Brine on Mars?

Bagels writes "A new article on MSNBC (coming originally from Space.com) reports that the both Rovers may have struck water in the form of brine. The Opportunity rover found hints of salty water in the trench that it dug, and scientists note that the Spirit rover is currently digging a trench of its own to investigate the soil that clings to its treads, suggesting the possibility of moisture. The brine would only be small amounts of water mixed with salt, which can exist in liquid form at very low temperatures. More images are available over at NASA's rover site." Reader frovingslosh would like to add: "I'm just hoping that when you get around to posting one of the many stories that the rover has found mud on Mars that you might include a link to the slashdot article where I predicted this but got moderated as 'funny'." Done!

Did someone say "brine?"

Scientists now believe that advanced colonies of Sea Monkeys [sea-monkeys.com] once inhabited Mars.

Since the scientists are looking for...

signs of life on Mars, and since it's likely that (being scientists) some of them are Monty Python fans, I humbly submit that the project should be called...

"The Life of Brine".

/ducks, runs away

And where there's brine...

...there's shrimp!

Re:And where there's brine...

Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich.

That- that's about it.

Obligatory Seinfeld Misquote

Hey George, Mars called, and they're running out of shrimp!

Re:Obligatory Seinfeld Misquote

Oh yeah? Well the Jerk Store called.. They're running all out of YOU!

I'm going to go out on a limb here....

I believe this is obvious proof that Mars used to have oceans. Yes, oceans. And because they had oceans, they had life. And because they had life, they had Elephants. Only they weren't called Elephants. They were called Marlaphants.

Yeah, Marlaphants.

Anyone taking bets?

Re:I'm going to go out on a limb here....

Other people have made similar extrapolations [wulffmorgenthaler.com].

Burn, karma! burn!!

Re:I'm going to go out on a limb here....

Frovingslosh was modded "+5 Funny" for his comment about water...and then it came true.

The parent to this comment? Also "+5 Funny" (right now). How long before they discover the Marlaphants?

Has NASA ever been Slashdotted?

I'd be interested to see what kind of hardware/bandwidth NASA have cos they serve up images and movies 24/7 and never seem to get slahdotted...

Re:Has NASA ever been Slashdotted?

I can't help you with hardware, but I can attempt to do a little karma whoring with nmap (for fun and profit!)

Slightly edited (for brevity) transcript follows:
<root@fennec> nmap -P0 -O marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
Starting nmap 3.48 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-02-20 14:34 EST
Interesting ports on 198.5.148.7:
(The 1640 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open http
443/tcp open https
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 2.4.X|2.5.X
OS details: Linux Kernel 2.4.0 - 2.5.20
Uptime 307.509 days (since Sat Apr 19 03:21:22 2003)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments
Difficulty=5171621 (Good luck!)
TCP ISN Seq. Numbers: 3223BDE5 331C8EB8 32C3FA5D 32C9082B 3251ECD7 32DC6A8B
IPID Sequence Generation: All zeros

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 11.963 seconds

Let's not forget

Jokes, aside, let's not forget that this could house some microbial life, at the very least. Just look at our ocean's seabed around the vents.

The first step to empire

And so begins the great Martian Salt Trade.

If there is water on mars

..why did it not evaporate?

The atmospheric pressure on mars is pretty low [washington.edu], which means that any liquid water (which this apparently is) will be vacuum dried [wustl.edu] to gas and move into outer space.

Re:If there is water on mars

That's why they're not looking for water on the surface. Water mixed with rock, sand, or salt, or even just underground, would not evaporate.

Re:If there is water on mars

..why did it not evaporate?

The same reason they are speculating that it can exist in liquid form at such low temperatures: the phase diagram of a solution can be radically different from the pure substance. In hand-waving terms, the attracion between the salt molecules and the water molecules increases the energy required to evaporate the liquid. This is why they are theorising that it is highly concentrated brine - because if it were not highly concentrated, it could not exist under the temperatures and pressures on Mars. I'm probably not being unrealistic in suggesting that the scientists have thought this all through before publishing the press release.

Partial pressure of salt solutions

Indeed, I've found an abstract from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference [usra.edu] on the subject.

Re:If there is water on mars

Even if the water DID evaporate, it would not, "move into outer space." There's this thing called gravity, which works on the molecules of gas-phase matter just as much as it works on liquids. The air doesn't "move into outer space," does it? The vapor would rise until it found equilibrium with other atmospheric gases. If there was a lot of water, you'd see it in the form of clouds.

Re:If there is water on mars

Gases do move into outer space. Gravity slows down the process, but it doesn't stop it. When you get to the outer atmosphere, the velocity of gas atoms and molecules follow a predictable statistical distribution, dependent on their atomic mass and average temperature. Many atoms and molecules will reach escape velocity, and diffuse away from the planet. What do you think happened to the atmospheric helium on Earth?

Water staying in atmospheres.

Gases do move into outer space. Gravity slows down the process, but it doesn't stop it. When you get to the outer atmosphere, the velocity of gas atoms and molecules follow a predictable statistical distribution, dependent on their atomic mass and average temperature. Many atoms and molecules will reach escape velocity, and diffuse away from the planet. What do you think happened to the atmospheric helium on Earth?

Molecular weight of helium: 4
Molecular weight of water: 18

Gases escape over geologic time if the mean particle velocity is more than about a tenth escape velocity (if I recall correctly). Light particles at a given temperature (defined by average particle kinetic energy) move faster and so are lost more readily. Heavier particles are moving more slowly, and so are lost at a _much_ slower rate (the tail of the Boltzman distribution is exponential).

The real reason Mars has relatively little water is that water is broken up in the upper atmosphere by interaction with solar UV. While water may not be light enough to escape, hydrogen definitely is (molecular weight 2, and weight of an atomic hydrogen radical formed by a UV event is 1). This mechanism works on all of the planets (especially the inner ones) to strip their atmospheres of hydrogen.

Mars has a less active geology than Earth. We get hydrogen compounds (including water) replenished from volcanic sources. Earth also has a much higher escape velocity, which means that hydrogen is lost less quickly when formed (and has longer to recombine to form chemicals with higher molecular weight).

Both of these help explain why Earth is wet and Mars isn't. On the short term, however, water stays bound in Mars's atmosphere just fine. Those ice caps that migrate seasonally via atmospheric gas transport aren't all CO2, you know.

You can find a number of documents online discussing why Venus did get stripped of most of its water, despite being heavy and having a fairly active geology.

Re:If there is water on mars

..why did it not evaporate?

Most of it probably has. One process could be groundwater carrying dissolved mineral salts being drawn to the surface by capillary action. The water evaporates into the very low pressure Martian atmosphere, leaving the salt as a deposit.

Similar processes take place on Earth where they deposit salt and iron oxides in deserts.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:If there is water on mars

Good point, but we simply have no idea if the process is continuous (in which case we have to come up with a damn good theory for replenishment), or if it is intermittant and relies on slight changes in temperature to release water from the permafrost.

NASA already has some tangential evidence of permafrost on Mars, where it looks like molten rock has encountered subterranean ice [space.com] and places where it looks like something is is seeping to the surface [cnn.com].

NASA did choose these landing sites for evidence of water in the recent past, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that something is going on.

But I guess our best hope is to wait for Mars Express [esa.int] to point its instruments at the landing site. So fingers crossed until then!

Best wishes,
Mike.

Brine predicted before

Here's [newscientist.com] a New Scientist article from January which argues for the presence of brine.

My god... it's full of hot-dogs!

Coming soon - Bonanza 2012, starring the head of Lorne Greene: Mars - the new frontier, thousands of fortune seekers stake their claim on the red planet, hoping to make their fortune panning for frankfurters.

Great!

Now there will be salt mines for the riff-raff when I take over Mars.

Salt?

Maybe it's leftover salt from Martian civilizations de-icing their driveways...

This just in

Rover is picking up hints of Martian Cities made entirely of Gold off in the distance. Spanish mercenaries, get ready!

What else would you get by evaporation?

Great findings, but it seems somewhat obvious that there can't be clean fresh, salt-free water on mars if the hypthesis that most of it evaporated away is true.

Else, all the rocks would only contain non water-soluble materials - hard to imagine.

Speculation: The salt content of the water is probably be linked to the water content in atmosphere. The average evaporation rate for the brine into the atmosphere should match the rate of hygroscopic attraction of water from the atmosphere.

My theory...

My guess, one of these days one of the Mars rovers will stumble on upon Bikini Bottom, and be treated to the whimsical antics of SpongeBob, Patrick, Plankton, and Squidward. Come on, there's no space helmet wearing sassy squirrels like Sandy on earth. If there were, would I be sitting here typing?

Don't they mean they found spice?

This would be much much more exciting if they found spice.

Other rover was actually taken by a sand worm.

In other news, new rovers will roll without rhythm. :)

Re:Don't they mean they found spice?

No, it's really brine. The other rover was taken by a giant kosher dill pickle.

Be careful

The Opportunity rover found hints of salty water in the trench that it dug, and scientists note that the Spirit rover is currently digging a trench of its own to investigate the soil that clings to its treads, suggesting the possibility of moisture.

The very small particle size of Martian dust makes it likely that it sticks due to static charge. If the soil were moisture laden you would expect it to rapidly dry out and crust over (change appearance) on the wheels of the rover.

Re:Be careful

"The very small particle size of Martian dust makes it likely that it sticks due to static charge. If the soil were moisture laden you would expect it to rapidly dry out and crust over (change appearance) on the wheels of the rover."

No. The amount they are talking about causing this is much much smaller than the amount it would require to saturate it to the point of an observable change in appearance after exposure.

It may even be the result of no water in it now but the result of residual salts left behind by existance of water at some point. Theoretically this could display these properties as well.

Re:Be careful

Right.

The brine speculation is coming from people not involved on the project, which space.com is reporting uncritically. The news conference where the project scientists are presenting their information mention nothing about brine.

See the entry for Thursday, February 19, 2004 at http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.htm l [spaceflightnow.com].

Fe2O3

I hope they rust-proofed the Rovers.

Not Morocco after all

So the Rovers are not in Morocco/Sahara after all...

Normally

If you dig a trench in the sand and find salty water, you should start running because the tide is gonna come in any minute!

Ah, but...

Deimos and Phobos, while closer (23459 and 9378 km) to Mars than Luna is to Earth (about 384400 km), also have much smaller masses (1.8e15 and1.08e16 kg) than Luna (7.35e22 kg). [source [arizona.edu]]

Tidal forces (being a function of gravitational differential) are an inverse-cube function on distance, and linear with mass, so that would be a tidal force about 1/99th that of which we're used to. (Disclaimer: I am not a Physicist, but I share a house with one.)

While this is Mars, the concern isn't completely insane. If the rover's in position to get a 1% response from the Martian equivalent of the Bay of Fundy [highest-tides.com], we'll be needing yet another Mars probe, and someone at NASA should be needing a new job for putting it there.

Halophiles vs. Viking Landers

This raises the possiblities of halophiles [www.uib.no] living on Mars. On Earth, halophiles can live in up to 35% salt solutions. Pure water would kill these creatures --causing them to aborb water until they burst.

Its no wonder that Viking [utk.edu] found no clear evidence of life on Mars, the low-salt water in Viking's nutirent broth probably killed any halophiles.

Gee...

You mean there might actually be water on Mars, meaning that there's oxygen, that we could extract and breathe?

If only someone [netjeff.com] had mentioned this possibility before.

Wait a minute....

Brine? Brine means pickles? Pickles means Mars was (or still is) inhabited by a highly evolved race of cucumbers? Earthlings eat huge quantities of pickles on burgers? Meaning McDonald's could be considered a weapon of mass destruction? So now Mars will declare war, great, this is just what the economy needs...

Mmmmm, pickels...

So now we know where all those pickled odities you find in redneck bars come from. I knew those things floating in brine must have come from another planet.

Anybody else want to see a night time picture?

I think they should take a picture at night so we can see what Mars' moons look like.

Better way to dig

Rather than having the rovers scratch the surface or look at billion year old craters what they should do is send a large lump of heavy metal (say, 500 lbs) to Mars and, with it protected by a heat shield, slam it into the surface like an meteorite. Not having to account for parachute wind drift they could be pretty accurate with such a targeted blow and the result would be a small -fresh- crater. The crater could be observed by sensors in orbit and a rover landed in the vicinity shortly thereafter. Both the man-made meteorite and the rover could be sent together and initially orbited so as to allow time for a precise hit and accurate rover reentry.

Re:Better way to dig

I think the words you're looking for are Beagle 2.

We saw (or rather not) what happened when the lander crashed on Mars. Seriously, what did they expect ;)

Opportunity costs too high

The opportunity costs are too high for this to be feasible. If we're throwing 500 pounds of anything at Mars, it's going to be a little more sophisticated then a hunk of inert metal.

This would be a feasible experiment if slinging 500 pounds of material around the Solar System were something we could do causually, so it's not like it's a bad idea, but at our present stage of development, we'd want that 500 pounds to be probes and satellites and sensors and such that are more useful for making things other then holes.

Resolving Power?

I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..? If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them? It is impossible for the layman to look at the closeups we've been seeing and understand how big the field is.

Re:Resolving Power?

The published images from the microscopic imager are about 3cm accross.
(or about an inch and a quarter for the metrically challanged)

Re:Resolving Power?

I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..?

It is definitely a microscope - going down to 30 microns per pixel. A hair is around about 100 microns in diameter.

Sorry I don't have a precise magnification.

If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them?

The objects seen in the ALH84001 meteorite were only between 20 and 100 nanometres (0.02 to 0.1 micrometres) and needed a scanning electron microscope to be seen. So MER can't hope to see them. Terrestrial bacteria are 2 to 10 microns (generally) in size - so the majority of them would also be invisible. There are some much larger bacteria; the largest known Epulopiscium fishelsoni is a whopping 250 microns in diameter.

But it should be remembered that this is not a biological microscope - it was designed for petrological work which rarely requires such extreme magnification.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Oh no, not again!

Hasn't anyone else noticed this [nasa.gov]?

The mars face has returned!

Dan East

Venutian Beach Front Condos...

Maybe... just maybe, Mars was similar to Earth some-umpteen-billion years ago. And Earth will be like Mars in some-umpteen-billion years.

I'm willing to take an entreprenurial risk and say we're overlooking the real moneymaker here... and that's Venus... once Earth moves out of this cushy orbit, Venus is going to move in. A couple billions years after that... Hot Venutian Chicks on my beaches.

awwwYEAH.

Gotta love science...

You stick a couple of 100 million dollars worth of water detecting apparatus aboard a rover, and how do you eventually find the wet stuff? Right, it sticks to the tires...

Doh!

With apologies to Nickelodeon....

Administrator O'Neill: Are ya ready engineers?

Engineers: Aye Aye, Administrator!

AON: I can't hear you!

ENG: AYE AYE, ADMINISTRATOR!

AON: Ohhhh.... who's driving around on a planet briney?

ENG: Spirit Squarepants!

AON: Along with his good friend Opportunity!

ENG: Spirit Squarepants!

AON: He's grinding at rocks with his robotic arm...

ENG: Spirit Squarepants!

AON: Hoping his file system does him no harm!

ENG: Spirit Squarepants!

All Together: SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS

AON: Spirit.... Squarepants!

Cool! Mud...

That means that NASA can start putting cool mudflaps on future rovers. You know, those flaps with the naked ladies on 'em? R-r-r-r-r baby!

No Life On Mars

There can't possibly be any life on mars.

The club scene is a barren landscape, and the whole place is just one big red light district.

water?

What happens if the rover DOES find water? Would it sink or would it float? Logic dictates that if it floats, it is therfore a witch and must be burned.

Ok,it's not a game anymore...

I want whoever had hidden my shiny roundmarbles [nasa.gov] on Mars to come and tell me the truth.
I lost these things since the first grade, sniff, how am I supposed to get them back from there?

Leaky rovers

They BOTH found it? Maybe the rovers are just leaking some of their antifreeze?

Space Elevator already! Forget this stuff....

I really wish that the majority of global space efforts would go towards designing and constructing a space elevator already. This is really what they need in order to get things rolling in outer space. The major hurdle is getting anything we construct here on earth off the surface, past the atmosphere and out past orbit....If a successful implementation of space elevator were to exist we could simply raise our payloads out past the atmoshere and snap together prebuilt space cruisers in space. Then we could really have some serious space travelling. Unt il then we will just piddle around with the Xprize and trying to get chunks of metal off the earth's surface....we're still stuck in our sandbox with our pale and shovel...how depressing. If only more effort and funing were to go toward space instead of missiles and chem weapons, etc...sigh.

Static?

Dry stuff. Wiggle. Rub. Static. Clumping?
Also, someone asked "if you took an earth extremeophile and plonked it mars, what would happen".
It might burst and die. It might dry out and die. It might use its energy reserve and die. Its innards might freeze and die. Its DNA and proteins might get fried by the radiation and die. (Notice how many of these involve the word "die"?).
There are one or two genera that might just have time to kick their sporolation apparatus into action and retreat their important bits (mostly tightly packed DNA) into a dry, tough husk. But thats as good as its going to get I would think.

I'm Still Doubtful About Life On Mars

Why am I doubtful that life is there now? Because life is agressively pervasive. Once a life form can eek out a foothold in an environment it will exploit it to the maximum effect. The only example we have so far is our planet but the effect of life on Earth profound and blantanly obvious! There is hardly a spot any place where some life form of one type or another has exploited the environment around it and thrived leaving evidence something was once living there. Life doesn't hide. It spread like wildfire.

So if life on Mars exists now it should be easy to find. So if there is brine type life on Mars it should be easy to find because natural selection would kick in leaving the heartiest lifeforms left to spread as far and as wide as possible. You should be able to find large clusters of the stuff all over. So why haven't we yet? Maybe we aren't looking in the right spots. Maybe we don't have the right scientific tools out there yet. The point is that if life has a foothold anywhere on Mars is should be obvious when we stumble across it.

Re:This Just In:

No, the ice caps have been known to be largely water ice for a while now. There was another story confirming it a few weeks ago. The real news here is liquid water.

MOD PARENT UP

The parent is right; the "+5 informative" grandparent is just wrong. We have known for some time that at least the north polar cap was composed mostly of water ice.

References:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-9.html [nature.com]
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/express_water _040123.html [space.com]

I see...

Point is, first impressions may be incorrect and additional data and study leads to more accurate conclusions.

So what you are predicting is Martian rats with salty urine. :-)

Re:hurrah, we found dirt!

why the heck havent they toddled over to the face? :( ...cause they've already determined that the face (ready for a shock?) isn't actually a face. [solarviews.com]

REPOST WHORE

You know you read too much Slashdot when Martian rats with bladder control problems sounds familiar. [slashdot.org]

No need to thank me, just not doing my (real) job.

H2O IS ON TEH SPOKE!

Stop the importation of Martian Dihydrogen Monoxide now! It's threatening the Earth's Dihydrogen Monoxide industry!

Re:Is this a bizarro universe?

Because if they were sent to the polar ice caps, they'd probably get stuck in an ice-crevice or snowdrift upon landing. And you don't want to land on mountains or rough terrain either.

Even if there were lakes or oceans on Mars, you wouldn't want to land on them because the probe would be constantly bobbing about, making satellite communications extremely difficult.

So that leaves flat, soft sandy deserts as your only choice.