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Mars Soil Appears To Be Able To Sustain Life
beckerist writes "Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists: 'It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us.'"
TFA refers to a 1 cubic meter sample (35 cubic feet). That is one sweet lander...
They went to great lengths to avoid contamination of the Mars environment with life from Earth. One of their objectives is to see if there's life on Mars, remember?
Assuming that at some point some tiny little bacteria-like thingy is actually found on Mars, what guarantee do we have that it originated there, as opposed to coming from Earth as contamination during any of our Mars missions?
And why am I unable to write in short sentences?
The spice == oil etc.
HTH
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It says that lichen still needs water to grow, it can just manage to survive without it for long periods of time. If there is no liquid water available on mars, the lichen would die eventually.
Well, while the soil may very well be conducive to growing asparagus, the temperatures most certainly are not. Asparagus is fairly hardy (depending on the cultivar), relatively speaking; but surviving -70C (or even -70F) is too much to ask of the plant.
I must say this is the first time my knowledge of vegetable gardening has ever come in handy on Slashdot!
#DeleteChrome
Ok so how many asteroids do we need to crash into Mars to give it some greenhouse gases and an atmosphere similar to Earth's?
You'll want to be crashing comets into Mars, not asteriods. After all, what is crashing a rock into Mars going to do, apart from adding a new crater? Crashing a couple of megatons of CO2, H2O, and other gasses into Mars, well that's a different story. Not only do you get your brand new crater, but you add a couple of megatons of C02, H2O, and other gasses to the atmosphere.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What do you think makes the soil alkaline?
Lichen and high altitude soil bacteria were my first thoughts as well.
Knowing the right questions to ask has always been more valuable than a large amount of rote knowledge when it comes to problem solving. Failing to teach this kind of skill is one of the great weaknesses of our modern school system. Rote memory is dropping into an even less important role as the information age progresses, even as public schools face more and more standardized tests as their educational benchmark. All that said, in a social world, grace and courtesy can play almost as much of a role in getting your ideas heard as having the right answer.
We are all just people.
Well let's really put it into perspective.
Annual sales of Microsoft Windows, $8b
Annual sales of popcorn in the US, $1b
One day in Iraq, $300M.
Sending an intelligent lander to Mars and establishing that it could support life, priceless.
Statesman
--- Tao
The entertainments you call fitting for adults strike me as juvenile pursuits. I would never seek to make it illegal for you to pursue them, but please clearly understand, I will never accept your claim that these interests make you a more mature adult human being.
Bringing about the birth of living worlds from previously dead worlds may be an impossible dream, as you claim, but the beauty of its potential is stirring enough to make it a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
If we fail to achieve this goal on Mars, we can and should find other planets where it can succeed. If we also fail to do that, it will be because we allowed ourselves to be distracted by short term pleasures such as those you describe, or because we followed your siren call to pour all our resources into repeatedly failing "solutions" for perennial problems such as poverty or disease. By all means, let us continue trying to solve humanity's problems on this planet. But don't use that as an excuse to shut down all space exploration efforts.
I care about humanity more deeply than you seem to be able to imagine. I care enough to want a future for humanity that extends beyond the lifespan of any single planet, beyond the lifespan of any single star system, and if possible, beyond the lifespan of any single galaxy. How is this any less mature than the desire of parents to hope their children and grandchildren might continue to prosper for many future generations?
If we fail to secure such a future for our descendants, the end result might very well be a sterile, dead universe, where nobody else will ever again have the chance to enjoy sex, skydiving, skiing or anything else adults do for excitement.
Bringing Mars to life may be so difficult it approaches the impossible. But it may be the best place to take the first step toward opening up the universe for humankind, and that makes it worth the effort.
I think the news here is that you would not have to bring native soil to Mars if you wanted to farm. Yea, you would have to farm under a dome but at least you don't have to transport a few tons of topsoil!
Can we ever conclusively determine that there is no life on Mars?
Given that we are still uncovering life in the most unlikely places on Earth, who knows where it could be found on Mars. Do we need to look under every rock, and take a billion core samples before we are satisfied that the introduction of terrestrial life will not destroy any chance of finding native life?
My brain is pretty fried right now to do it (long day at work), but you really need two data points:
1. escape velocity of mars
2. distribution of the velocity of the molecules comprising the proposed atmosphere
There are some relatively simple kinetic models for #2 that do a decent enough job. Long story short, if the bulk of the distribution of #2 is greater than #1, then the gas will escape, as it has more velocity than escape velocity. At what rate? Again, depends **how** far above escape the bulk of the distribution is.
Here on earth, the vast bulk of the distribution(s) of each of the consitutents of air fall under the escape velocity of earth - so we lose very little in the way of our atmosphere to space. But we do lose a little here and there. The lower escape velocity on Mars is what hurts its atmosphere potential.
I'm perpetually amused that folks whine how we can't replace an old-growth forest or rainforest but terraforming a planet, hey, no problem there. All you need to do is sprinkle a little spores and fairy dust and boom you have Earth II, except without all the people mucking it up...
You asked the question and answered it at the same time. Life is very resilient to most anything short of more aggressive life. The old growth forests actually require less effort to fix than to kick-start mars. All you have to do is leave them alone for awhile and they would recover on their own. Keeping people from continuing to drag them down further is the trick. Mars has the edge here in that it's very hard for US to screw it up.
It's more economical to spend $500mil to start an ecosystem that will maintain and develop itself without further interaction, fertilized only with time, than to spend $100mil every few years trying to keep fixing up what people keep breaking, and still continue to lose ground.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.