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."

Comments

The spherules

[corebreech]

I don't see what's mysterious about these at all. You have to remember that Mars has much less gravity than Earth, ergo, the amount of force required to displace a pebble is so much less. So while the atmosphere is thinner there than it is over here, it is still sufficiently dense to allow for substantial winds to develop; winds that displace these pebbles and cause them to move over the ground, and over time--millions and millions of years--this repeated displacement causes the tiny stones to become spheroid in shape. The end.

Re:The spherules

[Kircle]

And NASA is really concerned about martian dust devils and it's impact on future human missions to Mars. They're suppose to be 100 times larger than the dust devils you find on Earth. I believe they have scientists out in Arizon studying the dust devils there and working around that.

Re:Tell news

[MoonFog]

There's a bit of a difference between an orbiter and a rover located on the actual planet.

I doubt you this kind of evidence from an orbiter:
Other images show the rover tracks clearly are being made in "mud", with water being pressed out of that material, Levin said. "That water promptly freezes and you can see reflecting ice. That's clearly ice. It could be nothing else," he said, "and the source is the water that came out of the mud."

Re:Great...

[CdBee]

"and even an oddly shaped object that looks like Rotini pasta."

Could it be a fossil?

What is this all about?

[heironymouscoward]

I mean, seriously. I'm not trolling, just scratching my head...

We are sitting on a planet that has everything we could possibly want. Water, food, sun, beaches, fresh mangos, carnival once a year, beer, ADSL for peanuts.

And now the hint of the memory of water on Mars is enough to give us sciencegasms of pleasure. "Oooh, water, bacterial lifeforms,"... I know, water = life, life = understanding, etc.

But it seems so perverse. There is such a huge waste of life and resources going on all around us. Nothing we ever find on Mars will be remotely as interesting as - say - a bucket of seawater from any corner of the world's oceans. We'll spend fortunes trying to extract a few nuggets of knowledge from the furthest corners of our domain while ignoring the mountains of knowledge that remain to be unpuzzled all around us.

Are we just a perverse species, or what?

Re:What is this all about?

[Darkfred]

I don't think its the thought of the life forms themselves on mars that will give people 'sciencegasms'. It's the implications of what it would mean if we found similar cellular life to our own somewhere else in the universe.

It gives us hope that somewhere else in the universe there would be life as well. After all if two planets in our own system have life it must develop quite easily, Or at least show that interplanet panspermia is possible.

And most important to our motivations, it addresses two very basic interests inherant to our physque. Loneliness and the divine.

data and speculation

[mike3411]

what a weird / poorly written article. maybe i'm misunderstanding some of their statements, but the author makes certain important conclusions that totally lack support. In particular, the possibiliy of liquid water (as evidenced by mud) is suggested. The article states "Levin points to Opportunity imagery that offers conclusive proof of standing liquid water and running water on a cold Mars." The argument is that freezing areas in the rover's tracks are filled with ice, which is supposedly identified through pictures. This may be valid, but to suggest that such an important conclusion can be made by theorizing on what could make a shiny surface in imagaes... seems excessive. This appears especially absurd to me because the rover has tools specifically designed to answer this question. I mean, why is this guy attempting to conjecture this based on images when we can use IR & GC to find out exactly what is there? I suppose the point in this article is that this data has been collected, and is to be announced soon, but the confidence with which the article makes these assertions and its lack of explication for the possible errors in these theories really frustrated me and seems totally inappropriate in a scientific publication, even one online :\

Re:data and speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

what a weird / poorly written article. maybe i'm misunderstanding some of their statements, but the author makes certain important conclusions that totally lack support. In particular, the possibiliy of liquid water (as evidenced by mud) is suggested. The article states "Levin points to Opportunity imagery that offers conclusive proof of standing liquid water and running water on a cold Mars."

Yeah, Levin is a bit nutty here. "Crackpot" may or may not be too strong. He has a history with mentioned Viking experiment. Nearly everyone else has concluded that the results can be explained through normal (but unexpected at the time) chemical properties of the martian soil. Google around for more info, it's also come up on Usenet recently.

All this talk of "mud" and "liquid water" leaves me scratching my head... I can only assume that these people are desperately looking for something to support their preconcieved ideas.

Let's take the "mud" first.

Everyone knows Mars is a very dusty place. It's exceedingly obvious from the pictures. The behavour of the rover tracks (and airbags) is about what you'd expect from a very fine grained material. Go play with some flour in your kitchen if it helps. Also, the "pro-mud" people (shall we call them Elbonians?) also seem to forget that the rovers carry a microscopic imager... The pictures from it seem to clearly indicate that we're looking at sand and dust, not mud.

As for the "shiny" pictures implying brine/ice...

This also seems uninformed to me. There are plenty of things that are shiny that are not ice. I think most of this is a result of not being able to correctly intrepret what the rover sees. The Pancam takes images though a variety of narrow-pass filters, and this can sometimes make things look funky. In fact, you can see that rocks sometimes look "shiny" in one wavelenth, but dull and normal in another.

It's easy to find examples of rocks like this in NASA's "raw image archive" -- eg some of the Sol 14 Pancam pics at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit. html

Re:Great...

[CdBee]

Troll???

I'm asking a perfectly legitimate question. An odd-shaped object embedded in a rock on mars may be a chemical deposit, or it may be an organic product - or it may just be an anomalous rock.

I fail to see what is trollish about my question.

Re:What's so great about water!?

[anish1411]

The fact that for millions of years on Earth, nothing happened, and then all of a sudden BOOM life arose in the gap of about 10,000 (which is a small gap), might be suggestive that life really might not be able to happen many other way!

If you look at life on Earth, it is based on long chains of carbon and some nitrogen, mixed with various other molecules. Not many other elements have the combining properties of carbon and nitrogen, so nothing too complex could be formed with anything else.

If you take the example of a DNA molecule, this ia an extremely complex and precise little thing. It's double-helix structure is only possible because of the way it has been formed, and its replication has been masterfully engineered by millions of years of evolution.

There are many, many other things about life on Earth that are so complex and specific, that I - and many biologists agree with this - think that life probably could not have happened any other way.

Btw, the reason capillary action happens is because water molecules are polar, with the hydrogen side being slightly positive and the oxygen side being slightly negative. This is not true with most other liquids. And besides mercury, or ethanol wouldnt be very useful to plants, even if they could absorb it by capillary action.

Where's the Pasta?

[torpor]

Anyone know where the images of this 'pasta-like' object are? I'd sure like to see that!!!

Re:Where's the Pasta?

[Angry Toad]

They seem to be keeping the most interesting shots and other data to themselves - and no surprise, the only benefit the scientists get out of their participation in the project is publication rights. I'm quite sure that we'll see the most interesting stuff before too terribly long.

Of course there's always the mysterious "horned" Opportunity object, which simply up and disappeared from one day to the next. I still suspect that it may have been a torn bit of material from the airbags that got blown away, but all the same it's an odd thing.

Re:It may have water

[ColaMan]

That doesn't rule out subsurface life.
Which is a likely place for life (if any) to be, considering that there's:
- Possibly liquid water / brine there.
- Possibly adequate sheilding from the crap atmosphere above ground / radiation from space.

What I don't get...

[Lord Kano]

We all know that hydrogen is the most common element in the known universe, why is it such a big deal that some of that greatly abundant hydrogen exists in H2O on Mars?

With the countless gallons on earth, it shouldn't be a big deal that just a fraction of that much water ended up on Mars.

LK

Be careful what you wish for

[tverbeek]

Discovering evidence suggesting that there is life on Mars could be a serious stumbling block to further exploration, and definitely to exploitation.

Remember when Chekov was scanning Ceti Alpha 5 for life before testing the Genesis device there, and his captain said that even a microbe meant the test would be a no-go? Remember what happened to the invading Martians at Grover's Mill NJ: they're highly vulnerable to Terran bacteria.

But seriously, a dead, sterile Mars is one we could start sending people to, and eventually set up a permanent settlement (with waste products and all). But one with actual life would - for scientific, and arguably for moral reasons - have to be quarantined.

Re:Spherical snowflakes?

[art6217]

Several of the photographed spherules seem to have various features close to their tops, i.e. they seem to be pointed like here. There is also a photo of a cut of one of the spherules. If you brighten dark colors in the image something like a central stem, dendritic structures in, relatively to the image, upper part of the spherule, and a `glue' to the left of the spherule, can be seen.

These can be illusions, of course.

Re:What's so great about water!?

[barawn]

But what is it exactly about water that makes it so important?

Actually, that web site you linked to shows a lot of properties that are generic to all liquids - the unique one being that water expands when it contracts.

However, the question should be "why only water?" and the basic answer to that is pretty simple.

Life, simply put, could be described as nature selecting out certain configurations from a system that contains an almost infinite amount of states. Therefore, you need something that allows for many states and many configurations to form - that is, you want a dipole - subatomic "glue", basically - something that can take ions and join them together in weird ways to get bizarre states. Dipoles also act simultaneously as solvents - that is, they break down objects into dissolved ions.

Well, if you want a dipole for life, then you're probably going to get life based on the simplest dipole available. So you start with hydrogen, the most common element. And the simplest dipole you can form with hydrogen is water.

This, of course, doesn't preclude other elements from being the basic dipole for life if the region isn't compatible with water - though, unlike what the article says, Earth is not at the triple point of water - the blackbody temperature of Earth is ~255K, which is far underneath the freezing point of water (granted, triple points require knowledge of pressure, which eliminates a simple blackbody approach, but...). Earth's atmosphere, however, is at the triple point of water, but that's because it's been tuned to get to that point by the various thermal cycles and biological cycles which keep Earth's temperature near that point. What you really needed was liquid water, because as a solid or as a gas, the dipole properties are really being wasted. So, one can imagine a world where something just slightly more complicated than water (say... ammonia) is liquid, and maybe, just maybe, you'd get a complex chemistry out of that, too.

Re:The spherules [talk to pilots]

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, I should think that quite a lot is known about dust devils.

Every cumulus cloud that you see is a dust devil (though usually without the dust). The rising air of the dust devil is itself responsible for the cloud. Oft times it happens that the rising air either runs into an inversion or is sufficiently dry that it doesn't reach the dew point to condense a cloud. In deserts and dryer climes those rising air columns often find plenty of dust to pick up, making them visible.

Further, these things are useful. Skilled pilots can use them to fly hundreds of miles in a day (1000km is not unheard of; I've personally flown > 300 km several times). As the poster mentions, they are often visible and rise up to two miles. (Actually more; in New South Wales (Australia) or Arizona (US) on a good summer day, they go regularly to 3-4,000m and more than 5,000m is not unheard of.) In mountainous areas where pilots are likely to carry supplemental oxygen, dust devils are scarcer, and orographic winds are more practical for achieving very high altitude (10,000m+) and long distance (500km+) flights. The orographic winds ("ridge lift", "wave") also tend to break up dust devils, strongly limiting their altitudes in mountainous regions.

Without thunderstorms (on earth) dust devils sometimes reach upward speeds of 30 knots (15m/s) or more. With thunderstorms (condensing and freezing water release heat), much more powerful winds are created (> 70 knots).

Further, in many areas of the world, you can get soaring forecasts. These provide some indication of the likelyhood of "thermals" (dust devils, w/ or w/o dust), what time of the morning they are likely to start (they are driven by sunlight), how strong they are likely to be, how high they are likely to be, and how many can be found per unit area. (Or you can use a T-phi chart or a Stuve chart (aka "skew chart") and a few measurements to figure these things yourself.)

forget water -they discovered LIFE on Mars in 1976

[mattblanchard]

One scientist that was quoted in the article, Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, was the lead scientist on a life detection experiment that was aboard the 1976 Viking lander mission. He's been trying to tell NASA and the world for the past 3 decades that "the Viking LR experiment detected living microorganisms in the soil of Mars". Check out this paper. Amazing stuff. Truly amazing.

After reading this paper and several others by Dr. Levin, I have to wonder why the general public has no idea about these findings. Don't they merit public discussion? Why don't *any* of NASA's planned Mars missions contain direct life-detection experiments? IANACT (Conspiracy Theorist), but something smells fishy to me.