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

Re:Disappointed

[Jhon]

"We must have the humility to understand the limits of our intellect"

Um... no. We must have the blind ambition to push beyond some perceived limits of our intellect. Humility for our achievements -- but aggressive in our progress. I for one would like to see my great^x grand children living on another rock circling another fireball one day.

Re:So, when are we going to send tunnel-bots?

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Funny thing is though, the total surface area of Mars is only a little over 3 times the land area of Asia.

Mars is quite small, so excavating at maybe under 40 sites on the entire planet should be statistically a good search.

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.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"cheap and simple" and "Mars" do not occur together

Mars mission costs are mostly sunk into the lander/package (i.e. rover.) Launchers aren't that expensive. The idea offered here is just a small inertial warhead with a simple guidance package. No tethers, retro-rockets, balloons, lander telemetry, solar collectors, autonomous navigation, etc., etc. All that complexity and cost is gone.

The cost would be low and the mission profile simple; blow out a crater near a rover.

current CEP for Mars landers is measured in kilometers

We have reconnaissance orbiters around Mars now. The CEP could be reduced several orders of magnitude by using the orbiters for precise guidance.

Part of the reason for high CEP with lander missions is the deceleration profile. This is not a lander. It's a high velocity projectile following a ballistic trajectory all the way to impact.

Re:So, when are we going to send tunnel-bots?

[icebike]

Right. the LAND area of Mars and Earth are close.

Land area of Earth 148 million km.
Surface area of Mars 144.8 million km

So our sample to date is pretty miserable.
However, our samples to date agree with out space based observations. Both on earth and on mars. We don't have to turn over every rock.

We need rovers that can get to some more risky locations. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap03...

Re:Not a bad run, so far..

[rmdingler]

We're looking at real time pictures from fscking Mars!

Each time a fail of any magnitude occurs, it is incessantly toasted by ambitiously administering the brogans to the deceased equine.

Yet two rovers designed to last 90 days on another freaking planet operate 24x and 40x+ design specifications without overtaking the Bieber arrest in internet interest.

We need a new PR guy.

Re:Not a bad run, so far..

[Dunbal]

No, we simply need to strap Bieber to the next mars rover. This would solve 2 problems.

Re:Not a bad run, so far..

[Irate Engineer]

Wish my mod points hadn't expired.

I don't think it is so much bad PR from JPL - they do pretty well with their limited PR budget, but more that these explorations rapidly exhaust the short attention spans of most of the public. Sojourner landed in 1997, Spirit & Opportunity in 2004 (with Opportunity still operational today) and Curiosity in 2012. Kids have grown up for over 10 years with pictures from rovers on Mars. There are teenagers and young adults today who can't remember a time when we didn't have a rover on Mars. It's old news.

And the missions themselves - launch day (big fiery fast moving things!) is pretty cool, but then you have a long, quiet coast phase. Then maybe you have a complicated and dramatic re-entry / touchdown that gets attention up (Pathfinder, the MER rovers, and the Curiosity skycrane ftw). But after that, it's a long slow roll across something that looks like the Arizona desert. The science is immensely interesting, but there isn't much gee whiz factor for the average person. And some of those average people are the ones that decide what gets aired on the news, so if they don't care to see it, few others will.

I actually don't think that many people give a damn about Bieber's shenanigans, but somebody in the media thinks that is the noise that will attract the eyeballs to their ads.