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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."
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.
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.
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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
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".
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...
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!
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]
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.
The summary of the study can be found at USC here.