NASA's "Opportunity" Rover Finds New Evidence For Once-Habitable Mars 40
nedko.m writes "NASA's Mars rover 'Opportunity' found clay minerals in an ancient rock on the rim of the Endeavour Crater on Mars. The discovery suggests that neutral-pH water — slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life — once flowed through the area, probably during the first billion years of Martian history. Opportunity's latest discovery fits well with one made recently on the other side of the planet by the rover's bigger, younger cousin Curiosity, which found strong evidence that its landing site could have supported microbial life in the ancient past. Such observations could help scientists map out Mars' transition from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold and dry planet we know today"
Re:water on mars (Score:5, Interesting)
there may have been water on it. so what.
Finding evidence of past water is an indication that it might have had life. I don't know what would be more interesting, to find that Mars once had life, or that it was habitable for a billion years and never developed life.
But anyway, that's what.
what I want to see are fossils! (Score:4, Interesting)
like a trilobite of sorts. however, our rovers don't have a big enough shovel. It seems many people are getting bored with Mars, it has been said (and I agree) don't send another rover unless you bring something back. It would be nice to have another rover that can explore regions where geologists really want to go (but difficult to do the engineering to get it there), but with NASA has a flat budget and it will become more difficult to simply sustain the budgets as they are.
OTOH with so many spacecraft that are operating beyond their planned lifetime, these operating costs drain funding from developmental programs (should we let them die, i.e. Spirit and Opportunity, so we can get on with new stuff?). What about spacecraft to Europa (there's lots more water there, and is there little fishies under the ice?) unless the radiation is so intense don't bother to plan a mission which survivability is zilch?
Regarding Curiosity, it is providing extensive data per sampling, mapping, photos, etc. and provides much excitement for researchers studying the planet. I think issue is such excitement is seen as pretty dry stuff among the general public. Perhaps Mars has a identity problem. We have this huge fascination that seems fueled by science fiction and we get caught up in a human mission to Mars, and one person on another forum called such a mission a myth (it ain't gonna happen with current budgets and only chemical propulsion). Excluding Dennis Tito's flyby which seems to be feasible but not easy.
Re:water on mars (Score:5, Interesting)
What we know with certainty is that life in the universe is rare, as far as we know earth is the only planet that has it.
That's total nonsense. And you contradict yourself in the next sentence:
Everything else about life elsewhere is simply hypothesis and statistics, but unproven.
We know nothing about life in the universe. Nothing. Zero, nada, zilch, null. Until we have a much larger data sample, it is all just theoretical. Completely true, and until the intervention of interstellar travel, unavoidable.
That is exactly why we're looking for any clues we might find. That includes not only Mars, but also Europa, for example, where some scientists believe we might find primitive life.
We know for sure that there's life on Earth. We can exclude most of the other planets and moons as they can not possibly sustain any life based on anything we can imagine.
But that's just the solar system. For the rest of the universe, we have, for example, just recently changed our estimate about how common planets are. We thought that most suns wouldn't have any, now we think almost the opposite.
We have just started having methods to find planets of earth size.
But still, life somewhere else in the solar system would be a pretty big deal.
Intelligent life is even rarer, given the biomass of earth.
Wrong. Biomass is not the deciding factor. Right now, our sample size indicates that 100% of planets with life at all will bring about intelligent life. But that could just be due to the anthropic principle. We don't know if Earth is a rare exception, or if there's something to evolution that will result in intelligence in most cases.
Again, getting closer to an answer here, in either direction, would be a pretty big deal.