Slashdot Mirror
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."
> 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.
Yes... but every 100 billion spent on "frivolous pure research" is 100 billion not spent killing each other.
So whatever science was gained from the ISS can be considered a peace dividend. And the results of pure science always pay off eventually.
Nothing was wasted.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
"ISS that we hadn't already learned from Skylab and Mir"
The ISS project absorbed the data collected from the earlier orbital stations and then surpassed them in every way. There is a wealth of online information about Mir, Skylab, and the ISS. You best go study up before you make anymore stupid remarks.
"deorbiting Mir was a precondition for Russian participation in the ISS"
It was a "precondition" because Russia couldn't afford to maintain Mir and meet it's financial obligations required to participate in the ISS program.