Mars Rover Opportunity Finds Life-Friendly Niche

astroengine writes "Gale Crater, the region being explored by NASA's Curiosity rover, isn't the only place on Mars where ancient microbes may have thrived. New evidence from NASA's senior robotic Mars scout, Opportunity, shows life-friendly water once mixed with telltale, clay-bearing rocks that now lie on the broken rim of Endeavour Crater, an ancient 14-mile wide basin on the other side of the planet from Gale. 'If I were to go Mars early in time and wanted to do a well, I'd do it there,' planetary scientist Ray Arvidson, with Washington University in St. Louis, told Discovery News. 'It's like drinking water. This would have been a niche for whatever life at the time existed.'"

Comments

Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is idea for studying the subsurface that is affordable enough that we could actually live long enough to see it; we know the position (orbit, velocity, etc) of Mars with great precision. Why not build a cheap, simple impactor and send it to Mars. Aim it a few hundred meters away from a rover and blow a crater in the surface, recording the impact for spectral analysis and throwing debris around the crater for close inspection. A carefully guided projectile should have a CEP of only tens of meters; risk to a rover would be negligible.

So simple you can take the engineering for granted and so fast we could have it done in only slightly more time than the flight.