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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."
to carry NASA TV. I swear, the closer you get to Kennedy Space Center, the less chance they will offer it.
A lot of people are saying "salty water", but damn...microbes....it's just too much to hope for.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think either rover had any instruments designed for detecting any form of life. Unless it was significantly bigger than a microbe and could be seen with the relatively low-power microscope on the rover, I suppose.
Just out of interest, does the media in the USA cover space news from other countries? For instance, was the launching of the European "Rosetta" probe today covered?
It is a fascinating project. Take a look at the "Animated guide to the Rosetta mission" about half way down the page on this BBC news item).
Yeah. Check out the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. One of the interesting things was the bacteria and molds that the scientists hid within some of the probes to "seed" Mars. And in defiance of some of their collegues that wanted a pristine Mars.
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
It would be regrettable if this annoucement only amounted to "We have evidence from the rock layers / erosion patterns / spherule concretions that water must have been involved in the creation of these features", as we already know that water can today exist in liquid form on 30% of the planet's surface, and that water has been active on the Martian surface in the recent geological past (source). But given NASA's reluctance regarding all things water-related, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what it's going to be.
The really interesting stuff is the things they have avoided talking about, like the "mud-like texture". But most interesting in terms of water evidence is the trench dug by Opportunity. If you look at the fairly solid wall of soil at the right you will see a slightly dark streak on it. That streak leads directly to a puddle on the floor. Given this visual evidence, and the structure of the soil, it is pretty obvious that this stuff is wet.
The simple reality is that Mars is a wet planet. The oceans didn't just vanish, they went underground into the porous subsurface world of Mars. That's where the real action is, not on the UV-sterilized surface. All we see of Mars' underground water world on the surface is the occasional puddle or pond, the black streaks and Malin's famous gullies. If you want to see Martian life, find wet underground regions with geothermal activity.
Before we all get too excited, remember all the fuss in about 1996(?) when it was claimed that fossil bacteria traces had been found in a martian meteoite. And then turned out not to be true.
World != planet Earth.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
If we all came from the same 'stuff,' it's likely these microbes could be compatible enough with humans to cause some nasty infections.
www.lonseidman.com
I'll bite.
As a Christian and believer in God, I find your comments to be ignorant and intolerant.
You should know that I of course believe that God created the world in 7 days. Why not? If there is an omnipotent God, why could he *not* do it in 7 days? Put it this way, if you were God, and you created a mountain, then you allowed a geologist to immediately examine the strata in in the side of the mountain, would the geologist be able to determine that it was only minutes old? Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
The fact is that I am also a believer in science. Anyone who is a Christian will quickly realize that our beliefs tell us only about goings-on in Heaven and Earth, and contains no references to other planets or other extra-terrestrial life forms. I believe that there are probably many other intelligent and unintelligent life-forms in the universe.
I would bet that most Christian-bashers on Slashdot would consider themselves great, tolerant progressives, yet they seem to only be tolerant of the cause du jour. How sad.
they already get sterilised.
moreover, it's very unlikely that stuff from here would contaminate whole mars anyways.
and even moreover, so what if it would contaminate most of it? isn't that the whole point of dreaming about terraforming?? if there's signs of life there it means other, much more significant things! answer to things like "is earth the only place in the universe with life?" and other 'little' things.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Everybody is all excited about finding water on Mars because that increases the odds of finding life on Mars.
But the big excitement of finding water on Mars means that manned missions are possible. Not the one-way missions that were discussed previously here on slashdot, but the kind where we go in light and process our own fuel for the return trip.
Read any good sonnets lately?
If you have brine you also have many other minerals dissolved in water which is nutrients for bacterial life. Combine this with the knowledge that the Soviet landers were insufficiently sterilised and that bacteria are known for a fact to survive years in space then it is not unlikely that the life they might find is, well, Soviet bacteria.
BTW the Soviet probes used thermionic valves and cold therefore not be sterilised at high temperature so it is likely that some survived to join the probe on its journey to the red planet.
Unfortunately just the opposite would probably happen, look at the Book of Mormon. When life is found somewhere else, Jesus is going to have to save them too you know.
Might make for interesting synchronicity.
-Peter
Most plans for manned mission to mars call for sending a nuclear powered fuel factory to transform indigenous martian resources into rocket fuel. Any people going to mars would probably be anxious that the robotic factory that was supposed to be manufacturing their air supply and fuel for the return trip had been working correctly for the past year it took them to reach marz. You could just as easily send the fuel factory, and unmanned probes that would refuel on marz as send manned vehicles that would refuel on mars. And if the factory wasn't working after all, then you could send another one and the probe could wait happily for it's arrival.
Eat at Joe's.
There's a school of thought that believes that oil exists on Jupiter, where no organic life has ever existed. This came about when comet shoemaker-levy 9 crashed into Jupiter and created that "big black eye".
y -9 /g-impact-Shoemaker-Levy-9.jpg
http://www.the-planet-jupiter.com/Shoemaker-Lev
There are many ways the instruments on the rovers could be used to detect life, but mostly they are for finding geological evidence that the planet could have or could now support life.
One possibility not yet mentioned (and what to me would be the most exciting news) is if they peeled apart some of the sedimentary layers and found fossilized microbes or evidence of former sea life. That would blow me away.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
Parent is not flamebait. Mod is a poopy-head.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
This announcement will probably mention that evidence has been found that hematite deposits were created in a wet environment and that the Martian surface was once warmer and wetter than it is now. I doubt that any mention will be made of brine, although it's possible that a carefully phrased statement such as "the surface characteristics *suggest* the *potential* of brine" may be made. Why hedge? Simple. If definitive findings are announced solving various Martian mysteries there's little or no incentive to send the next rover... There will be NO mention of bacteria/fossils/our Martian Overlords. Look at the list of announcers, there's no biologist (and no real biology experiments on the rovers anyway).
You are missing the point.
Imagine, for a second, God has just crated Adam.Boy, is he ever hungry! Because his digestive tract is completely empty. In fact, he has a blood sugar level of zero. He goes unconscious and his brain dies in a few minutes. Obviously (taking one possible creationism standpoint for a second), God created Adam as if he had eaten meals in the recent past, had been innoculated with the appropriate intestinal flora, had grown through the normal proceseses of metabolism, had had the amount of exercise that would be normal for an adult human being. In other words, with all the hallmarks of a history that never actually happened. A lemma, if you will, of this viewpoint is that Adam had a belly button.
Same goes (in this theory) for the world at large. It was created as an ongoing affair, complete with geological features (including fossils) that are indicative of a history that never happened. This history can be studied in any level of detail you wish, because it is perfect and indistinguishable from the results of an actual history. In fact it is an actual history in every respect other than it did not happen.
"But, but," you will object, " this kind of theory is not scientific."
Exactly.
All long term successful relgions go through periods where they "go back to basics". Ad fontes -- "to the wellsprings" was the cry of the Reformation theologians. The Cluniacs of five hundred years earlier in their own drive to recreate primitive Christianity inaugurated many of the institutions that the Reformation theologians rejected as corrupting innovations.
The problem is that you can never truly go back.
Fundamentalism is just a more recent variation on the same theme. They are following ad fontes impulse to try to recreate what they believe to be a primitive literal belief in the scientific truth Bible. Another, perhaps more hostile view of the Bible is that it is a pre scientific view of the world, and therefore it is obsolete. Personally, I think both viewpoints are misguided. Premodern religious people were not concerned with scientific truth, with its standards of evidence and negatability. To make the Bible "scientific" is both to add something to it that was outside the kenn of its creators, and to obscure its real value. By in large early religious people were concerned about the inner quality of human life. You can see this in the rather free way they treated their myths.
The Lurianic Kabbalists, for example, completely overlayed the Torah's account with their own highly detailed and symbolic creation myth. On the Christian side, much of what we receive as standard myths about Angels, particular Lucifer, is extra-Biblical. Almost every Chrisitan takes it for granted that the serpent in the Garden was Satan. In the Genesis account, the status of the serpent is much more ambiguous; while he is cursed in the end, he is certainly no Prince of Darkness -- he is a bringer of knowledge with all its attendant pain. Furthermore, read critically and in the cultural context in which Genesis was likely written, it would appear to be a gloss of earlier creation myths and shares many familiar symbols.
Why do people need a creation myth? In part, to address their curiosity about origins, a need that is now better satisfied through palentology, geology and cosmology. But curiosity about natural history is only a secondary reason; after all most people can make it through the day, the year, perhaps even their entire lifetime without giving any through to the creation the universe. The reason people need creation myths is that they need some kind of working hypothesis to questions that have no final answer: Why am I here? Why is life the way it is, full of pain and suffering?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's no intolerance here. We just find creationists hysterically funny, that's all.
as a student of religion and mathematics, and a confessing Christian, I'd have to agree with you...
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
I think I know what they did with the apes that came back from the early spaceflights.
They put them in charge of NASA TV programming.
I mean, J.H.C, when the "big spacewalk" was happening a week or two ago I tuned into NASA TV, and what did I get to watch?
**NOTHING**
Well, not quite nothing, a grainy image of the command center with an even grainer occasional camera view of a bigscreen projection of their track, which was 100 times worse than simply going to J-Track. Do you seriously mean to tell me that NASA controllers did not have a video feed of or from their own astronauts outside the station, and that all they had was nearly unintelligable acryonym laced audio? Or is it that they simply can't afford a $5 video splitter?
( During the hubble repairs a few years ago at one point they showed nothing but a video feed of an inanimate obscure connector between the shuttle and the telescope. Apparently the shuttle didn't have enough downlink bandwidth, and they needed them all for the job at hand. )
In any case if NASA and the administrationis so concerned about public image and if they really want people to get enthused about spaceflight, how about simply spending an extra $5000 for a single extra camera on the station to provide a view of the interesting things going on?
Throw in another camera to give us a LIVE view of the earth on another channel - 24/7. How many of you wouldn't LOVE to see a 400 mile wide live video feed from space of the earth, and follow it along with J-Track, a recent GOES image, and your atlas / globe, dynamic topographic and/or terraserver reference feed?
Isn't this supposed to be the information age?
Can you imagine how utterly amazing it would be for science teachers to be able to plan a science/geography class around an hour of that each couple weeks with a few groups of kids around 5 PCs all watching the different feeds and trying to match them to the live feed? Add in a few kids using google groups and google news to provide live socio/political/weather commentary, etc etc.
Following is the panel they will have available for interviews in an hour. Note that there is a geologist, but no biologist or anything similar. Thus I would guess that they found strong evidence for water, rather than stumbling across bacteria.
# Professor Steve Squyres, Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Principal Investigator, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
# Professor John Grotzinger, MER science team geologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
# Dr. Benton C. Clark III, MER science team member and Chief Scientist of Space Exploration, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Astronautics Operations, Denver
# Dr. Joy Crisp, MER Project Scientist, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
# Dr. Jim Garvin, Lead Scientist for Mars and the Moon, NASA Headquarters
I swear, the closer you get to Kennedy Space Center, the less chance they will offer it.
Have you asked? We used to have it on Time Warner and it was removed in favour of WB (I kid not). So, I went down to the local store and put in a request for it to be re-added. 2 months later, they added the channel again.