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NASA Orbiter Reveals Details of a Moister Mars
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 02:30 PM
from the alliteration-makes-me-happy dept.
from the alliteration-makes-me-happy dept.
Matt_dk writes "NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a billion years later than scientists believed, and it played an important role in shaping the planet's surface and possibly hosting life."
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Moister Mars (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moister Mars (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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As soon as Duck Dodgers negotiates the deal with the queen.
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I'm not sure why candy bars stored at a temperature where their oils begin to leak out is particularly Mmmm inducing...
Moist (Score:5, Funny)
Due to probing?
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I thought the headline was talking about "molester Mars", so I was really looking forward to some startling research.
Mars: (Score:5, Funny)
Mars: What The Earth Will Look Like If We Fuck Up Too Much
Re:Mars: (Score:5, Funny)
Venus: What The Earth Will Look Like If We Fuck Up Too Much In The Other Direction
Parent
Re:Mars: (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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You mean, unless Barack Obama is elected president.
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Stop it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.
Leave John McCain alone!
But in all seriousness, there is a reason why they use the word possibility. That means there may or may not be life. A fossil would mean there is proof of life. They say possiblity because it interests most people. Just saying they found more water than expected is boring. We already know there is water there. How much water there is doesn't mean much to most people.
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Fixed :Stop it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Fixed version:
What do you mean by fossil? Life on earth was consisting of creatures equally complex to bacteria for approximately 4 billion years, and these organisms are tough to find and difficult to identity
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I kid... I kid... I know that wasn't what you meant.
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meh, then you'll claim god put the fossil there to fool us, I'm not playing your games.
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Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.
Fossil?!?!
My privately funded Mars mission plans to bring back real, live, dead Martian Roadkill in a freezer!
Watch for it on CNN.
Seriously, you might have missed the "Scientific Hoax" thread, a while back. This latest water-on-Mars news opens up broader horizons for hoaxers.
But, how do you convince folks that you have actually been to Mars?
Nah, people will believe anything they want to.
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Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.
Finding a moist, chocolaty nougat, is the same as finding life.
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Why do I get the feeling that someone at NASA suffered a traumatic incident as a child, like Adam Sandler in The Water Boy?
"Hey, these rock formations look pretty interesting"
"They could be formed by water!"
"Well, there are number of processes that could leave a similar..."
"Water! I bet it's water! I'll start writing the press release."
"It could have been formed by water, but we can't go around telling everyone that..."
"Water! It was probably the floor of an ancient ocean that was probably teaming with life
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That's sounds nice. However, finding fossils is not going to be easy. First, the relevant rocks on Mars are going to be rare, assuming that life was much more prevalent in the past. Geologic processes work at the surface to grind that surface into dust, meaning that we need to find a lucky outcrop.
Then, we need to identify something conclusively as a fossil. Single celled organisms don't preserve very well, and the odds of something being preserved is really bad. On the earth, it has taken a long time and a
Always "possible life" (Score:2, Insightful)
"...and possibly life."
Can't leave that out. Life is so easy to get started that it must have been everywhere there was water.
Re TFA (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, quite. Now regarding the actual article, what they seem to be saying is that there might have been a longer window for life to develop on Mars. Frankly this was always an unlikely event...Mars is and probably always has been dead. Sad, but true.
Interesting bit of geology though, and it's amazing what we can find out from these probes.
Re:Re TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on what? We have no idea. For all we know it may be virtually impossible for a planet to go 1,000 years with liquid water on its surface without acquiring life.
Parent
wonderful (Score:3, Informative)
So just send an inflatable biosphere and some bacteria/moss/whatever, at let's see if that rock can still support life if it's given a little help.
Why wait? A stable biosphere outside of earth orbit would be a monument to humanity. Let's do it.
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I don't think taking stuff off our planet is such a good idea, I need that oxygen to breath.
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I agree, but I also honestly think there are a lot of people who would be strongly opposed to the idea, for two reasons.
If life is subsequently found on the planet, it would be much harder to prove that life evolved independently on Mars. The planet would effectively be contaminated. Many people seem to use superlatives like 'most important discovery in history' when discussing finding life (even bacterial life) somewhere else in the universe. Given that there would be no way to go back once life was introd
Re:wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
If life developed completely independently on Mars, it would be drastically different (on the cellular level) than anything we have here. If life is found on Mars which is cellularly similar to ours, we must conclude that one planet was the source and the other was "contaminated" via rocks or spacecraft or somesuch.
In short, sending a biosphere to Mars would not do anything to hamper our ability to prove or disprove that life developed independently on Earth and Mars.
And I doubt "environmentalists" (whatever that means) have the collective will and political power to interfere in NASA missions which don't directly harm particularly-cute animals. Outside of a few parts of California, fanatical environmentalist culture is pretty rare.
Parent
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That is an assumption.
It may well be a reasonable, and perfectly logical assumption, and it may even be one that I agree with, but until we know under what conditions life starts and what possible forms it could take during its initial stages, it will remain an assumption. For all we know, all life might start out with the radically similar cellular structure.
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Considering mitochondria (IIRC) was a separate, self-sufficient single-celled organism before it developed its symbiotic relationship with cells, it seems fantastically unlikely that just such a structure would have developed independent off-world. And that's just one example. [IANAB]
And at any rate, the practical advantages of having more than one biosphere in the universe far outweigh any intellectual curiosity. One biosphere == a single point of failure for LIFE AS WE KNOW IT!
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A monument to humanity's stupidity, is more like it. Let's wait and see first if Mars has its own life, and maybe we can study it and learn from it, before we fuck it up and exploit it for all it's worth.
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There is clearly no intelligent or even complex life on Mars. Even if it has some subterranean pond-scum, what is there to "fuck up?"
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If we contaminate Mars before we can ascertain what is there, we may never be able to determine whether any microbial life that may be there originated there, or came from us. We've barely begun to explore, and while we haven't found life yet on the surface, there's plenty of places where it could yet be found.
Spirit saw this first (Score:2)
It's been discussed at several recent conferences (AGU [harvard.edu], LPSC [usra.edu]) and was the main focus of Spirit's scientific research all through the last (Martian) summer.
Commericial viabile minerals? (Score:2)
From TFA:
Hydrated silica doesn't sound like much, but I think most people understand what opal [wikipedia.org] is. Granted, you're not going to fund a Mars mission with opals. Wikipedia says the largest uncut opal on *this* planet, the size of a fist, is worth "just" $1.2 million. You'd have to haul back several thousand of them, and pretend you didn't just tur
Everybody into the pool! (Score:2)
Holes and Juices. (Score:2)
Does mars also have holes and juices [rifftrax.com]?
And has not nasa now added probes to the holes and juices?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Wars increase economic activity
And why not? It sure worked wonders for Deep Space Nine [wikipedia.org] and Voyager's [startrek-voyager.info] ratings!
mod +2 Star Trek Reference!
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Wars increase economic activity
Wars increase economic activity ... needed to wage wars. After a war is over, the economy usually goes to Hell in a Hand-basket, because waging a war has distracted everyone, and other aspects of the economy have been neglected. "Yeah, we built a lot of tanks, and won the war!" ... "But our infrastructure is a shambles."
And why not? It sure worked wonders for Deep Space Nine [wikipedia.org] and Voyager's [startrek-voyager.info] ratings!
After the war was won on Deep Space Nine, the series ended. They never showed what happened afterward: soldiers returning home, demanding jobs, etc.
But, of course, this "getting-distr
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He was being sarcastic... He goes on to talk explicitly about window repairmen and window smashers. I'm certain he understands the fallacy quite well.
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I think you may have forgot the worst case of this: Star Trek: Enterprise.
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Which Star Trek?
Enterprise was the pick of the new litter IMHO.
Re:Mmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I have seen lakes that were so saline or full of some organism that they could not support life.
They were so full of some organism that they could not support life? Yogi Berra, is that you?
Parent
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or full of some organism that they could not support life.
Whaaa? Who modded this "informative"? If the lake is "full of an organism", it is supporting life. It might not be the kind of life you'd like to hang out with, but it's life nonetheless.
As for lakes that are so saline they don't support life, please let me know where they are. Some bacteria THRIVE in ultra-saline conditions and these lakes are full of them. Yeah ok maybe there are no ducks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The sea is called "dead" because its high salinity prevents macroscopic aquatic organisms, such as fish and aquatic plants, from living in it, though minuscule quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi are present.
In times of flood, the salt content of the Dead Sea can drop from its usual 35% salinity to 30% or lower. The Dead Sea temporarily comes to life in the wake of rainy winters. In 1980, after one such rainy winter, the normally dark blue Dead Sea turned red. Researchers from Hebrew University found
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Ummm... organisms are living things, by definition. Utah's Great Salt Lake also has lots of brine shrimp & algae; it's far from lifeless. Just because there aren't creatures scurrying about the martian surface on their 12 tiny green legs is no reason to think that there was never life there.
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Only a few religions have the one-true-world concept. Not all of them have the god concept, either.