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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.
Well, I suppose that would explain the ruins of a Long John Silver's that Viking 2 found in the 70s.
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I bet they'll soon find some stuff that will look like biological processes. Cool stuff...
It's time to get our asses to Mars. There is far too much to learn for us to just sit around and do nothing.
Especially considering some of this may be applicable to what will happen to our own planet in the future. We currently have seas. Mars used to. It'd be a good idea to figure out why they don't have them anymore.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
...after the discovery of a layer of surfboard wax in the sediments.
WOOOOOOO! PAAAAARTY! Show us your tits! Pass the tequila. Where's Shenor Frog'sh at? Adonde esta el bano? Can I get some more salt for my margarita glass?
You know it's only a matter of time. Really.
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Sure, sure - next they'll try to make us swallow Martian seamen!
Okay, so they've shown it to a few scientists who concur.
Whatever happened to *publishing* the results of your experiments (and the data) in peer-reviewed journals?
Now, granted, there's plenty of political bias in the journals -- anyone that thinks science is purely dealing with the facts these days is *beyond* an idiot, but still. Just because you've got the rovers and you've got a daily press conference doesn't mean that your statements should be treated as anything but sensational speculation this early on.
If NASA were claiming Cold Fusion or Perpetual Motion, they've be laughed out of the scientific community for broadcasting just a revolutionary claim without first publishing.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
I don't know anything about this area, really, but in seas on the earth isn't it thought that salt accumulation occurs from activities of living (and dying) organisms?
"Opportunity Rover on Strike: Demands Pina Coladas, Sunscreen, and 5 days off to enjoy time at beach."
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Im so glad all these scientists have finally be able to validate your claim...you must be very proud.
Suddenly I'm hungery for a nice juicy steak...
Oh, for chrissake.
They're throwing out updates as soon as they get them because, really, this is so far beyond anyone's expectations that we're really floored.
The big deal is that if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion, besides being a major psychological breakthrough for science. And the signs look *awfully* good.
Besides, NASA had a lot of bad press from Columbia, and they're hungry to be able to give good news.
And, really, aren't you even a little bit excited.
May we never see th
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!
You can't blame the guy for being excited. Skeptics called everyone 'foolish' for believe that water could have existed in any significant quantities on mars, in any form.
He may be jumping the gun a bit, but those water seekers certainly scored big by hitting two targets that both were drenched in water at one time.
'Course, nothing drives people better than proving someone else wrong...
I can't believe they actually discovered they have rovers over there:
"NASA has made another announcement, live on NASA TV, regarding the discoveries of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. "
Mod +5 Drunk
Almost makes you wonder if buying that low UID on eBay was even worth it, huh?
You are probably thinking of limestone. Calcium carbonate.
If memory serves, limestone isn't necessarily laid down by critters, but finding stromatolites or chalky cliffs ala Dover would be a very good sign indeed.
As would finding a fossilized opabinia, or one of the cannons the Martians used to launch their cylinders to Earth back in 1898.
Stefan
"Would there have been life there?" asked Jayson Blair, new cub reporter for Tool & Die Quarterly.
"Dude!" said Corona, "With wave action like that how could there not be life? Can't you just imagine the green-skinned Mars babes lounging around, sipping Martain pina colodas while rubbing tanning butter all over their Barsooms."
"So you think Mars mught have supported intelligent life?" asked Baba O'Reilly, a distant cousin of Bill O'Reilly working for Akron City College Daily Herald, Mid-Morning Edition.
"Yeah... yeah... those barsooms, man," said Corona. "Huh? What? Oh, well, you wouldn't want them to be too intelligent, you know what I mean, man?"
The press conference was brough to an early end when a catsuited Gloria Allred and Camille Paglia paraglided into the taffy booth and beat Corona into submission.
--- Ban humanity.
Cooling my friend cooling. Mars' core cooled alot further than earth's due to its smaller size/distance from the sun. And a planet with no in ternal heat can not hold an atmosphere properly.
I fixed some PHP code last night where I'd used a & instead of a $ to start a variable name, but you don't see me holding a press conference.
You didn't hold a press conference because everyone already knows you suck at coding.
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 (probably) got there in the first place during Mars' formation, and perhaps later due to cometary bombardment.
As to why it was lost, crudely put: evaporation into outer space.
Molecules of volatile gasses, including water vapor, that waft into a planet's upper atmosphere occasionally reach escape velocity and are lost.
Why some gasses and not others? There are a bunch of factors at work:
Heavier gasses -- CO2, for example -- require more energy to get up to escape velocity. They statistically hang around longer.
Larger planets have higher escape velocities.
Planets farther from the Sun recieve less insolation, so there's less of a chance that a molecule will get kicked up to escape velocity.
If you're fast enough you can go view the briefing live, if not its archived on this web page: Briefing
if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion
Like when they first showed the earth wasn't flat, and suddenly christianity collapsed because a flat world was one of its cornerstones? Don't kid yourself, there is a world of difference between dogma and religion. Dogma comes and goes like the tides, religion is eternal. The handy thing about holy scripture is that you need to interpret it, so what it actually says is left up to the interpreter. When we do find conclusive evidence for alien life, the major religions will all come back and say "well ofcourse, our holy scripture said it all along, here's the passage that mentions it."
Isn't all that salt going to be bad on the rovers? I know it was hell on cars in Utah when I lived there.
Read any good sonnets lately?
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"
So, Mars had a Sea and now it's dry and desert-like...
How long until they find worm-sign?
The big deal is that if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion
No it doesn't. Please... I'm an atheist, just finished beating down some bible thumper on another site for arguing that evolution was bunk, but the existence of microbial (or even non-intelligent macro) life wouldn't be a huge quandry.
In this case some religions could even use it as a pro-God point. Yes, there was life on Mars, but it was not favored by the Creator and thus died out.
Intelligent life elsewhere in the universe may cause a bump in religion (at least as far as Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology goes; most other religions aren't as self-centered), but I doubt even that would destroy it. Belief in a higher being (or beings) has been part of humanity since well before the written record. And, most importantly, the central concept of most religions is faith -- such that no reasoning for or against it can counter that faith.
What amazes me isn't so much that they discovered evidence of water on Mars, it's that they've discovered so much of it so quickly!
This is really the first fully sucessful mission to Mars whose primary function is to search the geologic record for evidence of water -- and not only did they find it -- they found it twice and quickly at that!
First of all -- kudos to the mission planning team. They picked their landing spots beautifully (and then hit a moving target from a moving target -- this isn't Lawn Darts folks. That alone is impressive.)
Second -- how much like Earth is Mars??? If the entire planet was covered with Oceans at one point, then (obviously) finding water isn't that remarkable. If, however, Mars is geologically similar to Earth, then 3/4 of the "land" would have been covered with water at one point. But I don't see that.
Mars seems to have little/no active tectonics -- and therefore no sea floor spreading. Also, since we can't find magenetically charged banding on the ancient Mars "ocean" floor, it suggests to me that Mars simply does have the characteristics that created large oceans like Earth does.
What I want to know is if the rovers are cabale of taking a thin-section of some of these sedimentary rocks. So much of the ocean floor on our planet is actually microscopic bits of dead diatoms and other creatures -- that would certainly answer the life question!
Which brings me back to point 1 -- if there isn't that much water, those rocket scientists really did their homework.
Wow. This is some seriously cool sh*t.
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?
Actually, Christianity had a hard problem a century or two ago explaining exactly why the planets and moon appeared to be made out of rock. Finding water makes things worse. It's also not as far from finding life as you may think. No, it doesn't mean there was life, but it's the holster where we're likely to find the smoking gun - there may not be a gun at all, but if it's there, we know where it is now.
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.
If bacterial fossils would be found, it could possibly tell us a lot about how life orginated on earth.
The biggest problem with all the hypothesis of the origin of life is that of falsification. This problem is not confined to theories of the genesis of life alone.
All biologist that want to explain why a certain animal evolved from its ancestors in such a way and not in an other way, have this problem. So do historians. "What would have happened if king George the whatever died at 18 of pneumonia, I assume that germany bla bla ".
You can probably tell a nice story, but do you have any data to prove your assumptions?. Although biologist often are in a better position to prove their assumptions (there are a lot more animals with the same niches/ancestors, living in different continents/islands evolving in different species in comparison to king George's), it often resorts to just story-telling.
If life did orginate independently on Mars and any remains of this event could be found and studied, it could not only falsify a lot of hyphotesis but also stir new ones in the right direction
If life did orginate independently on Mars
Seeing that we have found Martian asteroids at the poles, proving life developed independently rather than being contaminated from earth is a long shot. Surely some of the ejectile material from dinosaur killing type asteroids made it throughout the solar system and beyond. Considering an estimated 95% of the bugs and bacteria in soil have not been discovered yet, the odds are good some undocumented extreme-ophiles are dormant on Mars.
If evidence of bacterial life was found on Mars, that wouldn't be evidence of independent origin. More likely, it would be cause to suspect a common source, e.g. life originating in asteroids which impacted both Mars and Earth. It is even possible that "life" ejected from one planet in a meteoroid collision survived the trip through space to land on the other planet. Granted, the odds against this are huge, but a lot can happen in 4 billion years.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
"And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose;... But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them."
Wouldn't a geologist (I'm not but I did) conclude that earlier pictures showed clear signs of the rocks being sedimentary?
Look at the area below Zugspitze in the picture above and then try and tell me with a straightface that those striated rocks are igneous in origin.
The question is why did they wait so long to announce the fact that there were sedimentary rocks?
Maybe a geologist could tell me whether there are any igneous rock formations that might look sedimentary & they therefore had to do further analysis.
The Machine stops.
Big hullabalo a few weeks ago that scientists had shrunk an amino acid detector and analyser to the size of a computer chip. They'll try to get these on the 2009 landers.
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,
F00FStriations can be laid down by wind-blown dust, or by ashfalls from volcanos, to name just two mechanisms tha tdotn require wqter at all. Adn we know that there were volcanoes. If there was an atmosphere at some point, there would have been wind-blown dust. Even in the "wet" category, layers can be created by streams or freshwater lakes. So the 'wet salty' part is also not at all implied by the observation of striated rock alone.
"And it's easy for you to say, not your ass on the line."
Since the days of pre-history when intrepid explorers navigated the Pacific ocean or the Bering land bridge, those explorers were risking their lives routinely.
Are we, today, so squeamish and pathetically cowardly that we can't emulate the feats of our forefathers (and foremothers)??
Exploration is a high risk activity. Either get over it or don't get a job as an astronaut.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
A huge asteroid could hit the Earth next Tuesday, but it won't.
You're right. The chances of it happening are very low. It could just as well happen right now as it could twenty million years from now, but it won't.
However, I
what's that bright ligh AAAAHHHHH MY EYES AHHH
(*$ R)UIGT&E )^(*FR&^R WHAM ffffhhhhhhhhhhhh
*NO CARRIER*
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
OT: but I had to share it:
My current titles on my tabs in Mozilla say:
"NASA Finds Critical Ass...."
and
"NASA Says Mars Rocks..."
Kinda funny...
Burma?
Laws of Physics & Biochemistry = On Any Old Wet Rock
Debunking the "59 Deceits"