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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.'"
Lets see if it works. Send a bunch of seeds that we think will grow there. Of course the lack of water might be a problem. Are there any arctic cactus?
What I now don't understand is why they didn't bring a small payload of seeds? What could possibly be lost? The eco-system can only be changed for the better (I think?!)
I don't care if there are green martians with antennas living underground... I WANT OIL. At $135/barrel, I think it's still profitable enough to extract oil from Mars and ship it here. Is there oil, Phoenix Lander? IS THERE???
i.e. We're still missing the magic ingredient: Nitrogen. Getting a sufficient quantity of nitrates to Mars might end up being the biggest problem with colonization efforts in the future. We obviously have water. CO2 can be reprocessed into O2.
The soil is not toxic. Now all we need is Nitrogen and a good method of bootstraping industrial production on Mars. (Shipping heavier technology would be impractical.)
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Has everyone forgotten Mars has no ozone layer? The soil may contain the necessary minerals and other nutrients, but it's baked under UV rays and (last I heard) full of peroxides and other unfriendly chemicals as a result. Starting with plants is putting the cart before the horse; we should be thinking about extremophiles if we're serious about this. And would it be ethical?
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they go to great lengths NOT to bring life to mars. Read up on "bio-barrier". If the spacecraft get contaminated during construction or prep they have to re-sterilize it. They want to find life, not spread it.
If you accidentally bring life to Mars, that makes it about impossible to discover it and know for sure it's Martian life and not something you brought, or that mutated from something you brought.
Although I agree that if we determine there is NO life on mars, I say our next probe is sent with a well-planned variety of "colonizer" lifeforms to begin teraforming of the planet so it's at least borderline useful by the time we can send people out there.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
True, but if it exists elsewhere... water, soil, greenhouse with insulating cover for nighttime = food and oxygen. Terraforming Mars may be way, way off but if we could actually establish farms it'd be a huge asset for any expedition or colony there. A lot of the supplies to the ISS is food, the moon is a barren rock, but if Mars can sustain itself with the basics having a permanent colony doesn't look that unlikely anymore.
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The two endeavors are not mutually exclusive. Terraforming and manned exploration could occur in parallel.
Would nuking it produce a similar effect?
>_>
You know, I see people say this kind of thing all the time, but I have never seen any kind of statement about how fast Mars will lose its atmosphere, except in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy where it is asserted that the rate of loss is actually quite slow. The only one of your links which actually addresses the rate is Wikipedia: "It is generally thought that Mars could once have had an environment relatively similar to today's Earth, during an early stage in its development. This similarity is predominantly associated with the thickness of the atmosphere and abundance of water, both considered to have been lost over the course of hundreds of millions of years. The exact mechanisms which resulted in this change are still unclear, though several mechanisms have been proposed." Uh, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your view. So, can you provide a reference for the speed at which Mars is supposed to lose a human-breathable atmosphere?
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I'd actually disagree. ID claims the Earth was designed for life; it makes no particular claims about the rest of the solar system. If anything, ID's claim that the Earth is "special" could be interpreted to mean that the other planets can't support life (although even if the Earth is "special" it doesn't necessarily mean that).
However, if we discover that despite having the ability to support life Mars was completely sterile, that would support ID, IMHO. At least, it would shed a doubtful light on the probability of evolution: If evolution actually works the way it's supposed to, then a planet that "can" support life should eventually develop life if given enough time. Given the amount and variety of life found on Earth, Mars ought to have had enough time for a few microbes to have evolved at least.
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If you've been following the discoveries about Mars over the last dozen years or so, you've probably noticed that each new revelation followed a trend of making the existence of past or present life on the planet more possible. This latest discovery certainly maintains the pattern. I think it's at the point where if evidence of life is dicovered, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Given how tenacious life is, and given how hospitable we now know Mars to be, I think it is likely that some form of life has evolved a way to survive on the present-day planet. Keep in mind that Mars is not always so cold. Tempatures can get well above freezing during the summer in some places. Condidtions just aren't as harsh as some of the places we find life on earth - like inside nuclear reactor cores.
Computed escape flux 3*10^6 (molecules)/(cm^2 s). Hydrogen escape fluxes are two orders of magnitude greater. (source below) A simple calculation someone may wish to do involving the density of oxygen molecules required for breathing as well as the surface area of the Martian ionosphere can give you a very rough idea of how quickly a magically-induced breathable atmosphere would decay away. It is unclear to me how the density of the atmosphere will effect the M-B speed distribution (considering how effectively the new density will effect light absorption, etc.) so it is also unclear (to me) how this escape rate would evolve with, say, "terraforming". 1997 paper - may be outdated, probably a better source exists http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993GeoRL..20.1747F
The thing about life is it tends to spread. Chances are if we find nothing from taking a sampling from about 20 different areas and find nothing, there's a pretty good chance there is nothing.