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!
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.
No, the ice caps have been known to be largely water ice for a while now. There was another story confirming it a few weeks ago. The real news here is liquid water.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
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.
Even if the water DID evaporate, it would not, "move into outer space." There's this thing called gravity, which works on the molecules of gas-phase matter just as much as it works on liquids. The air doesn't "move into outer space," does it? The vapor would rise until it found equilibrium with other atmospheric gases. If there was a lot of water, you'd see it in the form of clouds.
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Actually there are several HIV vaccines currently being tested. I'm a volunteer in a phase 1 study for one of them. (Before people ask, no I do not have HIV, this is designed to prevent me from ever getting it, hence, the vaccine terminology instead of the cure term.)
Compared to discovering the cause and solution to diseases, sending a rover to mars isn't that complex. You can overbuild the rover to make sure it works, but if you overbuild a drug, it kills the recipient. And of course you can't point hubble at a virus and see how it works.
Keep in mind that making the rover land close to the meteorite's impact spot is extremely difficult. And given the low speed the rover moves at, I guess this wouldn't be feasible...
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.
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.
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.
Then it is not likely to be enough moisture to bind the soil either. I still think it is lame speculation. You would think the thermal emission spectrometer could detect small amounts of water easily if it were there.
I agree with that, with the spectrometer's I thought they would be able to just scan and say exactly what the compositions are.
Well, if you'd like to walk over and verify it personally, be my guest.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Look, it's just the way science works. People form a hypothesis, do a lot of testing to confirm it, submit it to peer-reviewed journals where other scientists attempt to reproduce their results.
It takes more than a 5-minute experiment to get any degree of certainty in science.
Would you rather that they announced fantastically overhyped results before doing any testing?
Frankly I don't know what the big deal is about liquid water and mars. We know that there's plenty of frozen water, and also that the martian atmosphere contains trace amounts of moisture. Is it 0.3% or 0.03%? It's been a while.
If we know that there's solid and gaseous water, liquid water just seems like something obvious and not a major discovery.
The really big deal would be quantifying that liquid water, which is almost impossible. We have no idea if there are gigantic oceans hidden underground, or even a few smaller pools, or anything at all.
Inside our planet there are literally tons of water, and in many cities that's what you drink, purified underground water.
I'm not an expert, but why aren't they doing more seismographic tests, or even looking at sending a ground penetrating radar to mars?
I dont know about the radar but seismographs are small and cheap...