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Possibility of Life On Mars Looking More Remote

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 15, 2008 08:27 PM
from the it-is-kind-of-a-long-way-off dept.
Mars NASA Space Science
Riding with Robots writes "The never-say-die robotic geologist Opportunity continues its extended explorations in Victoria Crater on Mars. The latest findings from the mission suggest that while plenty of water did exist in this location, it was so salty that life would have a very hard time gaining a foothold. 'Not all water is fit to drink,' said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team. 'At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic. Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.'"
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story

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[+] Mars Rover Investigates Possibility of Ancient Microbial Life 50 comments
Riding with Robots writes "The robotic geologist Spirit, now scurrying to reach a safe haven before the harsh Martian winter sets in, has found signs that explorers say point to hot springs or fumaroles in the Red Planet's distant past. That possibility is not only interesting geologically, but potentially biologically, since those kinds of environments on Earth teem with microbial life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Opportunity continues its descent into a deep crater, where it has found other clues about the ancient waters of Mars."
[+] Mars Rover, Spirit, Turns 4 149 comments
Brandee07 writes "Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration. Spirit's sister-module, Opportunity, will turn four on Jan 25. 'We never thought we'd still be driving these robots all over Mars,' said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover science team. 'We joked about driving Opportunity into Victoria Crater, but now we're there, and we're looking at doing even more science. Each day they still work is an amazing one.'"
Submission: "Noose Tightens" on Possibility of Life on by sighted (851500)
[+] Scientists Look at Martian Salt for Ancient Life 116 comments
eldavojohn writes "Is there life on Mars? Maybe not, but a better question might be whether or not it has ever existed on Mars? Scientists are claiming that the best indication for this will be in newly found evaporated salt deposits on Mars which they can use to check for cellulose. Here on earth, tiny fuzzy fibers have been found in salt dating back almost 250 million years making it the oldest known evidence of life on earth. Jack Griffith, a microbiologist from UNC, is quoted as saying, 'Cellulose was one of the earliest polymers organisms made during their evolution, so it pops out as the most likely thing you'd find on Mars, if you found anything at all. Looking for it in salt deposits is probably a very good way to go.'"
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  • Dead Sea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davidc (91400) <.ude.klas.imcc. .ta. .cdivad.> on Friday February 15 2008, @08:31PM (#22442076)
    I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that the rover might be in a Martian equivalent of the Dead Sea? There are plenty of inhospitable places on Earth, too.
    • The planet is a giant frozen dustball with a poisonous atmosphere.. also am I the only one who's seeing the "remote" pun here?

      • Re:Dead Sea (Score:5, Interesting)

        by davidc (91400) <.ude.klas.imcc. .ta. .cdivad.> on Friday February 15 2008, @08:41PM (#22442140)
        It's a frozen dustball now. Many years ago, who knows? And Earth was supposed to have had a poisonous atmosphere a long time ago (similar to the one we're trying to create nowadays :-)
      • I would think the air pressure would be more harsh than the actual makeup of the atmosphere.

      • How do you figure that it is poisonous? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by WindBourne (631190) on Friday February 15 2008, @09:30PM (#22442386) Journal
        It is mostly CO2, which makes this ideal for micro-aerophiles, or even an anaerobic lifeforms. In addition, we have plenty of low life at each pole. The dead sea is anything but. I will agree that the likelihood of carbon based life being there is DAMN slim, but slim is not the same as none. No chance would be the sun, or even the Venus surface (though it would be possible in the upper atmosphere).

    • I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that the rover might be in a Martian equivalent of the Dead Sea? There are plenty of inhospitable places on Earth, too.

      TO say nothing of the archeobacteria that thrive in the Dead Sea. Some sort of Haliophile (sp?).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by wizardforce (1005805)
      glad you brought that up, there are organisms on earth that can survive hellish conditions and in fact are thought to have existed on early earth. extreme saltiness, acidity, cold, heat, pressure, radiation etc... we have organisms living happily in all of them. there's bacteria that survived being autoclaved, found in acids nearly 0 in ph, radiation levels 3,000 times what it would take to kill humans and microbes that survived being frozen in ice for 8 million years. life can be pretty stubborn and fra
      • But you have to admit, the salinity of the Dead Sea kills off pretty much everything (I think there's like 1 little bacteria that lives in it, but nothing else).
  • ... with this searching for life on Mars. This is getting ridiculous already... seriously. I understand the importance of finding life on another planet. I do. Seriously though, Mars is a big ball of dust with little atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no water... its practically a giant red moon with two little asteroids circling around it. Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated. I know it sucks, especially for those who believe that there "must be li

    • Re:Please Stop already.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by neonmonk (467567) on Friday February 15 2008, @08:36PM (#22442118)
      There's a chance of the existence of A HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL? Possibly somewhere in the region of my pants??? The fact that there is even a chance I must now search high and low! I Believe!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BitZtream (692029)
      Its rather retarded to think the our planet hosts the only life that has ever existed or will exist. Especially if you are not religious. While the requirements and conditions must be almost perfect for life to form as we know it, there are for all intents and purposes, infinate possiblities for such a thing to occur in the universe due to the shear size and mass available in it. While the odds are that it will probably have some sort of mostly random distribution across the universe, statistics and odds

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Mal-2 (675116)
              We know the odds are greater than zero, because we have proof that it has happened once. "Infinitesimal" was probably a bad choice of word, as the anthropic principle shows the odds have to be finite. That is, we're here, so it can and does happen. It sets a lower bound on probability.

              Mal-2
    • I understand the importance of finding life on another planet. ... Its only important because its a planet that we can land on without being crushed and/or incinerated.

      Which is why I am glad to hear there is no life there. If there was any form of life there it might raise moral questions as to if we as humanity should ever have any kind of lasting presence there. In 100 years there will be self sufficient colonies on Mars, because as you pointed out it's one of the few places in space we can actually ge

    • Re:Please Stop already.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mmalove (919245) on Friday February 15 2008, @09:06PM (#22442270)
      Of course, given that we probably couldn't completely 100.00000000000% sterilize what we sent there, the next question is:

      Is there life on Mars now? (that we've been there)

      Sooner or later, we're gonna find our own bacteria on Mars if we keep sending stuff there.

    • we aren't looking for little green men you retard, even finding a sign that life existed there at some point would be huge. we know mars had liquid water at some point which suggests an atmosphere and hospitable conditions.

      please just go back to watching the "power hour" on discovery channel and stfu while the good people are NASA continue with their amazing work.

    • Re:Please Stop already.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by AJWM (19027) on Friday February 15 2008, @09:38PM (#22442434) Homepage
      Mars is a big ball of dust with little atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no water...

      Please stop already with displaying your abysmal ignorance. Mars has the largest (though now exinct) volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons, along with three nearly as big on Tharsis). You don't get those on a "ball of dust". Sure, there may not be much magnetosphere at the moment -- Earth has had periods like that too, during geomagnetic reversals. There's still life here.

      As for water...if you don't believe the photographs, go get yourself a decent telescope and just take a look at Mars. See that white patch at the pole? That's ice, also known as frozen water. (Yeah, the winter icecap also gets some CO2 ice; the permanent cap is water ice.)

      Perhaps Mars never did have life. But your analogy is like the guy who goes looking for his dropped keys under the lamppost because the light there is better than where he dropped them. We haven't begun to look in the really interesting places yet.

  • Bit early to say that (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Friday February 15 2008, @08:39PM (#22442126) Homepage Journal
    "The rovers [can] do in a day what a skilled field geologist can do in 30 seconds." -- Steve Squyres.

    Squyres was given the 2005 Wired Rave Award for science by Wired for overseeing the creation of Spirit and Opportunity that had, at the time, lasted thirteen times longer than expected.

    As we approach sol 1500, this means the rovers have done about 12.5 hours of field geology. And that's being generous, as Squyres was talking about the combined work of both rovers and only one of the rovers has been operating at full capacity.

    So maybe, just maybe, Andrew Knoll is a little premature in declaring the planet dead.

    • They also haven't moved all that far from their starting position (about 7 miles).

      If you landed in the bed of a (former) salt lake in the US (eg. the aptly-named Dead Sea), you'd likely draw the same conclusions. It'd be really tough to support life in that locale.

      I don't want to discredit the fantastic achievements of the project, but we currently don't have even remotely enough data to make these sorts of grandiose claims.
      • What's more unfortunate is that NASA has a habit of doing it. The Moon was declared "explored" after landing at six places on the equator and picking up some rocks.

      • If you landed in the bed of a (former) salt lake in the US (eg. the aptly-named Dead Sea), you'd likely draw the same conclusions.

        Traditionally, we've considered the Dead Sea to be outside the US. In Israel, in fact, though I may have missed some recent border movements.

        Perhaps you meant to refer to Death Valley? Which, by the way, is full of life, for all that it's a dried up seabed and the hottest place in the USA.

  • Too salty? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Carnildo (712617) on Friday February 15 2008, @08:42PM (#22442146) Homepage Journal
    Too salty? Is there such a thing? Here on Earth we've found life everywhere where there's energy and liquid water: even apparently-unliveable places like the nuclear waste tanks at Hanford or the superheated water of deep-ocean vents. Excessively salty water might kill off life not adapted to it, but there's no fundamental reason why life can't form in extreme saltwater.

    • Re:Too salty? (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Friday February 15 2008, @09:13PM (#22442298) Homepage Journal
      Let's not forget the most unlikely place where we've found life: the human stomach. It was assumed for over a century that the stomach was just too acidic for microbial life.. then some Australian medical researchers claimed to have discovered microbes that live in the stomach and were literally laughed at for decades before they managed to culture them. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2005 after showing the bacterium Helicobacter pylori plays a key role in the development of both stomach and intestinal ulcers.

    • Goodness, yes. Indeed, for all we know, a very salty liquid water environment helps get life started.

      After all, one way to describe a living cell (leaving out its ability to replicate) is a system that maintains across a membrane various ion concentration gradients and uses them for various purposes. Surely one of the most primitive possible cells one can imagine is just a closed membrane with membrane-bound ion pumps actively maintaining a different ionic environment inside than outside, and using the gr

    • No such thing as too salty. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FellowConspirator (882908) on Friday February 15 2008, @10:19PM (#22442592)
      Here on earth we have several strains of halobacterium that can live inside salt crystals and survive off sunlight and residual moisture. Our terrestrial ones generally like a hot environment too.

      No, a high-salinity environment doesn't rule out life at all.

      Nor do other extrenes. There's plenty of microbes that will live in concentrated acids and bases. In one of my wife's old labs, she once had to through out a jugs of concentrated NaOH solution because a fungus was growing in it...

  • Late Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey (862126) on Friday February 15 2008, @08:47PM (#22442172)
    Optimism continued to make inroads today across the community as K'Breel, Speaker for the most Illustrious Council of Elders, stated that the Council's latest plan to feed misinformation to the robotic minions of the sinister blue planet were bearing fruit.

    "Gentle Citizens, today I stand before you proud as a gerlsh in the first heivtning, positively quirlly to bring you the news that the devices of terror, sent unto us by the hideous inhabitants of the evil blue planet, have been duped by our clever plan! By sowing the soil in their path with the poisonous gretch-sand, we have convinced the credulous fools that life cannot possibly exist here. Thinking our planet a horrible wasteland of gretch-sand, instead of the vibrant paradise we know it to be, the disgusting creatures of the evil blue planet will doubtless abandon their nefarious schemes to annex our world! Rejoice with me, pod-mates! This is the turning point!"


    When a certain impertinent youngling pointed out that there have been so many 'turning points' in this terrible conflict that surely, the Illustrious Council must by dizzy by this time, K'breel denounced him as a traitor and decreed that his gelsacs be lacerated until he admitted his guilt and confessed his onerous crimes. The youngling confessed later that evening, and was immediately executed for his awful crimes.
  • While the BBC series was a good show, I cannot imagine that the proposed US version of Life on Mars could have worked out as well. There is only so far that the premise can stretch, and the BBC was able to pull it off because the relatively short run allowed for it while a US network would not want to pick up a show that was only intended to run for a relatively short number of seasons.

  • That is what happens (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2008, @09:04PM (#22442258)
    When oceans and seas dry up they get saltier and saltier. Unless you know the total volume of water you don't know the concentrations of salts to make a determination of whether or not it can support life.
    • Indeed. I'm sure that if the Martians sent a probe to the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats, they'd conclude that the chances of life on our planet are slim. Ironically, the Salt Flats would also make a nice, safe, predictable place to land an expensive probe.
  • I say hit terraforming mars esp. with an ammonia ball. The likely hood of life being there is REAL slim. Worse, we could search for a hundred years. But if we send a mission to go past jupiter, capture an asteroid and send it back to mars, it would take over 20-30 years for all that. During that time, we could be looking over the planet. If it is found, then divert the asteroid, otherwise, let it hit the planet while we have little to nobody on there. With an asteroid coming say every 2-5 years, we could sl
  • This keeps coming up "is there life on mars" or "If we found life on mars it would change everything." or "We may never know if there is or ever was..."

    Look, it's easy to get an absolute answer. Next time we send a probe to mars, just have it bring along a few loogies from the designers, maybe a can of some old mayonnaise, some uncooked chicken and a few other stuff full of bacterial life. Seal it up nice and warm and protected from the vacuum (you probably don't even need to do that, but just to b
    • Karl Rove, is that you?

      Choosing the answer you want and then altering reality to ensure that it's at least somewhat true is not the same as discovering the answer to the question.

      That's not to mention the sheer irresponsibility of intentionally manipulating whatever ecosystem might (but probably doesn't) exist on Mars. Accidental contamination is one thing, but haven't we learned by now that we can't just impetuously troll the galaxy doing whatever we want? It's certainly caused us all sorts of problems d
  • Well we now know that high blood pressure killed the last of the Martians. Their love of salty food finally ended the reign of our pyramid building face carving brothers.
  • Its possible that the inability of the rovers to locate any evidence of life may be due to a serious morale crisis. Here's an article [theonion.com] with details.

    • Re:How is this news?? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dreamchaser (49529) on Friday February 15 2008, @08:31PM (#22442082) Homepage Journal
      I don't think it's a question of 'is' there life on Mars. It's more like 'was' there life at any point in it's history.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mrxak (727974)
        Even the word 'is' isn't necessarily a something that is necessarily obvious. From what we knew until recently, there could very well have been some bacteria living someplace deep underground.

      • Assumptions... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by msauve (701917) on Friday February 15 2008, @10:02PM (#22442536)
        Every time I read an article like this, I'm amazed at how the term "life" is used. They don't mean life, they mean "life, as we know it on earth" (and often even more restrictive than that). Looking at the extremophiles right here on earth should be enough to see that life can adapt to many "unsuitable" environments. Are these people really that myopic?

        If I'm not mistaken, the lethality of salty environments (for "life as we know it") is related to osmatic pressure at a cellular level. Too many assumptions there to rule out realistic adaptations (and "adaptation" assumes that the lifeform originated in a different situation) to such an environment.

        • Re:Assumptions... (Score:5, Informative)

          by WaltBusterkeys (1156557) on Friday February 15 2008, @10:32PM (#22442644)
          It seems that NASA is well aware of extremophiles, but even considering the range of environments that support life here, there's still a limit. There is no life on Earth that exists without water, nor is there an alternative solvent available on Mars. There is no life on Earth that exists outside of a relatively tight temperature band (as far as the cosmos go, -50 C to 150 C is pretty narrow). There is no life on Earth that is able to survive a temperature swing of more than 100 C. Etc.

          Maybe there's silicon-based life somewhere in the cosmos, but the chemical reactions that are required to sustain carbon-based life have certain limits. Temperature, pressure, the availability of certain minerals and the availability of water are chief among them.

        • Re:Assumptions... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ridgecritter (934252) on Saturday February 16 2008, @12:42AM (#22443266)
          Yeah - We have one data set from one location (Earth) regarding conditions that can give rise to life. To say that energy-driven local entropy-minimizing systems couldn't have arisen because it was too salty is more a comment on the limitations of the declaimant's thought than illumination of the range of conditions in which life might occur.

        • Looking at the extremophiles right here on earth should be enough to see that life can adapt to many "unsuitable" environments.

          It can adapt to those conditions, of course, but can it arise there?

          At the risk of starting some flames, I point to an argument often used by creationists: that a complex living structure cannot evolve from nothing. I'm not a creationist, that's for sure, but that argument seems valid in the case of Mars.

          Unless conditions existed at some time that were far more benign than now, life

    • Re:How is this news?? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Zeinfeld (263942) on Friday February 15 2008, @08:37PM (#22442120) Homepage
      Am I the only who has, for tears, 'known' that there is no life on Mars?

      Yes the idea that the life on Mars is all off looking for the remote would be so much more believable if they had like found a TV or something.

      • There's a difference between life and advanced, intelligent life.

        • Re:How is this news?? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Zeinfeld (263942) on Friday February 15 2008, @09:01PM (#22442240) Homepage
          There's a difference between life and advanced, intelligent life.

          We are still waiting for the second down here on earth.

        • There's a difference between life and advanced, intelligent life.

          Not really, not now. If you found anything that met some definition of "being alive" (self replicating, energy using, etc.) that would have profound implications on how some of us view the universe.

          If we could charge them for watching our "instructional videos", so much the better.

    • Re:How is this news?? (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheRealMindChild (743925) on Friday February 15 2008, @09:17PM (#22442324) Homepage Journal
      You act all surprised. Guess how shocked I was when I found out this story had nothing to do with televisions.
    • And you know this how, exactly?

      What's your explanation of Viking's labelled release experiment? Were you even aware that there was something that needed explaining?
    • Am I the only who has, for tears, 'known' that there is no life on Mars?

      "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
      - Carl Sagan

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