Mars Had Surface Water for Eons

LukePieStalker writes "Far from being a one-time event, it now appears that surface water flowed on Mars for eons. Nasa has announced that, after descending down further into the Endurance crater, the Opportunity rover has found a 'razorback'. It is believed that this was formed by 'fracture fill' from the minerals in percolating water. Since this feature extends through several geologic layers, it argues for a long period of wetness near the surface. This would seem to substantially increase the chance that life once existed on the red planet."

Comments

Water common?

[lecithin]

If we can confirm that there is/was water on Mars, what does this say about the rest of the Universe? Is water all that common? If we then associate water with the chance of life, out of the billions of stars, we just ain't alone. Insert Overlord comments below.

Re:Water common?

[LeahofRivendell]

Is water all that common?

Not only is water uncommon, the liquid phase is uncommon. Also, the reason it's so important is because it is less dense in the solid phase than the liquid phase, which allows it to freeze on top instead of on bottom, which in turn allows organisms to sustain life even when the body of water begins to freeze.

Re:Water common?

[AKAImBatman]

Water should be pretty common near stars as Hydrogen is the fuel which runs them. When combined with oxygen pulled near the star by gravitation, you find yourself with water. The difficulty is in finding it in liquid form. Planets and planetoids near a star will have their water blown or boiled away. This water will then travel toward the outer system. If no large body exists in the star's "temperate zone", then the water will continue on. If it hits a body outside of the "temperate zone", it will remain as ice.

At least, that's how I understand it.

Re:Water common?

[Artifakt]

To expand on Leah's comment - There are other liquids that are very simple atomically so they exist a lot around the universe. Two of these are Methane and Ammonia, both liquid under some circumstances. Because they are not polar molecules, the range they stay liquid is much narrower than for H2O. Their ice form is denser than the liquid, so lakes or oaceans of them will freeze from the bottom up, and there won't be an insulating layer to keep them from freezing over completely. So not only life as we know it, but some of the alternatives that we guess just might be possible are affected. Ammonia based life would only be possible in environments with a colder AND much narrower temperature range than Earth's. Freezing winters would be a critical problem instead of something life might be able to adapt around.

Re:Water common?

[Rei]

"Not only is water uncommon, the liquid phase is uncommon"

That should have read:

"Water is not uncommon; only the liquid phase is."

Our solar system is jam packed full of ice. Heck, Uranus and Neptune are best described as "Ice Giants" instead of "Gas Giants", due to their expected ice cores. Ice dominates the moons in the saturnian system, the kupier belt and oort clouds are composed mostly of ice, etc, etc. In fact, it is even theorized that Earth got its water from comets.

Re:Chances of Life

[QEDog]

I don't quite see the obession with finding life on Mars.Because by finding life somewhere else we can learn a lot about life on earth.

What is life? Really? You will find many people with slightly different definitions just on life on Earth.

What about other planets? What if life in mars, the DNA strand twists the other way? Or what if there is no DNA. If the DNA is the same, then, maybe life in Mars and Earth have a common origin. If not, what common things do we see? What is the minimum requirement for life? And these are just a few questions I can speculate on. I think we can lear about ourselves, and the fundamentals of life on Earth by finding life somewhere else.

And that is all without any religious (or anti-religious) agenda.

Re:Why is it surprising?

[xenophrak]

I think the common dogma is that a catastrophic event happened some billion years ago where Mars lost its magnetic field. The loss caused the upper atmosphere to be evaporated from solar radiation that was then allowed to pass into the lower levels.

One might surmise that since the Earth has a molten fluid core and routinely undergoes magnetic reversal that Mars once had the same type of core, but it may have cooled and solidified, rendering the field inoperable.

Whatever it's worth, I think that the ammonia presence is far more interesting than the traces of water.

Still waiting for fossilized remains.

[LeahofRivendell]

To me, that's the only concrete proof of life on Mars. Life is complex--there's more to it than water.

Re:How long is an eon?

[Rei]

The problem is that the rovers are not equipped to be able to tell how old these rocks are - nor is it likely that any rovers any time soon will be able to do this sort of work. Labs that do radioisotope separation don't easily fit all of the categories ("small", "lightweight", "robust", and "self sufficient"), needed to send things to other planets. A sample return is a much more likely course before we can start dating these rocks.

Now, we can tell *relative* dates fairly easily with these rovers, but absolute dates are going to be a problem just using the rovers. There are some cases where you don't need radioisotopic dating, but I doubt they'll prove very useful here.

Re:Chances of Life

[DynaSoar]

"I don't quite see the obession with finding life on Mars."

I do. But then I'm a scientist. I want to know stuff. I want to know as much as possible, and have other people in other fields find out as much as possible, because you never know what good things that can improve the quality of life can come of it. And actually, that last part is justification so that society will continue funding my research. Mostly, I just want to know stuff. It's why I became a scientist.

Also: because that's what humans do. They explore. They want to know their environment. I could probably come up with a decent hypothesis regarding cognitive dissonance driving humans' desire to decrease the number of unknowns in their environment in order to maximize their comfort level and probability of survival. But then that's the other thing I do as a scientist. Come up with hypotheses. Fact is, for whatever reason, or maybe no reason other than evolutionarily determined hard wiring in the brain, it's what people do.

Anyone not interested is free to focus their attention elsewhere. And dollars to donuts they themselves will have something like this that drives them that other people may not understand.

I'm sure you're right, that some people would use such a discovery as proof for and/or against some religious viewpoint. Hell, they did it with rock and roll music, and pretty much anything you can think of that they can use as leverage against each other in their power games. Good for them. Everyone needs a hobby, it gives them purpose in life, and it keeps them out of my hair.

Re:How long is an eon?

[JustDisGuy]

It's as long as Slashdotters will argue over how long an actual eon is, when the reporter that used the term just thought it sounded good...