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Mars Rock Supports Cross-Seeding Theory
914 writes "Mars rover Opportunity has found a rock (nicknamed 'Bounce') that "provides conclusive evidence not only of Martian meteorites on Earth, but also of the possibility of cross-seeding." Not only that, but according to the UPI article: 'The discovery of Bounce raises the distinct possibility that life arising from a common source could have existed for a time on both worlds.'"
And of course if life existed on Mars, this gives the whole SETI thing alot more significance. Next we need to find the ancient alien spacecraft that crashed on Mars and started life there!
Add +5 Karma points to the Mars rovers
It doesn't matter, because they're gone and we're still here. We Won!
nyaaah nyaah dumb Martians picked the wrong planet.
Analysis: 'Bounce' rock's cosmic portent
By Phil Berardelli
United Press International
Published 4/16/2004 6:07 PM
WASHINGTON, April 16 (UPI) -- Opportunity's phenomenal luck continues.
Not only did NASA's rover land smack-dab in the middle of a neatly excavated and navigable crater on Mars, where it promptly uncovered persuasive evidence that water once flowed across the red planet, and not only has it been performing nearly flawlessly since it touched down on Jan. 24. Now, it also, essentially, has stubbed its toe on a rock whose discovery portends cosmic implications.
A few days ago, on its slow roll across the Martian terrain at its landing site at Meridiani Planum, an iron-oxide-rich area near the planet's equator, Opportunity's controllers noticed an odd-looking, football-shaped rock lying in the red dust. They named the rock "Bounce," because the lander most likely hit it as it bounced along the surface, cushioned by its airbags, before coming to rest inside the little crater called Eagle.
Controllers considered Bounce an odd find because it did not resemble any of the other rocks in the crater's vicinity -- nor did it resemble anything seen before on Mars, they said.
So they ordered Opportunity to train its formidable instruments on the rock, including the tool NASA engineers affectionately called the "RAT," for rock abrasion tool, which grinds away surface impurities to expose the undisturbed, primordial composition below.
The results stunned the NASA team.
The main ingredient in Bounce is a volcanic mineral called pyroxene, said rover science team member Deanne Rogers, of Arizona State University in Tempe. The high proportion of pyroxene means Bounce not only is unlike any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also is unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, Rogers said.
Bounce is a unique rock, and it has been sitting at Opportunity's feet.
"We think we have a rock similar to something found on Earth," said Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, a science-team member for the missions of both Opportunity and its twin, Spirit.
Rather more than that. Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865.
Called the Shergotty meteorite -- and the source name for a class of meteorites called shergottites -- its chemical composition is a "matching fingerprint" to Bounce, said David Grinspoon, professor of planetary science at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The resemblance helps confirm something meteorite specialists and planetary scientists have suspected for more than two decades but until now have been unable to prove: Micro-bubbles of gas trapped in dozens of meteorites found on Earth -- including Shergotty -- match the recipe of Martian atmosphere so closely that they must have originated on Mars.
"There is a striking similarity in spectra," said Christian Schroeder, a rover science-team collaborator from the University of Mainz in Germany, which supplied both Mars rovers with Moessbauer spectrometers -- exceedingly sensitive instruments for identifying chemical compositions.
A less-distinctively named shergottite, EETA79001, found in Antarctica in 1979, has a composition even closer to Bounce's.
As a result, NASA scientists are convinced Shergotty, EETA79001 and Bounce -- and maybe a couple dozen other Martian rocks that found their way to Earth -- were ejected from Mars by the impact of a large asteroid or comet.
The instruments aboard another orbiter, Mars Odyssey, suggest Bounce may have originated at an impact crater about 16 miles wide that lies about 31 miles southwest of Opportunity. The orbiter's images show some of the rocks thrown outward by the impact that formed the crater flew as far as the distance to the rover.
"Some of us think (Bounce) could have been ejected from this crater," Roge
There isn't any kind of evidence there ever was life on Mars, yet this article raises the speculation that life from Mars survived a high temp impact, ejection through the harsh radiation and temperatures of space and "cross-polinated" earth?
This is not supported by any facts and is pure speculation. It doesn't even qualify as junk science.
The authors should wait until we get some data back from Mars confirming that life was even present there before publishing these kind of claims.
So basically what they are saying is that a lot of meteorites have a (very) similar composition. Some end up on earth, some on mars - and yet others are probably still Out There looking for a reasonably sized planet-like entity to smash into.
Given that the article first states that Shergotty and Bounce match like a fingerprint, only to go on saying they found a better match somewhere else leads me to think more in the lines of the rocks being "extremely close" rather than "identical".
It is also probably likely that a meteorite on its way to either planet could shed rock and ice from its tail on the one before crashing into the other, thereby elimiting any "direct" contact between earth and mars.
Still waiting for the martians to make contact...
Penhead
I heard physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies give a talk on this subject just yesterday ;)
Davies proposes that the lower gravity of Mars makes it more likely for Martian rocks to reach earth, than vice versa, though transit both ways is statistically viable.
He also suggests that the faster cooling rate of the Mars crust, the lack of a global ocean, and some of the largest volcanoes in the solar system made Mars a more favorable place for microbial life to form.
http://aca.mq.edu.au/Research/research2003.html
... Martians in science fiction are so darned humanoid.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
... the rover experiments were indeed faked on earth. What more evidence do you want? ;)
Bush will probably *cough* promise *cough* that in a month.
Hell, those WMD gotta be somewhere ?!
You are speaking of the so called "Western" religions ( of Asian origins, go figure).
Thus the third possibility is that various other "nonstandard" ( in the sense that only billions of people adhere to such relgions, just not typically those people in Detroit). Some of these religions have already made strong footholds, at least, in Europe and the United States. Buddhism is widespread enough among physicists that it hardly even raises an eyebrow any more (well, at least not both eyebrows).
And the fourth possibility is the rise of new relgions founded upon these new ideas.
People are adaptable, even if dogma is not.
Of course there's also the possibility that the answer to the question "who was first" is neither the Earth or Mars, that each was seeded from some third bit of interstellar dust carried across the winds of space and time that predates us both, and by a goodly margin.
Yeah, that'll give those of the Judeo/Christian/Ismalic bent something to chew over, and quite possibly deny. There are still plenty of Millerites in the world, and they like to let me know about it.
No, thank you much, I do not want to buy a Watchtower. Would you care to come in anyway though? We're about to sacrifice to Ramtha and your arrival may be taken as propicious.
Hey! Where ya goin'?
KFG
KFG
Interplanetary pong!
Diego
diegoT
Hence the position of Vatican Astronomer, held by the Jesuit George Coyne, who states, "It's madness to believe that man is alone."
I suppose I could also point out that in like manner the views of most Islamics differ markedly from those of the fundamentalist sort, and there are plenty of Reformed Jews in the world, and that much of what we think we know about these religions comes to us not from the main line of thought but from those that their own contemporaries thought of as "extremist religious whack jobs."
KFG
I'm not trying to be a smart ass, but I know little about chemistry and I would like some clarification by someone who might know.
It seems to me like people are jumping to conclusions here. Isn't it possible that some other source, source C, was where these meteorites originated and then later collided with both earth and Mars?
The only thing which seems to not support this is
from the article:
"Micro-bubbles of gas trapped in dozens of meteorites found on Earth -- including Shergotty -- match the recipe of Martian atmosphere so closely that they must have originated on Mars."
But couldn't there be some other place (source C in my example above) which also has an atmosphere with such a "recipe".
Or are these atmospheric "recipes" that unique? (And if so, how was that determined?)
The high proportion of pyroxene means Bounce not only is unlike any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also is unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars...
Personally, I'm inclined to think that this means that Bounce probably did not originate on Mars. It sounds like Bounce is not like any other rock on Mars.
"Some of us think (Bounce) could have been ejected from this crater," Rogers said.
Craters are formed when meteorites smash into planets/moons/etc. To get a crater, you need something that came from another part of the solar system, if not another part of the galaxy. If Bounce came from this crater, as they hypothesize it did, then Bounce may or may not have come from another part of the galaxy, so this theory is starting to fit together well...
On a slightly related note, it should be much easier to find a meteorite on Mars than on Earth - Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, so objects are less likely to burn up upon entry into the atmosphere. This explains why Mars has many more craters on it that Earth does. Also, I've read in several places (including a mention in the above quote) that many of the rocks on Mars are quite similar to each other. Thus, any different rocks will stand out rather a lot. This makes meteorite hunting fairly simple. Consequently, it would not surprise me at all if the rovers managed to find a meteorite on Mars.
I do not profess to be at all knowledgeable about Mars geology, but any fool can see that the author of the article knows even less. Not only did they dumb the finding down for laypeople, they have even added some inconsistencies:
Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865.
A less-distinctively named shergottite, EETA79001, found in Antarctica in 1979, has a composition even closer to Bounce's.
I for one am disappointed by the lack of information in the article. Give me a real scientific article with real scientific facts, and hopefully we can then come to real, scientific conclusions. Until then, many different interpretations of this article are equally valid.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
I've had a feeling that the true history of humankind, and most of the early biblical events, took place on Mars or another planet.
This is an idea I've heard before, but I can't see it making sense. There's evidence of life on earth (including our ancestors) for millions of years. The Bible was only written a few thousand ago. Do you think that our chimpanzee-esque forebearers preserved the history orally all of that time?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman