Phoenix Mars Lander Deploys Robotic Arm, Possibly Finds Ice 168
The Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully deployed its robotic arm and tested other instruments including a laser designed to detect dust, clouds, and fog. The arm will be used to dig up samples of the Martian surface, which will be analyzed as a possible habitat for life. A camera on the arm will allow pictures to be taken of the ground directly beneath the lander. The camera has already seen what may be ice, which was exposed when the soil was disturbed by the landing. The data collected by the arm will be compared to recent findings which suggest that water on Mars may have been too salty for most known forms of life.
Re:How is this news? (Score:1, Insightful)
Extremophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
Go halophiles! (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, but don't count the halophiles out [wikipedia.org]. Happy in 2 Molar salt solutions? Wow.
Re:Finally a solution for glbal warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I doubt importing billions of tons of frozen CO2 is going to help us reduce greenhouse gasses
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Extremophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets face it, odds are if we DO find life, it's going to be fundamentally different than what we're expecting it to be. Saying conditions aren't good for life anywhere based on what we consider habitable is silly. The reason our conditions are ideal for our life isn't because we got lucky and got the right combination of environment to grow up in, it's because we adapted to become the best suited for the environment we developed in.
I'll give them "initial conditions" though. Certain environments certainly lower the odds for genesis. Once you've achieved genesis however, evolution takes over, and so long as you don't have a fast severe change in conditions, life will adapt over time to become well-suited to whatever the environment can throw at it.
So unless you're looking for life that has just recently come to be, there's almost no point in examining conditions. Probably the only environmental necessity is reasonable temperatures. (and I mean very generous range, at least a ways over abs 0 and too low to melt lead)
Actually, on the high end, it would not completely surprise me to find life IN a sun. Whenever we look somewhere and say no life can exist there, it's too hot, too cold, too alkaline, too dry, whatever, we end up finding life. Recently we found life IN a rock, eating radioactivity. After that you pretty much have to be an optimist.
Re:Extremophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, we could easily dream up a million and one scenarios in which life could have existed on Mars or could exist there today. Without more information, all we can say with any certainty is that terrestrial life could not have arisen on the surface of Mars within the narrow region of space and time for which we have reliable geological data. We can say nothing about any other form of life, any other location on Mars, or any other point in Martian history.
(God, I hate agreeing with someone who's got me marked as a foe. It's so... so... Un-Slashdotish, somehow.)
Re:Extremophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
er, ahem -- [enotes.com]
Two billion years from now it may be difficult to imagine life evolving on the Earth. If you can still find the Earth, that is. Time has a way of hiding things.
Re:Lets get our priorities straight! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Extremophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
Might have found ice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lets get our priorities straight! (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you!
Brett
Re:Lets get our priorities straight! (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to America, 2008. The stupid people won.
Re:Might have found ice? (Score:2, Insightful)
But definitely definite you shouldn't have posted...
Re:Might have found ice? (Score:2, Insightful)
What are you, a Creationist? :)
Seriously -- Science Doesn't Work Like That, and deep down inside, you know it.
When I was a kid, there "might" have been water or CO2 in the polar caps. All we knew was what we could see from telescopes: the Martian poles had whitish stuff on them that got bigger and smaller over the course of the Martian year.
Science works by changing those "might"s into "probably"s and "almost certainly"s, but there's almost never a "definitely".
Two weeks ago, there was almost certainly ice at the poles, and that it was almost certainly going be under wherever this lander ended up, and that some of it might be within digging range of the probe.
A few days from now, I'll bet you we'll know there'll definitely be ice on Mars.
But that won't be the news. The news will be "We know know something about what might be in the ice. We don't know how it formed, nor how old it is, but we can make some pretty good guesses."
We know so little of the Martian environment that when a new probe touches down, just about everything it sends back is "news" in the scientific sense. The time between breakthroughs can be measured in days and weeks, rather than years.
I'll grant your original point, namely that today's discovery is marginally newsworthy at best -- but the fact remains that if the probe were to stop functioning right now, we'd still know more about the Martian polar environment based on that one picture of the rocket-blast disturbed ground (if it's ice, we know its depth, and if it's rock, we know how much dust was covering it) than we did yesterday.
Re:Extremophiles (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see how we can read much into that. Evolution on Earth just found it quicker to start one place/niche and shift to another rather than start from scratch in the salty place and reinvent all the machinery of a cell from scratch. The easiest path is not the same as the only path.
After all, if evolution was smart, we wouldn't have our damned scrotum on the outside of our bodies. Other species found a better solution.
Re:Might have found ice? (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly the information from this probe is of no use to you. You know the answer already. But I'm still waiting.
Re:Black and White Ice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Extremophiles (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Black and White Ice (Score:1, Insightful)
You have a probe millions of miles away, that could stop working at any moment due to any number of unforseen issues. You better darn well make sure you do the stuff you went there for FIRST and worry about the other stuff when you can. The last thing you need is to have to explain that your multi-million dollar probe designed to collect scientific data wasn't able to actually do any science, but was able to take a few nice snapshots.