorry, couldn't resist.
It seems that this is an increasingly popular form of karma-whoring.
Perhaps an entry should be added here: slashdot culture
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
No. You don't need to do it more than once, but you may need to wait a while.
Once, after 8 months of constant generation, I got almost the entire 3rd act of Hamlet, but it was missing a scene, so I had to throw it out.
I used the pattern of incomming spam to a friend's mail server to seed the random number generator. Now that spammers are using random words as filter fowls, I can even use the spams themselves.
If you want to help the project, send all of your spam to input@shapespearegenerator.com
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I have read that some soil photos showed worm-like "threads" that some speculated came off from the airbags. I know that some say there are tube-like hollow areas in the soil, but this was actual threads, not holes, they were talking about. Does anybody have a photo link? Or, is it just a rumor?
Table-ized A.I.
I'll bet the brine contains whole fleets of tiny pirate ships, full of little microbial pirates with the power to grow upwards of ten feet tall at will. Make your amends with god. Say your final goodbyes. We are all doomed when the giant martian pirates find out we've been sending robots after them. "INUKTCHUK!"
Yeah!!!! Free shrimp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(damn lameness filter)
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
My Astronomy professor also mentioned the solar wind as a contributing factor. Mars is geologically dead, so there is no significant magnetic field to shield the planet from the solar wind. This has accelerated the loss of the Martian atmosphere.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It seems pretty clear to me we need to send some monkeys up there. Then we wait about 1 million years for them to evolve into an intelligent species so we can send astronauts to visit and do yet another painful "Planet of the Apes" movies.
True: exactly what the new job will be will depend to a great extent on how convincing the person is when they say "I meant to do that!" when their boss's boss comes round to ask about it.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Food Geek Alton Brown has done a show on space based cooking. He's planning on somehow working on shooting poultry faster than light at Mars, so that it technically brines on the planet's surface BEFORE cooking by burning up on hitting the atmosphere.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
You are required to maneouver straight down this trench....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
as in Free Roving Slosh?
Not only did he make this precipitous prediction, but it seems his nickname has meaning attached to his prediction?
adjust YOUR tin foil hat accordingly!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did anyone else notice the face in this picture?? Bears a strong resmblance to the original 'face on mars'
Coincidence? I think not.
Oh, it's "brine," not "brin."
"Sag ich doch, es gibt Lehm auf'm Mars!"
(Tetsche is a German cartoonist. I always liked that joke, but I cannot find the old cartoon online now...)
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Considering things live in the highly concentrated brines here on earth and nearly boiling temps, not to mention antartica and the seabed trenches in volcanic ducts it's jut a matter of time.
To my untrained eye, any prescence of liquid water (damp dirt counts) means we will very likely eventually turn up some form of life on mars, alive, not as a fossil.
Clickey...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Somwhere else this was described as "liquid salt water brine". It's nice to see people at /. actually know what these words mean.
The predominant fluid on Mars today is the thin electrodynamic particle storm that kicks up and covers the planet from pole to pole at intervals, not water. With the kind of electrical hoohah you'd get in those storms, you'd expect to melt sand in midair and precipate silicate sleet as ... mysterious spherules. Martian dust in suspension probably behaves more like a plasma, in other words a "fourth state of matter."
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
At the NASA rover site you can see the trench and both the front wheels.
Does the left front wheel look like it has been damaged?
space.com just mention that Nasa found "thread" like on Mars. Could it be from Martians?
Might the subsurface "sparkling" spheres be a form of Martian brine shrimp eggs
similar to the Great Salt Lake brine shrimp eggs???
photo 1
photo 2
More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:
Link 1
Link 2
Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."
Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?
Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:
intermediate details
advanced details
I believe Juanita
It shows mostly sand-sized particles, but with a large number of apparently hollow spheres or tubes. The image resolution is about 30 microns per pixel - about the width of a human hair.
Such grains were completely unexpected. But John Grotzinger, a geologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says they closely resemble formations he has seen in soils in the southwestern deserts of the US [rm3friskerFTN - perhaps lending some weight to my earlier analogy to Arches National Park @ Moab, Utah, USA]. "There are little tubes that build up by capillary action," he told New Scientist, as salty water evaporates from the nearly-dry soil.
I believe Juanita
Equip the rover with a gun that can shoot an explosive projectile into the ground.
-
They're running at a low cost (at least in their terms
:-)
- they've got a reputation for 'cool' design
- It's easy for them to match the h/w and s/w
- They were there first, at least with a viable legal business model
Everyone else is an also-ran for the forseeable future, IMHO. It'd take a pretty big hitter (and Napster aren't big enough) to break it, with a significant investment. Frankly Apple are doing what the RIAA etc. should have paid someone to do a long time ago...found here