Mars Soil Appears To Be Able To Sustain Life 337
beckerist writes "Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists: 'It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us.'"
AP News Article (Score:3, Informative)
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1hvRUNc9W-3lupLU6TLQtR0gdRAD91I04D01 [google.com]
Some quotes...
Preliminary results showed the soil had a pH between 8 and 9, researchers said. A pH less than 7 means the solution is acidic, while a pH over 7 means it is salty. Phoenix also detected the presence of magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride in the mixture.
"It's typical of the soil here on Earth minus the organics," Kounaves said during a teleconference from Tucson, Ariz. ...
The heating experiment, which was designed to look for organics, did not yield conclusive evidence of carbon. Scientists planned to study another soil sample taken from further below the surface.
Re:AP News Article (Score:5, Informative)
Wait... pH over 7 means a solution is "salty"? Salts are electrically neutral; surely they meant "alkaline" or "basic".
Re:AP News Article (Score:5, Informative)
umm...pH over 7 means alkaline, not salty.
Re:Martian Red (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Life? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:1 cubic meter? (Score:4, Informative)
I found that to be rather large as well, but according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
The Robotic Arm (RA) is designed to extend 2.35 m from its base on the lander, and have the ability to dig down to 0.5 m below the surface.
However, I still doubt that they actually scooped up 1^3 meter of soil, but rather parts of an area that is 1^3 meter...
Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, it's possible that a collision was responsible for destroying a previous Earth-like atmosphere on Mars.
Re:Only a 'might'? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the *soil* might be capable of supporting Asparagus, but the seeds might not like the temperature, atmosphere, or ambient radiation.
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:4, Informative)
How about potatoes?
Re:AP News Article (Score:5, Informative)
Ocean is usually ph 8.5 or higher. However, in some areas on the planet earth the soil has high ph value (not acid). Plants do well in that type of soil, as do most living things.
Re:What every Mars Lander story needs... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:send seeds (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:3, Informative)
Nutrition wise asparagus kicks ass:
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2312/2 [nutritiondata.com]
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:5, Informative)
(*) I know that's bollocks..
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1759493 [physicsforums.com]
http://www.philforhumanity.com/Terraforming_Mars.html [philforhumanity.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars [wikipedia.org]
The problem right now is not the temperature or the sun, we have some forms of life that could handle Mars right now, as far as I know (Asparagus, for example, as well as plenty of microbes). The problem is the plant just isn't heavy enough to keep gas close to it.
Re:FTA: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, because scientists are totally saying that climate change is 100% caused by humans. *eyeroll*
Re:AP News Article (Score:2, Informative)
Some kind of basic compound like NaOH. Essentially and compound that splits off the OH group, except obviously HOH.
Salts can be used to stabilize or buffer the pH of a solution but by themselves don't vary pH.
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:5, Informative)
OK! I was hoping someone with high speed internet access would do this for me, but I did it. NASA says that much of Mars' atmosphere was lost to pressure from the solar wind, but "[...] solar wind erosion was likely much more effective in the past than it is today [nasa.gov]." Some believe that Mars' atmosphere was lost mostly due to collisions from a variety of potential impactors [findarticles.com]. Apparently you can or once could take a class at uoregon which would teach you that there was insufficient temperature for [Martian] water to remain as a liquid [uoregon.edu], so it froze out leaving CO2 as the primary component in the atmosphere. Which is OK, that's an atmosphere! We want it for warming (CO2 is great) and for providing pressure so that we can survive with an air mask (for which purpose it would be fine.) I mean, an oxygen atmosphere would be dandy, but any atmosphere would be an upgrade. However, it might also have been 7.5 bar [pibburns.com] of CO2 when Mars was young, which would be a bit excessive for our purposes. Actually, .5 bar would probably do the job, although it would certainly limit the value of suction-based pumps in a non-pressurized environment...
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:1, Informative)
You know, I see people say this kind of thing all the time, but I have never seen any kind of statement about how fast Mars will lose its atmosphere, except in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy where it is asserted that the rate of loss is actually quite slow. The only one of your links which actually addresses the rate is Wikipedia: "It is generally thought that Mars could once have had an environment relatively similar to today's Earth, during an early stage in its development. This similarity is predominantly associated with the thickness of the atmosphere and abundance of water, both considered to have been lost over the course of hundreds of millions of years. The exact mechanisms which resulted in this change are still unclear, though several mechanisms have been proposed." Uh, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your view. So, can you provide a reference for the speed at which Mars is supposed to lose a human-breathable atmosphere?
I got a better proof for you: assuming an insignificant or zero rate of dissipation, how long would it take to generate a livable, breathable atmosphere at ground level on Mars with any known, arguably feasible method? Assuming we've solved the problem of being able to make Martian air breathable, maybe the problem of atmospheric dissipation is smaller than you think?
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:1, Informative)
Mars is a great deal less cold than Titan. The temperature that generally matters is the solar thermal temperature at the average orbital distance. There are equations that exist in many college astronomy books that you can use to compute the average "escape half-life" of a gas in the atmosphere given the mass of the planet and its solar thermal temperature in kelvin.
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:3, Informative)
That's due to the massive difference in temperature. The colder a gas is, the denser it is. It's no good being able to hold an atmoshpere at >1 atm if that's only the case with temperatures slightly above liquid nitrogen.
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:2, Informative)
...The exact mechanisms which resulted in this change are still unclear, though several mechanisms have been proposed.
The common methods I've discussed are backward to me. The only method I could see that's workable is to reactivate the core. It seems to me that how the atmosphere is replenished and oceanic plant life filters it to make it breathable. And you would get your magnetosphere. Probably take a really long time though.
Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... (Score:2, Informative)
Last thing i read about terraforming Mars would be nigh impossible was that the sun is blasting away the atmo. Earth's atmo is protected by the magnetosphere generated by the moving iron core (or some such). Mars is solid all the way through, and has no such protection.