Slashdot Mirror
NASA Mars Press Briefing & "Significant Findings"
An anonymous reader writes "NASA will have a press briefing today at 2 p.m. EST to announce "significant findings". Salty liquid water maybe? Bacteria? This meeting will also be broadcast on NASA TV."
How on Earth--er, Mars--is this offtopic? Steve Squyres is part of the panel giving the presentation! A significant presentation no less, one that is about Mars!
Stupid moderators.
NASA TV
German newsmag "Der Spiegel" has the story: They found a certain kind of iron sulfate compound, which forms only in bodys of standing water. Discoveries were made using the MIMOS-II Moessbauer spectrometer and the APXS x-ray spectrometer. Images are available in the article.
Probes already undergo severe sterilization procedures prior to launch. For the very simple reason that you don't want earth microbes in outer space places when you're looking for bugs there in the first place.
NASA Television can be found on the satellite AMC 9 Transponder 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization downlink frequency - 3880 MHz, Audio is at 6.8 MHz.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
You can view NASA TV online, as well, it seems... (The page also has satellite coordinates, and alternate sources for NASA TV)
It definently has to do with water - not microbes, and almost certianly saltly water at that. This article on MSNBC talks a fair amount about it.
More or less, the appearence of the martian bedrock appears to be sedimentary in origin, with a clumpy, sticky soil that hints at a bit of brine. While it's not life, water is one of the building blocks of life.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
EST = GMT - 5 hours. (unless it's summertime then it's 4 hours)
so 2 p.m. EST should be 19.00h (GMT) in the UK and 20.00h in Amsterdam/Paris/Berlin (GMT+1).
So exciting stuff, but probably not any microbes.
Geothermal activity on Mars? All the volcanoes are long dead. Mars cooled down long before Earth, because it's hot core is ten times smaller. I'm pretty sure most scientist think Mars is geologically "dead".
Translation by the Fish
You are correct...I don't believe the microscopic imager has the magnification muscle to view something as small as bacteria, and the Mossbauer spectrometer is very specific in what it can analyze (iron-bearing minerals). These rovers are, as designed, primarily geological instruments.
For details about what the rovers are carrying, instrument-wise, see this page.
mplayer mms://wmbcast.nasa-global.speedera.net/\
wmbcast.nasa-global/wmbcast_nasa-global_jan\
212004_1021_53608
(Watch out for the \ that mark line continuations!)
Frame rate is low, but the audio's nicely in sync and is certainly decent enough for watching press releases.
Beware, though, that as I post, NASA TV is broadcasting some ghastly children's programme. You have been warned...
I don't know you tell me
NASA does not put it on their page (I emailed them asking them to), but if you are on an Internet2 enabled + multicast enabled network (college/university) it is available via MPEG1 multicast feed.
You can view it with Quicktime, Real 9 (real 10 crashes with SDP), VideoLan and CISCO IP/TV.
To view it on Videolan start the player with
--extraint SAP
and look at the playlist....it can take up to 10 min before you'll see the NASA listing.
If anybody wants the sdp file I'll try and find a way of posting it. I tried to...but the slashdot forum filters killed my post!
They're keeping busy with comets comets (with Europe) and the most distant galaxy in universe (with Swiss).
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's also available via Internet2/Mutlticast advertised via SAP. If you have an I2+Multicast feed you can view it with the VideoLan client or Quicktime if you have the SDP information.
We've known there's plenty of water on Mars for years, in the polar ice caps. (No, they're not all frozen CO2.)
The excitement is over finding liquid water (or evidence of same). -Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Because we would see evidence for it.
Instead, we see miles and miles of sediments stacked up on top of each other, many full of animal burrows, others requiring deposition in still water, others are deserts, others have dessication cracks.
There is a difference between what you say and the evidence. God sure did a good job of making the earth look old.
__________
[Big Brick Wall]
Der Spiegel has already leaked the story.
NASA are announcing their plans and timeline for the future:
Commitment to manned exploration of the solar system and beyond
Space shuttle back on line asap
ISS to be repurposed for manned exploration (Hmm, did they dicuss this with the other countries that built it?
New manned vehicle do be developed called CEV (anyone have more info on this? I tuned in just as this part ended)
Manned mission to the moon sometime between 2014 to 2020 (ie slower than the 'in this decade' with 1960s technology)
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
http://www.the-planet-jupiter.com/Shoemaker-Levy-9 /g-impact-Shoemaker-Levy-9.jpg
www.c-span.org usually carries all of the NASA rover briefings live as well.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Although most of the evidence for martian life in the meteorite was later disproven, the magnetite crystals still stand as a fairly persuasive argument for martian life. There was a rebuttal to the magnetite particles but I'm not at all convinced by it - researchers have been trying to make magnetic particles like the ones in the meteorite/Earthly magnetotactic bacteria for decades without success. I'm very dubious, therefore about the report that a simple geology simulation can form those particles. Given that a significant fraction of the Martian particles are identical to Earthly ones to the atomic level, we can't throw out the meteorite evidence just yet.
What do you mean "not a biologist among them"? John Grotzinger of MIT, who's going to be on the panel, does "biogeology". Check out his research at:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/sedlab/projects.html
Disclaimer first: I am not an astronomist, but at least, I am a german native speaker...
SPIEGEL ONLINE EXKLUSIVE
"Opportunity" finds proof for martian floods
by Thorsten Dambeck
The mars rover "Opportunity" managed to find proof that once upon a time, there was flowing water on mars. As SPIEGEL ONLINE heard from sources within NASA, the US space agency will make this discovery public tonight.
[caption]Water trace: Light stones close to Oppotunity's landing spot (NASA/JPL)[/caption]
"I am flabbergasted, I am astonished", said Steve Squyres, scientific head of the rover mission, in face of the pictures from the second mars vehicle "Opportunity". No other landing zone is similar to the broad plain Meridiani Planum, where Spirit's sister probe landed. The scientist was especially taken in by the light rock formation that appeared in front of the rover's camera eyes, peering out of the dark martian sand.
After thorough mineralogical and chemical analysis of the rocks in the past few weeks, it seems clear now that Squyres spontaneous excitement was justified. As SPIEGEL ONLINE found out from sources within the US space administration, the rock formation is sedimental stone which was definitely built up in a stagnant body of water.
First suspicion hardened
The "smoking gun", the irrefutable proof for the existence of past floods on mars, is said to be a sulphate compound that was found in the rocks, and which can only come into existence in the presence of water. NASA will present these results tonight, Tuesday, at 8 PM german time on a press conference in Washington.
Already the first close-up pictures of the formation fed the suspicion of planetologists, that the rock formation may have been built by sedimentation, by the process of deposition. The single strata were clearly visible on the high-resolution snapshots from Opportunity's panoramic camera. An important contribution to the discovery can be assumed to have been made by the Mossbauer-Spectrometer "Mimos II" , built by the physicist Gostar Klingelhofer from Mainz, which is responsible for the mineralogical analysis of ferrous martian rocks.
Breakthrough with german instruments
Already on the 9th of February, German members of the rover research team reported surprising results from their APXS ("Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer") instrument. According to these reports, analyses of a light rock named "Robert E." using the spectrometer found substantially higher levels of zinc and sulphur than in all previously investigated mars rocks. "This indicates that the rock is a hardened, salt-containing sediment, and not of volcanic origin", said a member of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry, where the APXS spectrometer was built.
But even if non-volcanic processes are being favored more and more: Until last week, NASA scientists emphasized that various formation mechanisms -- including variants without the influence of liquid water -- are possible. Now, it seems, liquid water made the race.
With this, the US-rover would have confirmed from the ground what the european probe "Mars Express" already discovered from orbit: End of January, ESA scientists interpreted the breath-taking pictures of the red planet as clear evidence that once upon a time, rivers and seas existed on mars.
Along with it's drilling tools and such, it carried a spectrometer (or something of the sort) to detect mineral and chemical composition.
:-)
Actually, several spectrometers. There's the Mossbauer spectrometer, designed to identify iron-bearing minerals. There's the APXS (alpha particle x-ray spectrometer.) which performs elemental chemistry analysis. And there's the Mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) which studies infra-red spectra to help determine type and abundance of minerals.
Then there's the arsenal of 9 cameras on each rover, including the stereo panoramic cameras which have filters from far IR to near UV (980 nm, 930 nm, 900 nm, 860 nm, 800 nm, 750 nm, 670 nm, 600 nm, 530 nm, 480 nm, 440 nm, and 430 nm).
Yes, we've got spectrometers
Are they likely to be the required tools for confirming the existence of life? No. These are geologic and rock chemistry tools.
Is it possible that we've got MI pictures that suggest life? Yeah, it's possible. Is it possible that our wider-angle cameras spotted some Martian beast moving across nearby terrain? Yeah, possible, I suppose. Is it likely that they've got anything close to definitive proof of life on Mars? I don't think so.
I'm going to take a guess and say that they're likely to tell us that they've got a pretty good handle on the local geology at Opportunity's crater in Meridiani Planum and that the rocks they've analyzed most likely formed in large bodies of standing liquid water.
As a bonus, it would be nice if they also announced that they've found more than trace amounts of liquid water just under the surface or large amounts of water, frozen above the surface (could those spherules be ice cubes? Ray did say that they were the "grayest" think they'd ever seen on Mars, though that could be a signal that they were the coarse gray hematite they're looking for.)
The summary of the study can be found at USC here.
They just announced the surface where Opportunity is was "drenched" with water for an extended period of time.
Left shift 1 for e-mail...