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Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed
astroengine writes "The site where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity landed last year contains at least one lake that would have been perfectly suited for colonies of simple, rock-eating microbes found in caves and hydrothermal vents on Earth. Analysis of mudstones in an area known as Yellowknife Bay, located inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site, show that fresh water pooled on the surface for tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of years. 'The results show that the lake was definitely a habitable environment,' Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News. The finding was announced at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco."
I find it incredible that we're getting all these results today, that it isn't some scifi or something. JPL, NASA etc are really doing a great job.
I mean, it's pretty much been determined that Mars used to be habitable. We may be only a short time from someone finding real microbe fossils there.
At the same time, exoplanet research is exploding. Someone just found oxygen in the atmosphere of some exoplanet. In the near future, we may be able to detect signatures of life on exoplanets, at least spectroscopically.
Disclaimer: My niece works at JPL. I'm therefore somewhat biased in favour of them, and may not be completely objective. However, I believe my interest in these matters to be true. I was fucked in the ass by a goat yesterday.
We welcome our rock eating microbe overlords...
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
"When I was your age, I made love to your grandmother by that lake! Eh? WHAT. No, WHAT? There ain't no more water in that lake? That's the first I heard of that."
... ...
This was the response from my geriatric grandfather as I just read him the story from the tablet. Sigh.
Now get off my lawn...
banded iron formations
I always suspected Iron Maiden was from Mars.
Call me when the headline reads: "Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Fossilised Remains of Ancient Lifeforms"
I suppose the assumption is that, if there was one habitable environment that persisted for tens or hundreds of kiloyears, there were probably others. I also suppose that life would be more likely to maintain its foothold in an environment where lakes tended to persist for many years, as opposed to appearing and disappearing with the seasons.
...still searching for new source of NASA funding.
I really hate it when I have had something on my 'to visit' list and then find out I've waited too long...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
On earth, it took 1 billion years before life started to appear. Just let that amount of time sink in for a second. A billion years. During this astoundingly long period, the conditions for life to appear have been orders of magnitudes better than on Mars. Lower radiation due to an atmosphere, warmer but not too warm, less toxic chemicals on the surface, and covered mostly with oceans.
Now although there might have existed water on Mars, and even oceans, the reality is that the chance that life had been able to start on Mars before it dried up and turned into a reddish rock is zero.
My karma ran over your dogma
All these reports of finding topographic depressions is depressing
You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years, and probably oceans, not lakes.
Not according to Hollywood: Red Planet (2000)
Tens of thousands of years just ain't gonna cut it. Water may be necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.
Tell that to the iron respirating microbes of Blood Falls that were in their transient little pool breathing oxygen normally until one sudden winter the surface froze and never receded. All they "needed" was a pool of water and some chemically active elements, like iron and sulphur -- both present on Mars.
Transient lakes are not a good environment - anything that gets started gets nipped in the bud when the lake dries up.
You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years, and probably oceans, not lakes. Find some banded iron formations and we'll talk.
You're in luck! We found a formation right next to Mars! You're living on it! And we even have rocks from Mars on Earth -- ejecta from impacts -- and estimate that tons of Earth has been spread about the solar system, possibly seeding live just about anywhere that could support it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as sceptical as the next person. I'll rightly dismiss any claim without evidence, but I refuse to have a closed mind to possibilities for the very same reason: Every time we've declared places on Earth devoid of life, we've found it thriving there. Used to think life couldn't exist at the bottom of the ocean, wrong. Used to think no life could survive subduction into the crust, wrong. We've had to re-define what life "needs" to survive so many times it's more truthful to say, "we're not really sure where life can't survive." So, if you make an unevidenced claim like, "You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years" -- I'll give you the same sceptical middle finger: Fucking Prove it, or you're full of bullshit.
Summary says "show that fresh water pooled on the surface for tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of years.". For there to be fresh water, there had to be rain (or snow). For that to happen, there were likely oceans.
(Actually we're reasonably sure that most of the Vastitas Borealis was ocean during Mars' early wet stage several billion years ago.)
Beer cans, trolling jigs and outboard motors lost overboard.
Have gnu, will travel.
Only if one can obtain intricately-organized molecules of amino acids, ALL laevo-rotary, to make up a system that can then communicate with concurrently-existing enzymes that are then able to reproduce that molecule. In other words, the "life" you're looking for needs so much more than mere "water" that to say "life" might've been possible is a good way to say, "I wanna seem ridiculous."
Cranky educator.
I double-dare you to watch the 'one year on Mars' video and not get a geek-erection. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt20kTRV-_M
Fish, or it didn't happen!
Posting a response like this, you sound even retardeder
...that reads this and wonders: What happened to all the water on Mars? ...the answers my imagination provides are quite scary. Planet-raping aliens came and sucked it all up in a few years. I hope they don't return.
I'll give the benefit of the doubt to who you're replying to that by "life" they meant complex or advanced life. A lot of those places we thought life couldn't exist, the life that does exist there is single-celled, or extremely rudimentary.
Mod parent up. Ne1 else thawt ^this^ wuz phunnie!?
Mod parent up!!!
is alive, every rock around and in every lakebed or former lakebed is alive; guess it just depends on how we see things - the rocks, the trees, the birds, the bees, the yous, the mees - are all alive - they/we are expressions of life - the life that has been breathed into the all-everything from the one LIFE; and the expression of life is not life.
Why down vote this? The core cooling is one of the leading theories on how Mars lost it's magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, radiation and energized particles from the sun and deep space were able to blast most of the atmosphere away.
The Martian atmosphere is gone because John Carter was spending too much time screwing Dejah Thoris and didn't remember that he knew how to get into the building housing the equipment maintaining Mars' atmosphere until too late!
There are several different niches on earth where life exists in very hostile conditions. But that's not relevant to the question of life on Mars. The point is, did extremophile life arise spontaneously in such places, or did it migrate from somewhere else and gradually adapted to extreme conditions?
As far as we know, life may have a very low probability of appearing. We still don't know the exact combination of factors that led to the formation of the first living organisms, no one has ever been able to duplicate it in a laboratory.
The earth has several unique characteristics, one of them being its presence right in the middle of the habitable zone. However, the right temperature is not enough. The existence of a magnetic field is important, and plate tectonics may also be a fundamental factor, in its recycling of carbonaceous rocks that keeps the carbon dioxide in balance.
The presence of the moon could be fundamental to both the magnetic field and plate tectonics, due to the churning of the earth through tidal action. Also, ocean tides may have been a contributor to the creation of life, perhaps the concentration of soluble minerals in tidal pools were a factor. So, it could be that life will only evolve on a planet with a large moon.