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A Lake On Mars May Once Have Teemed With Life (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Verge:
Once upon a time on Mars, there was a crater that had a massive lake that may have hosted life. Now researchers are saying that a whole variety of organisms could have flourished there. Sure, that life was probably just microbial, but this is another exciting step toward understanding just how habitable Mars may have been around 3.5 billion years ago. Petrified mud that was once at the bottom of the lake suggests that, at the time, the lake had different chemical environments that could have hosted different types of microbes.
The rocks also show that the Red Planet's climate may have been more dynamic than we thought, going from cold and dry to warm and wet, before eventually drying out. We still don't know whether life once existed on Mars when the planet was warmer and had liquid water. But today's findings, published in Science, give a much more nuanced and detailed picture of what this area of Mars could have looked like through time... "The lake had all the right stuff for microbial life to live in," says study co-author Joel Hurowitz, a geochemist and planetary scientist at Stony Brook University.
NASA's Curiosity rover spent three and a half years collecting data from the crater, and that data now suggests that a habitable environment existed there for at least tens of thousands of years -- and possibly as long as "tens of millions of years."
The rocks also show that the Red Planet's climate may have been more dynamic than we thought, going from cold and dry to warm and wet, before eventually drying out. We still don't know whether life once existed on Mars when the planet was warmer and had liquid water. But today's findings, published in Science, give a much more nuanced and detailed picture of what this area of Mars could have looked like through time... "The lake had all the right stuff for microbial life to live in," says study co-author Joel Hurowitz, a geochemist and planetary scientist at Stony Brook University.
NASA's Curiosity rover spent three and a half years collecting data from the crater, and that data now suggests that a habitable environment existed there for at least tens of thousands of years -- and possibly as long as "tens of millions of years."
How does this affect anyone?
It gives us a better understanding of how life happens, how it evolves. If we find evidence of life on Mars, or if we fail to find evidence, that helps us to understand life on earth. It is hard to point to a direct application of basic scientific research, but it has historically proved to be a very wise investment.
Can anyone justify the value of this research?
The "value" has to be compared against the cost. These unmanned robotic missions are way cheap. If you want to look for poor value/cost, look at the $100B squandered on the ISS.
> The "value" has to be compared against the cost. These unmanned robotic missions are way cheap. If you want to look for poor value/cost, look at the $100B squandered on the ISS.
Which is about the cost of five months of the 2003-2011 war in Iraq.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
the TOTAL amount of money given to NASA for the entirety of its life is less than the Department of Defense got in one year(2016).....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA