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NASA's "Opportunity" Rover Finds New Evidence For Once-Habitable Mars
nedko.m writes "NASA's Mars rover 'Opportunity' found clay minerals in an ancient rock on the rim of the Endeavour Crater on Mars. The discovery suggests that neutral-pH water — slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life — once flowed through the area, probably during the first billion years of Martian history. Opportunity's latest discovery fits well with one made recently on the other side of the planet by the rover's bigger, younger cousin Curiosity, which found strong evidence that its landing site could have supported microbial life in the ancient past. Such observations could help scientists map out Mars' transition from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold and dry planet we know today"
(ducks)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
yeah we get it. it has been on the news the past whatever years.
there may have been water on it. so what. find real water on mars and stop annoy us with "news" like that
This is nice and all, but I think the real news here is that Opportunity is, although aged, still alive and kicking.
Why is it news that it was "once habitable"
Please alert me when they determine if it was "once inhabited".
After these bozo last declaration on non-carbon based life who would be naive enough to believe anything NASA would say?
NSA is still busy spying on us
They don't have time for Martians, yet
Flame all you want, but the truth is, without a human or two on the planet, both the research is ultraslow, and the interest is ultralow. On slashdot there is this misconception that robots can fully replace humans for space exploration. That's true only if you have unlimited time and funds, because those rovers need people to be moved, inch by inch, day by day, year by year. That costs money, and it's very low on results per dollar. Organizing and launching a human mission is expensive in absolute terms, but very cheap in relative terms compared to rovers, because of the 40 minutes it takes for a signal feedback.
And as for interest, it's clear that even on slashdot, robotic probes are mostly yawned at - look at the minute number of comments here.
NASA likes to sell the idea of water and "habitable" and goes to great lengths to make assertions of such and same.
It's the funding & media game.
I guess there were canals on mars once, like Venice, and life as in Mars Attacks!
Hard to get around hard radiation and a lack of atmosphere or complete hydro logic cycle.
Perhaps a large icy comet impacted on occasion, producing flows of methane or water before quickly evaporating thin the thin dry martian "air"
Perhaps the water was captured by Earth in what is now known as Oceans, only to quickly evaporate into space to carbon heat sequestration ; )
Martian fossil fuels
like a trilobite of sorts. however, our rovers don't have a big enough shovel. It seems many people are getting bored with Mars, it has been said (and I agree) don't send another rover unless you bring something back. It would be nice to have another rover that can explore regions where geologists really want to go (but difficult to do the engineering to get it there), but with NASA has a flat budget and it will become more difficult to simply sustain the budgets as they are.
OTOH with so many spacecraft that are operating beyond their planned lifetime, these operating costs drain funding from developmental programs (should we let them die, i.e. Spirit and Opportunity, so we can get on with new stuff?). What about spacecraft to Europa (there's lots more water there, and is there little fishies under the ice?) unless the radiation is so intense don't bother to plan a mission which survivability is zilch?
Regarding Curiosity, it is providing extensive data per sampling, mapping, photos, etc. and provides much excitement for researchers studying the planet. I think issue is such excitement is seen as pretty dry stuff among the general public. Perhaps Mars has a identity problem. We have this huge fascination that seems fueled by science fiction and we get caught up in a human mission to Mars, and one person on another forum called such a mission a myth (it ain't gonna happen with current budgets and only chemical propulsion). Excluding Dennis Tito's flyby which seems to be feasible but not easy.
mfwright@batnet.com
Mars supported life when it was 'alive': its core was still active, shielding the planet from gamma rays and other radiations. Now it is a useless piece of red dust and rocks, no seismic activity, no earthquakes, no magnetic activity. Its a dead end... We'll find some other proofs of early life on the surface, might find some late fossils hidden under the surface, raise a flag and move on to deal with our terrestrial challenges, as usual!
"Anything you can do, I can do better..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfHBPusZg6E
Table-ized A.I.
It was just less than two weeks ago that NASA announced the 100th discovery of water on Mars. Being the true trend setters that they are, NASA continues to discover water where it is previously been discovered before.
Wouldn't it be lovely to know what the limits of acidity (or alkalinity) are for life in general. We don't even know, for sure, what the limits are for life on Earth, because we don't have a full catalogue of life forms on earth. We don't have any representatives of life on other planets, and we don't know if there are other possible chemistries on which life can work.
Even within a DNA-and-protein chemistry, we don't know the real limits ; we don't know of any existing lifeforms with triple- or quadruple- stranded DNA, but the basic stranding configurations are not wildly unstable, so it would be a brave chemist to declare that such a system is impossible, they're merely not-known.
(Some) existing lifeforms on Earth can live reasonably happily at a pH down to approaching 1.0 ; alkalinity is a bit more of a constraint, and I can't recall hearing of anything living at much higher than pH 10 ; but that's at surface temperatures and pressures. what the limits are at, say, 5km below water level, is a rather more open question.
In the not impossible (to the best of anyone's knowledge) for life to exist in liquid ammonia ; that's going to change the whole relative importance of hydrogen ions compared to hydroxyl ions.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"