Slashdot Mirror
NASA Says Mars Rocks Formed in a Salty Sea
NASA has made another announcement, live on NASA TV, regarding the discoveries of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. They believe that the rocks examined by Opportunity were actually formed in water; that those rocks were actually sediments laid down in a shallow salty sea. They've already had outside scientists examine their data and those scientists concur with the conclusions. NASA has a story with explanations and some photos.
If this is true, and those rocks truly are sedimentary, they should be full of bacterial fossils. All we have to do is get one of them under a microscope to confirm life on Mars.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I bet they'll soon find some stuff that will look like biological processes. Cool stuff...
I remember back in Kindergarten when all of my classmates and I wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. All of our dreams were dashed to bits the next year when the Challenger exploded. We all went back to wanting to be fire fighters or whatever.
I tell you, these Mars rovers have done more to get me excited about space exploration than anything which has happened since then. I'm currently applying to medical school, but a long-dormant part of the back of my mind whispers, "You should have been an astronaut after all!"
What an amazing day to live in, when we may be at the threshold of discovering LIFE on ANOTHER PLANET!
Dude, this stuff is happening Live, as you see it. The fact that they've had time to let other scientists peer review their work, even at the highest levels, is pretty cool. There will be plenty of peer review going on over the next many years, but for now I think the Mars Rover science teams are going out of their way to make sure they are only reporting what they believe they can prove. None of them has stated that there was life on mars, they're just reporting the facts as they see them.
I'll bet you they'd be willing to debate the facts with you if you had credentials to match your statements above.
For now, this is a pretty big deal and one step towards making us wonder seriously if there was life on mars.
I don't think NASA is claiming anything more than broad speculation with lots of caveats. They're pretty sure there was lots of water. When? How much? How long? Who knows. Since I'm paying for this info anyway, I'm glad they're making it available as quick as they are.
Besides, isn't releasing this data to the world defacto peer review?
Blaze a trail to the New World
When NASA shows their results to another group of scientists (peers), doesn't that count for the purposes of peer review? Isn't that what peer review is?
I thought peer reviewed journals were where you published crap that had already been peer reviewed.
I'm not a professional research scientist, nor do I play on on TV, or even slashdot. I have done minimal post graduate work. I don't know how these things work. Please educate me if I'm wrong.
Exactly. NASA could have sent it to a journal that would have a handful of scientists look at the arguments (which they are sure to do) or they could let the world know what they were up to and in the process have the entire world analyze things. Sure this data is through a filter of the press, which may make it harder for scientists everywhere to analyze the claim. But they did do it live on NASA TV and surely have information on their website (or soon to). Therefore for you scientists out there, you will have a great opportunity to analyze, scrutinize, etc. a huge finding.
Meanwhile, Joe Blows like me can actually hear about it and read about it rather quickly, instead of waiting for the filter down process after a peer-reviewed journal down to a general science magazine down to Newsweek or Slashdot. And I am very happy about that. After all, I have at least a couple pennies invested in those two rovers. And I should have a right to know what they have found.
Salt water is important news because it shows that the water was there for a long period of time and that it had some sort of feeds (rivers?) to keep adding eroded minerals and maintain water levels, not just some brief puddle.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It is now apparent that they might not have any type of fossil experts in their employ as well. Consider the following from the tin foil hat crowd:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppo
With the fossils on the following URLs:s _globularis.htm
http://www.cretaceousfossils.com/plants/porocysti
http://www.iftx.com/oct03.jpg
http://wardsci.com/category.asp?c=834
http://www.iftx.com/oct03.jpg
Or compare the Opportunity outcrop structure to the following image showing the layering found in coral fossils on earth:s 4.html
http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/navassa/geology/fossil
So whats's going on a NASA ? Have the geologist overcome the astrobiologists ?
And things would not be complete with this interesting read from the tin foil hat king himself, with lots of pics. It would have been nice to have had a fossil expert on staff to help sort these things out in advance. But 20/20 hindsight, y'know ...
But also, it does suggest that they are being really really really overly careful about saying that there was or is life on Mars. Almost like they are scared of it.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
on why and how Mars lost its mass, and therefore the gravity necessary to have salty seas, and the probable atmosphere and precipitations to create them?
suppose Mars was bigger once, and due to a huge impact, lost a good chunk of itself... would it take a long time to reform itself into a spherical planet? Would there be any proof that such an event ever happened?
What if there's still some form of archbacteria living on Mars? I mean the ones living on earth can survive basically anywhere. Or they could be hibernating as the bacteria on earth are able to do.
It's still a good story, but has been rendered mildly obsolete. That says a lot of good things about the rover missions rather than bad things about Mr. Bova's predictive powers. Occupational hazzard.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Yeah exploration is *far* too dangerous to risk the lives of American astronauts.
American astronauts should sit at desks pushing their mouse around playing solitaire or somthing.
I really pity them... its sad that such cowardice should infect such a (formerly) great nation.
Yeah *troll*, *flamebait*, *whatever* but its true.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Nope. (Relevant bit about halfway down the page). My guess based on the information in the link is that the obliquity variations occur over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, so the ice migrates slowly toward the equator, while the seasonal variations occur over a period of just hundreds of days, so the ice doesn't have time to migrate back.
One correction: The obliquity cycle would seem to not exactly be highly chaotic, but rather a slow oscillation.
This is an interesting idea, and it was a popular concept for a while ago. Writers as diverse as Burroughs and C.S. Lewis wrote stories around these concepts. It could be called "dying Mars, high noon Earth, and promising Venus" hypothesis or something. I suppose this has lot to do with Percival Lowell's writings about ancient martians still trying to fight against their planet's inevitable destiny as a dry and dead place (with canals he claimed to have found). Add to this the fact that before 1960's we had no way of knowing how it's like in the surface of Venus, so it was easy for scifi writers to place there nice tropical forests just waiting for future civilizations to appear. After all, who could've guessed that right now Venus has temperatures around 480 Celsius and about the worst greenhouse effect you can imagine.
However, it's not getting cooler. Quite the opposite. Everyone doesn't agree about the exact timelines but the general consensus seems to be that we only have about billion years til Earth becomes too hot for living. That's simply because the Sun is getting hotter as it gets older.
One cannot underestimate the power of popular culture that has painted us the image of dying Mars. However it's important to see why the red planet once was better place for life and held vast amounts of liquid water, and why it isn't anymore. Of course we can't be sure about everything yet, but we can make good guesses. Most probable reason is that Mars, being smaller, has so low gravity compared to Earth or Venus. This has led it gradually losing most of its atmosphere, lowering both the pressure and temperature on surface. This in turn made conditions unfit for liquid water, so the seas then disappeared, making it very hard for any possible life there. Question now is, where is the water? If it's anywhere to be found anymore, it just might've vaporized to space. And obviously we're interested in any possible marks of life.
So apparently the Sun, and thus the whole solar system is getting increasingly hotter, but still we cannot reliably say what happens in any individual planet. I'm not sure anyone has complete theory explaining what causes Venus's ultra-thick atmosphere and what that planet would be like if something thinned the atmosphere to more Earth-like levels...
What I'd like to know is, what is that clearly visible, dark, yet shiny object in the foreground in the Meridiani Planium image at 97 degs (the largest image download has azimuth degree marks)?
It can't be the Backshell & Parachute which are at 235 degs. It can't be heat shield either, which is much farther away. And from the image, it clearly is much darker and rises above the surface.
Also interesting is the fact that it lies on one of the bounce marks from the airbags, but none of the other bounce marks have this feature. Its' in line with the distant East Crater (probably by chance), but clearly in the foreground...
What we DO know now with reasonable certainty is that such water could not possibly have been any warmer than near-freezing. Noachian Mars may have been "cold and damp", but we can now rule out the view of some hopeful scientists that it must have been "warm and wet".
Well so much for reasonable certainty, eh?
AN interesting question those articles do pose, though, is - if Mars was so wet for so long (wet enough to make this sedimentary rock) why is there so much Olivine up there? Olivine breaks down when exposed to water - even frozen water.
It's a mystery - so I guess we'll just have to pack up the truck and go check it out.
Swimmin' pools, movie stars...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I've read a lot of discussions lately about recent evidence for why there must, at one time, have been liquid water on Mars. But, much of that evidence relates to the deposition of sediment, presence of erosion patterns, aftereffects of evaporation, presence of salts, crystallization patterns, and so forth -- none of which (to my knowledge) requiring the liquid in question to be H2O. Some of the evidence, on the other hand, relates to the formation of minerals such as hematite, which presumably form only in or near liquid H2O, and not, say, liquid H2O2, liquid CO2, or liquid N2. The biggest question(s) I have that I've not seen well addressed are:
1. What evidence supports or rules out the presence of liquids other than H2O on the surface of Mars, at one time, in large quantities?
2. How much, if any, of the present evidence could be explained by flows of liquid CO2, nitrogen, methane, ammonia, or some other liquid?
3. Which evidence, if any, points most strongly to the presence of large amounts of H2O as the liquid in question? I know there are currently thought to be large, polar caps of solid H2O, but how much of the current evidence precludes the existence of large seas of some other liquid in the distant geological past?
I apologize if these questions are simple or completely baseless. I am not a geologist, and am legitimately curious.
Cheers,
F00F