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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.
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.
Umm... it depends. Salty sea = Water salt? Or an acidic sea? Water != life. Sea Water != life. Its a posibility, but I think your jumping the gun a bit.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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.
"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
but I think your jumping the gun a bit.
;-)
Well, you obviously aren't a modern journalist.
Do you like German cars?
Acidophiles.
There is no environment on Earth too extreme for life, as long as there is liquid water.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
No, salt accumulates in the oceans from the erosion of surface soils and rocks, as the minerals wash into larger bodies of water. This may mean that Mars once had rain.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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
"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.
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 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."
Liquid water + Gently flowing means the following:
Mars was once geologically active -magnetic field protecting from solar radiation - thus, thicker atmosphere, thus, warmer, warm enough for flowing, liquid water, possibly also hot springs or undersea vents.
I'd be willing to bet that the first sample-return mission will bring back sedimentary rocks filled with fossilized remains of sea creatures. Whether they evolved past the protazoan stage, who knows? But the conditions certainly existed, billions of years ago, as they existed on earth.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"If this is true, and those rocks truly are sedimentary, they should be full of bacterial fossils. "
Not to be a spoil sport but change "should be full of bacterial fossiles." to "could be full of bacterial fossiles".
There are a lot of unanswered questions still but all in all very exciting news.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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
During the news conference the possibility was raised that this water was under a protective layer of ice. So this could have happened without a thick and warm atmopshere.
The huge volcanos make it pretty clear Mars was once geologically active, I think.
The loss of oceans on mars has nothing to do with a loss in mass.
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The magnetic field Mars current has is not capable of protecting it's atmosphere by deflecting solar wind (the solar wind has been eating away at the Martian atmosphere for some time now; I'm not sure if scientists believe mars ever had a magnetic field capable of doing do, but as it's core has cooled off/solidified the magnetic field on the planet today is what it will always have).
As Mars's atmosphere is stripped away/blown into space, the atmospheric pressure drops. At a certain point, the pressure drops to a point where water cannot exist in liquid form and evaporates -- creating more atmosphere, which then gets stripped away by the solar wind
The cycle continues until all surface water has evaporated or frozen.
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,
F00FOT: 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?