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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."
... 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.
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...
It's a part of sand.
Silica or Silicon dioxide, is the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal settings is silica, usually in the form of quartz because the considerable hardness of this mineral resists erosion. However, the composition of sand varies according to local rock sources and conditions.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Its not just sand, its a beach ergo there must be water.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
" ...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.
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! --
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope not, women are from Venus.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Bah, stop parroting nonsense and think for a bit. If humanity does survive another thousand years and spread across the stars with full mastery of genetics, biology, and technology, in nothing flat cultures will be so mutually alien in every way that it'll make Star Trek look like parochial, small-minded garbage, what with 100 little humanity clones running around.
If we do survive and thrive, diversity will be the least of our problems.
The old "loneliness of the stars" bit is as out of date as, well, Star Trek, as out of date as the idea that "crossing the stars" will be done in tin cans carefully coddling our meat sacks. That may have made sense to 1950s science, but it's obvious nonsense to anyone who uses 21st century science. It's going to be way stranger than Star Trek. You will pine for the days when it was as simple as Star Trek.
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.
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!"
And conversely, Mars will soon be our primary source of melange. ;)
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
I do wish NASA were investing more in the DSN though...
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
will the madness never end ?
Read radical news here
"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