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Surprising Further Evidence for a Wet Mars
Riding with Robots writes "When the robotic geologist Spirit found the latest evidence for a wet Mars, 'You could hear people gasp in astonishment,' said Steve Squyres, the lead scientist for the Mars rovers. 'This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there.' The latest discovery, announced today, adds compelling new evidence for ancient conditions that might have been favorable for life, according to the rover team."
Baby, we're coming. Oh yes.
So... they found sand?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
... that gimpy wheel was a blessing in disguise. I think those little robots have been remarkable ... especially lasting years past their estimated '90 day' lives. If only the produce in my fridge could last that long past its estimated use date.
He awoke and wanted Mars...
Now how about looking in places that will show us the existence of LIFE on Mars....like say in the polar ice caps or subterranean caverns? I dont think even MORE evidence that there was water on Mars would be that shocking...
I am not supprised at all be the rovers discovery of multiple sets of Banth tracks. I had expected this.
I really was expecting Thoat prints, as they have been assumed to be much more common in both wild and domestic species.
I hope the next rover mission lands near the lost sea of Korus, where the mysterious river Iss empties.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Gustav Crater--Now known as "Silicon Crater."
" ...ergo there must be water."
TFA concludes that water had to be present as a solvent. I'm sceptical.
Silica is a polar molecule ( tetraheral: two oxygen atoms and two unlinked electron pairs equally spaced around a silion atom ). It ought to dissolve in any polar solvent, such as ammonia. And ammonia was almost certainly present during the formation of mars.
No offense to Gertrude Weise, but -- huh?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
...that robot/space telescope exploration gets you a lot more bang for the buck than trying to put a man back on the moon. Hopefully the next President will kill off this return to the moon business and start putting money into stuff like this again.
worst summary ever.. ok maybe not. this is slashdot afterall...
A Martian walked into a bar, and ordered a glass of water.
Bartender said, "We're a bar, we just serve alcoholic drinks."
Martian said "Well, since I'm not an alchohol-based life form, could I just have a glass of water instead?"
And that, friends, is why Mars is Dry.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It makes you wonder what else is still out there.
... it is a whole planet, after all.
Well, I mean, you know
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oh, nevermind...
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
According to the Great Filter theory, our chances of colonising other worlds before we go extinct would be diminished with every world we discover that contains life forms; and the higher evolved those life forms, the worse for us.
The theory in a nutshell: There are a handful of steps life must go through, to the best of our knowledge, before a rotating disk of star dust can bear intelligent life that colonizes space and thus ensures its survival. The reason why we don't see life everywhere around us is that one of these steps is so improbable or difficult that only very few, if any, aspiring colonizers of space make it past that crucial step and go extinct. The question is, are we, homo sapiens, already beyond this step? If we never find alien life, chances are we have passed this point. For every life form we do discover, the probability that we yet have to reach this point increases.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
the Leather Goddesses of Phobos?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
There's no need to wax eloquent about that gimpy sixth wheel. They're just using it for a crutch.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Is it just me, or does the excerpt posted by Riding with Robots lack any sort of detail? It reads to me like "Hey, we found something important. Really important. Now come to our site to find out what". Surely it wouldn't be too hard to mention that they found a concentrated silica deposit, which would require water to create.
Until you hear what the guy actually says, would you back the fuck up? Don't assume something's sexist based only on the interpretations of it that come to your mind. That's not feminism, it's closed-mindedness.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA01907_ fig1.jpg
look for o' Higgin's
looks like a face from a statue
It would have been more remarkable if it hadn't been about the 36th piece of evidence for water on Mars in the last couple of years.
And it still doesn't come close to competing with my `wet Earth` conjecture, either. I'm like *that* close to formal proof.
I was hoping they found some ancient Martian plumbing...
This is my signature. There are many like it but this one is mine.
What about finding martians? Water is so uncool... uncolored and unflavored!
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
I thought this whole thing was settled when Spirit snapped a picture of this...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Just try putting water in a glass bottle.
All we have to do is tell the TSA that there may have been liquids on mars. NOW it's a homeland security issue.
From TFA: "Spirit worked within about 50 yards or meters of the Gertrude Weise area..."
You'd think after the Climate Orbiter fiasco they'd make up their minds!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
That's pretty hot.
sometimes, nothing.
Hi Folks.
/bm/
This "Life on Mars" is so funny !
A European probe closed the case years ago :
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/Pr_51_2004_p_EN.html
Not only there's water, but its presence is geographically correlated with methane.
i.e. great probability of life, to be found under the sand crust.
But national pride at the NASA is badly hurt and they'll make announcement over announcement to overshadow the truth.
It's just like the space station that has no other purpose than making us forget that every meaningful experiment was already done on MIR, over 20 years ago.
The space news have shifted.
Now, one should watch China re-using old soviet technology, Japan having its own vector...
And water found on exoplanets.
Life on mars....
It's SO has-been !
BTW, this rovers are just great !
Amazing !
I told you the electric car is the best !
Apparently I've been watching too much Backyardigans with my son. Whenever I see an article on mars, that damned song pops in my head!
We still find new and interesting things here on Earth after a couple of million years of hominids running around. I fail to see how *anything* short of walking talking Martians would really be a shocker on Mars given how little we've covered of it.
You really hope we're alone, just to "bolster our odds"? So it's eventual extinction and a chance to find life outside of our terrestrial family, or eternal life in a barren universe? I'll take mortality/company over immortality/solitude any day.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
how do they know that this didn't come from some comet that happened to have a lot of silica in it? I mean, maybe they know it didn't, but let's say you've got a comet (lots of ice, some of it presumably water ice, and dirt) and it hits Mars and a chunk lands a few hundred feet away and spills silica all over the ground.
I mean, I'm not saying it's not Martian in origin, but it just doesn't seem like there's any question that it's Martian and I'm curious as to why. But of course, they ARE rocket scientists and geologists, so I suspect they've looked into this possibility.
How much evidence do we need in order to show that there's water on mars?
w00t
Can't believe how far the marketing people can go when promoting a new movie
I don't get why people keep being surprised that there's water on other planets. I would be surprised if there wasn't. With hydrogen and oxygen being two of the three most common elements in the universe with only helium in the middle, you have a simple compound made up of the two most abundant reactive elements in the universe. Given that hydrogen is so abundant, oxygen stands a good chance of finding hydrogen to bond with, and if it finds hydrogen it doesn't take much to get them to bond. Earth really isn't as special as people seem to want to make it out to be.
Ha ha, Mars wets its crust!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
There's still this pesky little thing called olivine, a volcanic rock. It's an interesting mineral in that it decomposes rapidly in water, and Mars is covered with thousands and thousands of square miles of it. There is water on Mars, perhaps, not as much as news stories in the press would imply, but the olivine puts an upper limit on the amount of water Mars has had in it's past. I want to know how the scientists can square the evidence of water and the olivine. There have been different epochs in Mars' past. I suppose it's possible that after Mars' wet period ended where most water either froze or evaporated and disassociated with the hydrogen escaping into space then there was a period of volcanism that covered large areas of Mars with olivine. Sadly, I'm not familiar with the sequence of what was formed when. It is hard to date the surface of Mars except in general terms.
There may have been life on Mars. There may be significant amounts of water in the form of ice on Mars. It's exciting and it will take a long time to sort the geologic or areology of Mars. We should be going to explore Mars because it is an interesting world, not because it might have water or harbored life. Those discoveries are the icing on the cake. Because if those are the reasons we go an don't find anything, that will tell us something, but we will be disappointed and may not be able to get public support nor the tax dollars for future missions. We should look for evidence of life and water, but that shouldn't be our sole focus nor should we expect to find either.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I love the smell of rocket fuel in the morning.
Before they even landed, it was obvious that they'd find water and "possible evidence of life". This will need more study! That means continuing careers and bigger management empires.
It's easy:
1. get observation
2. concoct a theory INVOLVING WATER OR LIFE which explains the observation
3. report observation as evidence for water or life
The scientest who says "nah, it's just a reaction involving volcanic stuff and light, etc." is due for a bad employee review. He's not a team player.
Coolness would be geysers of cold Mountain Dew.
Repeat, Why a _living_ thing need to eat food, drink water, or, breath air to _live_? Is is just because we, living things in earth, used to do that. Can't you think beyond these eat/drink/breath stuffs? If it is not possible for us to live in a place with temperature around 2000 K, why we have to think in the same way for other _living_ things? :(
Who here didn't already know well enough to take bets that there was water on mars- lets see hands?
At this point, the only thing that will surprise me is if they find a living, breathing, human being on mars.
"We know there are canals on Mars; and if there are canals, there's water."
Now just wait for the next phases of his prediction: "If there's water, there's oxygen; and there's oxygen, we can breathe."
Mars, here we come!
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
the tittle sounds like some type of dirty astronomy book.
Earth:Are you wet now, Mars?
RUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
Remarkable? More like "miraculous." Spirit and Opportunity have served far, far beyond the wildest dreams of the project. They would have been a huge success if they'd crapped out shortly after the 90 day mark. Instead, the amount of science they have allowed in their mission thus far has been truly staggering and has helped us understand the geology of Mars far, far beyond what we'd ever dreamed possible in the original timeframe of the project.
Steve Squyres is my freaking hero.
+++ATH0
I do wish NASA were investing more in the DSN though...
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Who said Latin was a dead language? This quote from the FA suggests that either Latin is still in use at NASA, or someone is a pompous twit.
Pining for the fjords
. . . is way ahead of them.
http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/
Why, so we can grant amnesty to any alien life form that can hitch a ride back to Earth?
Homeland security, pfft, what a joke.
will the madness never end ?
Read radical news here
OK, I'll shut up now :-)
Insert
"Spirit worked within about 50 yards or meters of the Gertrude Weise area for more than 18 months before the discovery was made."
Apparently we're still working out which measurement system we're using.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This GP needs to die.
Humorless cretins, you've disemboweled Slashdot's soul with your twittery.
according to one of the Mars rovers chief investigators. He estimates he could have found most of the significant discoveries of the rovers in just a few days if he were walking aroudn those areas of Mars.
Still he is grateful for the robots. Much better than nothing.
So obviously,it can exist in the presence of much water. There is olivine on beaches in Hawaii, for crying out loud. Only if you assume (contrary to the evidence) that vulcanism has been dead on Mars for billions of years, could the olivine be significant.
Upon locating a small quantity of water on the Martian surface, the rover was greeted by a strange young man who drank from the rover's collection vessel and said "may you always drink deep", and then made some kind of noise like a cat fighting a bullfrog.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Best professor and best class I took while at Cornell. Hands down.
After a quick read of the great filter argument, I thought of a relatively simple solution, there are probably others:
0. Explosion(s) have occurred, in the past,
1. but the explosion's colonization front is faster (even very slightly is enough) than the civilization front.
Given known physics, this is actually very much possible, consistent with possible expansion models. It can be flavored with Panspermia theories as well. Consider:
0. No FTL exists or is possible.
1. A civilization can & does send out seeds (due to their simple nature) at much closer to the speed of light than they can actually expand their civilization, and at a high spatial density (possibly randomly).
2. The expansion front of possibly many seeds expands much faster than the culture front, causing seeding and colonization of a planet possibly billions of years before the civilization front arrives.
3. Development of the seed planet occurs:
A. Those seeded planets close to their origin are likely overwhelmed by the advancing civilization front before developing significant on their own; or
B. Those sufficiently far, have a long intermission allowing the seeded planet to progress.
4. Eventually one of the following happens:
A. the civilization front of the seeding civilization catches up (the seed population and origination population has likely widely diverged evolutionarily by then); or
B. another's civilization front impacts the seeded planet (same divergence); and/or
C. the planet is seeded by another colonization front (the arriving seeds may not survive in the face of the existing competition [von neumann], or they may extinguish the existing native life/seed competition [berserker]).
We could in theory be such a seeded planet (not that I personally think there is any evidence) from 3 or 4 billion years ago. The probabilities of this scenario depend on the differential in front propagation speeds, spatial and temporal density of seeding civilizations, and other factors.
We figured out that Mars was wetter in the past than it is now, 3 years ago. Every discovery since then has just been gravy. Are they going to do anything about it?
Steve is a master at playing up new discoveries, but we already got the message 3 years ago.
No shit, Sherlock. It weathers (decomposes) rapidly in water on a geologic timescale on the order of thousands of years. You do know what a geologic timescale is? I knew about the olivine sand beaches in Hawaii. Eventually it'll converts to things like hematite. Maybe, if you'd actually read any one of the articles I linked to, you might know what you are talking about. Given your astounding ignorance I'm not sure you are capable of it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
People should have the right to make bad choices because they're autonomous human beings. I think you're framing the question all wrong. It shouldn't be "why should people have the right to make bad choices?", but rather "how is it the government's right to restrict an individual's choices so long as they aren't harming other people?" It isn't. Ergo, to my way of thinking you should be permitted to cook up whatever you want in your own toilet, but GWB's actions as you stated them are still wrong. Let the government handle the big engineering and technology projects that simply wouldn't get funded if left entirely to the private sector. They're good at that. What they're not good at is interfering in people's personal lives. Some bloke in Washington does not know what's best for me and even if he did, granting him the power to make those decisions for me is a sure road to tyranny.
Prohibiting the government from stealing people's right to self-determination doesn't give any additional meaning to scientific discovery. It gives meaning to life as a whole.
By the way, I completely agreed with all of your posts in this thread until I got to the implication of this one, so to all of your other comments I say "bravo!" and "right on!". My biggest complaint about NASA's current manned space exploration plan is that I think that it's woefully underambitious. If it were up to me we would've been following Zubrin's Mars Direct plan for the past 15 years, and would probably be landing the first people on Mars around the time that the current plan will be returning to the moon.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
It's interesting how NASA always delivers just one single interpretation of the data. My understanding is that lightning, which we've viewed to exist on Mars already, could generate fulgarites -- also known as non-crystalline silica.
Do we have any geologists here? Am I wrong?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
You are correct in saying that given a known fixed probability then the number of previous occurrences doesn't change likelihood of the event happening again. However, if you don't know the likelihood of something happening, then observing how often it happens can be used to determine it's probability. That is what GroeFaZ was getting at, although it could have been worded better.
So, the act of finding extinct civilizations does not change the probability of our own survival in any way - that is already fixed, as you pointed out. However, it does inform us of what that probability is. Right now we don't know - if we find more extinct life forms we will learn that it is easier than we thought for life to begin, but harder than we thought for life to survive. That does not bode well for us.