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Mounting Evidence for Water on Mars
Kent Simon writes "Space.com has an interesting article discussing new evidence from the mars rovers that shows there may really be Water on Mars."
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Has anyone else noticed the six segment radial spoke pattern on one of the spherules? Six-fold symmetry perhaps related to the same way that snowflakes form? Maybe the beads are snowflakes that gradually accrete into ice-droplets?
Either that, or the spherules are organic...
wow what a stupid post & argument. i dont mean to sound argumentative, but you provide almost no support for your conclusion that "ESA's mission is superior to NASA's mission". First let me say the ESA mission is important and useful. Remote mapping of the surface will help researcers understand martian geography, helping to locate points of interest, understanding weather paterns, and learning more about the geographic changes the planet may have undergone over the past few thousand years.
. html for spirit's photos, http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity.html for opportunity's.
_ surface_instru.html for details) are also very important. these tools will allow accurate analysis of collected samples. while an orbiter can determine chemical content to a degree, the detail pales in comparison to what the rovers are finding.
But the US mission is also very valuable. You ask "But what have they produced so far? A few snapshots and panorama pictures (which are nice, but well...), and some stone probes." which is really just silly. The photos the landers have taken are more than just panoramas of the scenary. While these do tell us more about the martian surface, the really imporant pictures are of the rock formations, close-ups of the surface sand and rock, and micrographs of all the material there at the surface. Seeing exactly what martian rock, pebbles, and sand looks like is very important for understanding the martian atmosphere & weather patterns, as well as geologic makeup and history.
to suggest that it's only taken a few is absurd... check out http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit
the other tools on the rovers (see http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft
with all your unfounded critisism and palpable distaste for another country, I almost mistook you for an American! try not to be so prejudiced in the future, mmK?
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Simple : the physics isn't different on Mars, so if the physical basis of the processes is understood (which it is in the case of grain & pebble formation), we can know what to expect (which in this case would be relatively similar things).
Besides : have you looked at the pictures? These spherules are not round because of abrasion or erosion, they are clearly round because they formed that way (either as molten droplets solidifying, or through some sort of deposition process). Rounded pebbles are "rounded", not "perfectly spherical" like these spherules.
Until we get info on their chemical composition, we don't know what caused them, but erosion into "spherules" is one of the least likely explanations.
Most likely, in order of decreasing likelyhood:
- Solidified droplets of molten rock (from impact or volcano)
- Chemical concretions in standing water (above or below ground)
- Chemical concretions of biological origin
- Eggs of a Martian Rock-frog
- wind/water erosion of angular stones
I remember watching a documentary on UK television describing one of the theories as to how water came to be on Earth. It was proposed that much of the ocean's water came from comets that pelted the Earth before there was an atmosphere and with the Earth being the right distance from the sun, we got oceans (instead of steam on venus and ice(?) on Mars). It has also been suggested that the building blocks of life (amino acids etc.) may also have come from extraterrestrial debris.
Could it be that without an atmosphere on Mars, comets and the like could be falling on the planet and depositing their contents on the surface in the same way as has happened on earth? I mean, heck, we've even got our rover planted in the midst of a crater created by extra-martian debris and since there is little or no erosion on this planet we could be partly examining the contents of extra-planetary material. Personally, I think this would make the examination even more interesting than it already is!
I was going to mod yet feel that I must post. Why can we not just take our nationlism, stow it and accept the fact that both NASA's mission and the ESA's mission are providing valueable contributions to mankind. Spirit and Opportunity provide a prespective that Mars Express cannot. Mars Express provides a prespective that Spirit and Opportunity cannnot. Both missions are good science!
But it seems so perverse. There is such a huge waste of life and resources going on all around us.
/. someone posts a 'why are we doing this?' message.
Whenever there's anything about space exploration on
Yes, there are 2.3 billion people without fresh water, but it's not the fault of the space programs. NASA's budget for 2004 is about $16 billion. The Pentagon's budget is $450 billion!!!! This is more than all other military spending by all other nations combined We could cut it in half and still be spending three times as much as our next highest potential enemy (Russia, who spends $70 billion per year, and they're an ally.) The "Axis of Evil" spends only $7.5 billion, so we could easily defend our nation from "evildoers", feed all the hungry children, house the homeless, and provide quality education to anyone who wants it and still have money left over to send humans to Mars and the Moon, and push ourselves into space.
Don't blame NASA for taking money from important programs. Blame the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex who would rather build things that blow up than feed starving children.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Someone in the article speculates that the spherules might result from water percolating upwards through the soil and freezing when it gets near the surface. To a layperson this is an appealing interpretation, with only one small drawback - the spherules are clearly eroding out of the rocks. If you've been following the daily raw images (click the non-obvious 'multimedia' link at the top of the marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov site, then 'all raw images' turns up in the LHS navbar. Took me ages to work that out) you'll see that Opportunity sawed a few in half when with the RAT when grinding holes in a rock. They're clearly in the rock, as the surface weathers away, eventually they fall out and roll across the surface to low points where they collect. Quite possibly we'd never have seen these if Opportunity hadn't been lucky enough to land in a crater.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe