NASA's Gypsum Find Clear Evidence There Was Water On Mars

First time accepted submitter RCC42 writes "The Opportunity rover has found evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars, through the discovery of gypsum — a mineral that can only be formed in the presence of water. Though other evidence in the past has suggested highly acidic water on Mars, this is the first evidence for water with a pH suitable for life as we know it."

Comments

how much gypsum?

[wierd_w]

Are we talking just a thin crust, or are we talking "gypsum quarry" size formations?

The reason I ask, is gypsum contains absurd quantities of chemically bound water. If mars has a higher calcium ion concentration than earth does, and had liquid oceans at one time, it is possible that with the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere and lack of techtonic plate movement that a sizable quantity of the ocean turned into "concrete" rather than drying up.

This would mean that much of the light elements (hydrogen, etc) might have escaped being blown off the atmosphere.

This is exciting news for science fiction writers that like to dream about terraforming. Creating techtonic activity would create the geomagnetic dynamo the planet needs, and as a consequence of the subduction and volcanism, huge quantities of water vapor would be expelled as a volcanic gas.

About all the planet would need would be ammonia, for the missing nitrogen. (Doesn't titan have an ammonia atmosphere? Wink, nudge.)

This does not mean the planet would go from lifeless desert to habitable overnight, as the gasses relased would be inhospitable to oxygen dependant life like us, but certain algae species like chlorella can survive in 100% C02 atmospheric concentrations as long as there is sunlight and water. Chlorella is well researched, fully genomically sequenced, and already has engineered varieties. A strain intended to rapidly convert the atmosphere to something a bit less toxic would actually be fairly plausible.

Re:how much gypsum?

[wierd_w]

That was ice.

This is gypsum. Gypsum is a conretion type sedimentary rock made of chemically bound water, sulfuric acid, and calcium ions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsum

It is mostly water by molar weight.

If heated in the mantle by subduction, it would thermally decompose into calcium sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and copoius quantities of water vapor.

If the formations are "large, and very deep", it would go a long way toward explaining where the ocean went.

Re:how much gypsum?

[wierd_w]

Titan is larger than earth's moon.

Mars is smaller than the Earth.

Smashing titan into mars would probably be a bad thing. (A very, very bad thing. That is, unless you like the idea of scattering huge chunks of rock into space. See for instance, the collision simulation for the hypothesis of earth's moon's formation.)

Better, would be to go ahead and nudge the moon out of saturns orbit, have it fall into the inner solar system, sweep a wide orbit of the sun, then fall into orbit around mars.

Best to use a trans ecliptic orbit, so that the falling body doesn't adversely effect other inner planet systems.

Once in martian orbit, titan's gravity would cause intense mantle heating of the red planet. It is likely that titan's atmosphere would freeze and snow out after being dislodged from saturn's orbit, due to the lack of tidal heating while it transits. Mars' tidal forces would be miniscule compared to saturn's, though being in the habitable zone might be enough to heat titan enough to reconstitute the atmosphere. Unknown.

It is concievable that with both bodies in the habitable zone, that both bodies could be actively terraformed.

Titan is presumed to have a silicate core, and not an iron nickle one like mars and earth. This means that it wouldn't disrupt the new martian magnetosphere. (Like our moon doesn't.)

Mars is more massive than titan, and if the atmosphere reconstitutes, mars might just rip it off titan.

Re:Now we HAVE to go.

[geekoid]

Humans can do in an hour what would take a robot a month.
Humans can make judgements.

There is strong scientific, and techical breakthgrough that send a person to mars will bring.

And yes, also send robots.

Send some humans and some backhoe to where we think the deepest water would have been. Dig some bigas ass holes and see what we can find.

See if there is an evidence of large species about 200 meters down.