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Mars Space Science

NASA Orbiter Reveals Details of a Moister Mars 94

Posted by CmdrTaco 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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NASA Orbiter Reveals Details of a Moister Mars More

NASA Orbiter Reveals Details of a Moister Mars

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  • Moister Mars (Score:5, Funny)

    by tpheiska ( 1145505 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @03:31PM (#25545907)
    Moister Mars.... mmm.... sweet...

  • mmm... moist (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    and delicious! Reminds me of that time I accidentally left a mars candy bar in my shirt pocket on laundry day. OK, it was not delicious, it was pretty gross. It also involved a lot of coins and a lot more detergent.

  • Moist (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @03:40PM (#25546053)

    Due to probing?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HardCase ( 14757 )

      I thought the headline was talking about "molester Mars", so I was really looking forward to some startling research.

  • Mars: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @03:40PM (#25546055)

    Mars: What The Earth Will Look Like If We Fuck Up Too Much

  • Stop it. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @03:52PM (#25546199) Homepage Journal
    Every time someone claims ANYTHING about water on mars, it always trails with "There could have been/should/would been life!". Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Fossil. Check. And it is already on Earth.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by megamerican ( 1073936 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by E++99 ( 880734 )

        "That means there may or may not be life. A fossil would mean there is proof of life."

        A fossil would be a long way from "proof." Since we have no idea what Mars life should look like, unless it happens to look a whole lot like earth life, it would probably be 95% speculation as to whether the fossilized thing had been a form of life.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ChienAndalu ( 1293930 )
      What do you mean by fossil? Life on earth was consisting of creatures less complex than bacteria for a billion years, if earth dried out at that time, I doubt that you would find "fossils" very easily.

      • Fixed :Stop it. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Paltin ( 983254 )

        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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 )
        I can guarntee that if the earth dried out at that time, that the other poster would not be able to find anything, much less fossils.

        I kid... I kid... I know that wasn't what you meant.

    • meh, then you'll claim god put the fossil there to fool us, I'm not playing your games.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Aren't you the idiot who claimed the Apple store didn't fully refund opened software, and when proven wrong about that, then claimed they didn't sell games, and when proven wrong about THAT, started whining to the mods that the proof of you being wrong was "off topic".

        And the whole time you were quoting from the very document that proved you were full of shit but you were too stupid to scroll down to see it?

        You really are pathetic, and you calling someone else a dick after that?

        God damn you're not trolling,

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by jollyreaper ( 513215 )

      Every time someone claims ANYTHING about water on mars, it always trails with "There could have been/should/would been life!". Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.

      McCain?

      *gasps of outrage*

      What, too soon?

    • OK, but I'm gonna need about 1/2 trillion dollars to get the job done.

    • Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.

      Finding a moist, chocolaty nougat, is the same as finding life.

    • 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)

      by Paltin ( 983254 )

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khallow ( 566160 )

        Geologic processes work at the surface to grind that surface into dust, meaning that we need to find a lucky outcrop.

        Geological processes are a lot slower on Mars than they are on Earth. If there was widespread life with hard features that can be fossilized (like bone or a shell), then there will probably be a lot of fossils.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Paltin ( 983254 )

          Three things:

          No one really suspects that life on Mars ever consisted of organisms with hard parts. Remember, on Earth, 4billion years passed with only soft parted organisms before hard parts burst on the scene at the beginning of the Cambrian 543 million years ago.

          Soft parts can be "fossilized".

          These fossilized soft parts, of single celled organisms, can be found on earth. To find them, scientists guess what rocks are likely to contain what they want in the field, take them back to the lab, and look. It's d

    • Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.

      Do you have any idea how long people scoured the Earth before finding and identifying the first fossils there? Finding them here on Mars is not going to be easy, especially using robotic rovers controlled from millions of kilometers away, a method that has yet to find a single fossil on Earth where they are known to exist and humans know what they look like.

    • As if a fossil would prove anything. First you'll ask for a fossil, then you'll demand that there be no gaps in the fossil record... Honestly, where will your skepticism end?!

      I hate to say it, but you're not following the blind faith of science. Are you sure you're feeling okay? Next thing you know, you could be denying the theory of evolution based on the lack of evidence, and other crazy things.

      Are you sure you're feeling okay?

  • Always "possible life" (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "...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)

    by Smivs ( 1197859 )

    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)

      by E++99 ( 880734 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @05:13PM (#25547475) Homepage

      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.

      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.

  • wonderful (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lord Ender ( 156273 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @03:56PM (#25546263) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They want to make absolutely sure there's no native life there, before we transplant our own.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 )

        Didn't seem to give a damn about that when they were colonizing the USA. Anyhow, I think there is evidently less and/or less sophisticated life on Mars than there was in the USA a few hundred years ago. Whilst finding it, if it does exist, could be fun, I don't think we should be denying ourselves the expansion that Mars colonies would give us, because of it.

    • I don't think taking stuff off our planet is such a good idea, I need that oxygen to breath.

    • 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)

        by Lord Ender ( 156273 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @04:55PM (#25547231) Homepage

        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.

        • If life developed completely independently on Mars, it would be drastically different (on the cellular level) than anything we have here.

          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.

          • 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!

        • Hmm... Let me see... Historical interest... Or better chance of survival for life as we know it... Interest... Or life... Argh, I hate tough choices like that!

          In all seriousness, we can build colonies first, and analyze historical evidence later. It's not as if we couldn't tell ancient material from current life here on Earth.

    • 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.

      • 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?"

        • 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.

  • It's an important result that MRO is mapping the global location of hydrated silica across Mars, but it is worth noting that we saw it first with the Spirit Rover [nasa.gov], in the site informally tagged "Silica Valley."

    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.

  • The Moon gets MOIST over Mike Douglas...

    Maybe we can make more, nuttier Mars Bars?

    And, for slogans, we can add to out-of-space ones:

    "A world without fences: Windoze"

    and

    "*I* will use less energy; Human Power"

    or just

    "I will eat less mars"

    "I will sex less"

    and so on... and so on...

  • Then we could put to rest all of the hysteria associated with religion. Life happened twice in this solar system, why didn't your god tell you guys about his other try? I can just imagine the hand wringing and apologetics.

  • "Moist" is just one of those words that is automatically associated with one other particular word, usually sexual in nature. "Pert" is another.

    I just had to make that comment. It was either that, or "mmm, a moister, chewier Mars."

  • From TFA:

    Researchers examining data from the orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars have found evidence of hydrated silica, commonly known as opal.

    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

    • Even if you do it bulk, the cost per ounce to fly gold from Mars to Earth is much, much, much higher than the value of gold. Or any other mineral.
  • Last one's a rotten martian egg!

  • Does mars also have holes and juices [rifftrax.com]?

    And has not nasa now added probes to the holes and juices?

  • The evidence is mounting that early mars from the Noachian period and perhaps later (3.8 billion years ago give or take) was extremely wet - you only have to look at the MOLA data set to draw *a* conclusion that the Northern polar regions were a single vast ocean, either that or the 4km+ deep depression was caused by a huge impact. Evidence of the "coastline" can be interpreted as a receding shoreline or something more cataclysmic - depends on who you read and believe.

    Clearly later periods with channels th

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