Mounting Evidence for Water on Mars 342
Kent Simon writes "Space.com has an interesting article discussing new evidence from the mars rovers that shows there may really be Water on Mars."
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Mounting Evidence for Water on Mars
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Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton
Spherical snowflakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that, or the spherules are organic...
Beware... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Mars program's stated goal is the detection of water on Mars - therefore every possible shred of evidence for that conclusion is being reported, with no discussion at all of any alternative interpretations.
A couple of very interesting opinion [spacedaily.com] pieces [spacedaily.com] at spacedaily.com recently sum up some alternative theories.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love it to be true. But there's a distinct water-mania in the current NASA press machine...
Cash being wasted why won't govts consider this? (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:Tell news (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Tell news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tell news (Score:4, Insightful)
Slight difference, I know, but get it right. The Media is quite often the enemy of Science, and The People.
Re:Tell news (Score:5, Insightful)
But the US mission is also very valuable. You ask "But what have they produced so far? A few snapshots and panorama pictures (which are nice, but well...), and some stone probes." which is really just silly. The photos the landers have taken are more than just panoramas of the scenary. While these do tell us more about the martian surface, the really imporant pictures are of the rock formations, close-ups of the surface sand and rock, and micrographs of all the material there at the surface. Seeing exactly what martian rock, pebbles, and sand looks like is very important for understanding the martian atmosphere & weather patterns, as well as geologic makeup and history.
to suggest that it's only taken a few is absurd... check out http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit
the other tools on the rovers (see http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft
with all your unfounded critisism and palpable distaste for another country, I almost mistook you for an American! try not to be so prejudiced in the future, mmK?
Re:What is this all about? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, Earth is supposed to be a Garden of Eden. Like it or not, but a lot of human policy is driven by Christians who would rather not have to deal with the reality of the universe...
Answering this question will transform culture in big, big ways.
Re:Beware... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is this all about? (Score:1, Insightful)
Waterous questions (Score:5, Insightful)
The result was that at Viking's time, most circles were standing for the Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead argument, no matter the controversial data from spectroscopy, the first pictures from Mars and several theories about the formation of the Solar System. Most academical circles were not only willing to but forcing the view that Mars was just like the Moon but more colder.
Unfortunately things did not stop only in this. There were people that for some reason falsified Viking's results or manipulated other results. For some reason, these people needed the Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead Mars argument as a weapon for their silly, stupid and overreligious theories. Frankly it is another show on how Mars, since Kepler, has been ground not only for a scientific debate but also for political-religious fistfights... Anyway, the extremism of ideas and the fundamentalism of some slowed down the exploration of Mars.
If you hear a refutation of the new discoveries, be careful. Before coming into conclusions try to find if this is the product of a scientific discussion, how correctly people step up with their arguments, or if this is another mass-media show between Hoagland-alikes and Horowitz-clones.
Re:The spherules (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't it safe to assume,,, (Score:4, Insightful)
'hydrogen' and 'oxygen'. Finding water on Mars is inevitable.
Let me know when they find some sort of bacteria or micro-organism. Water
Re:The spherules (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides : have you looked at the pictures? These spherules are not round because of abrasion or erosion, they are clearly round because they formed that way (either as molten droplets solidifying, or through some sort of deposition process). Rounded pebbles are "rounded", not "perfectly spherical" like these spherules.
Until we get info on their chemical composition, we don't know what caused them, but erosion into "spherules" is one of the least likely explanations.
Most likely, in order of decreasing likelyhood:
- Solidified droplets of molten rock (from impact or volcano)
- Chemical concretions in standing water (above or below ground)
- Chemical concretions of biological origin
- Eggs of a Martian Rock-frog
- wind/water erosion of angular stones
Re:Tell news (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mother of all pissing contest, the Cold War, has already ended.
So take example and start aiming to the toilet. This place is already too smelly.
-For Cleaner Environment
Water coming from comets (Score:5, Insightful)
Could it be that without an atmosphere on Mars, comets and the like could be falling on the planet and depositing their contents on the surface in the same way as has happened on earth? I mean, heck, we've even got our rover planted in the midst of a crater created by extra-martian debris and since there is little or no erosion on this planet we could be partly examining the contents of extra-planetary material. Personally, I think this would make the examination even more interesting than it already is!
Re:Wouldn't it be funny... (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't believe there's anything in Scripture that precludes extra-terrestrial life. The Bible is truth, but not exhaustive truth. If you want to learn Perl, for example, the camel book will be significantly more use to you than the Bible.
Seems to me like you have a real problem with the Church. Not surprising, given how much of it behaves, but that doesn't alter the *fact* of whether or not God exists.
falsified viking's results...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tell news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
More likely, they'll concoct some weird story about dust on some solar panels, admit a setback, find some last minute "evidence", shut off the rovers, ask for some money, and try it again.
Re:The spherules (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, it isn't random physical phenomena we're talking about here.
Third, why do you assume the rock fragments were of variable size and shape? All that is required for my hypothesis to be correct is that the original material was light enough to be displaced by the wind. Those materials of a given size and composition were therefore subject to this effect, those differing in size and composition were not. As we can plainly see, there is an abundance of material on the surface of Mars that is neither similar in size or shape.
The fact that they are the same size is easily explained by the terrain. The size of the stone or particle in question has a great deal to do with how it interacts with the surface as the wind propels it; similarly sized particles are going to behave similarly as the conditions of the surface change, i.e., a depression in the surface will "catch" particles of a certain size, but not particles that are larger, or smaller.
Nobody is shouting anything, and I fail to see how mysticism plays any role here whatsoever (your previous inane reference to Martian rock-frog eggs notwithstanding.)
The differences between the planets is anything but minor. The difference in gravity alone undoubtedly carries with it a tremendous potential to impact geological processes. As does the air pressure, temperature and chemical composition of the various materials being studied. Moreover, your depiction of the processes that take place here on Earth is similarly flawed... pebbles don't form in streams at the kind of altitudes that are remotely comparable to Mars. If you're going to throw stones at the conjectures others have on geological processes on other planets, it would behoove you to have a better grasp on those that take place on your own.
Re:Wouldn't it be funny... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be funny... (Score:2, Insightful)
The spherules are cool (Score:3, Insightful)
That is true if the globules spherical shape is the result of mechanical weathering. The spheres may also be concretions, formed in place through precipitation in an aqueous environment, or the may be melt glass from a volcanic eruption or meteor impact. The microlayered structure of the outcrop is also fascinating. I don't think it is known definitively yet whether it volcanic ash or a lake sediment. Observation of either one is a first for Mars exploration.
Re:Tell news (Score:3, Insightful)
The ESA "discovery" announcement last month was accompanied by a cartoonish image of the Valles Marineris area. I have yet the see the source data for this grandiose conclusion. Visual evidence for an abundance of water on Mars dates from the Mariner 9 mission in the early seventies. No one has yet trumped the awesome observations of recently active gullies [msss.com] in Mars southern hemisphere.
Re:What is this all about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever there's anything about space exploration on
Yes, there are 2.3 billion people without fresh water, but it's not the fault of the space programs. NASA's budget for 2004 is about $16 billion. The Pentagon's budget is $450 billion!!!! This is more than all other military spending by all other nations combined We could cut it in half and still be spending three times as much as our next highest potential enemy (Russia, who spends $70 billion per year, and they're an ally.) The "Axis of Evil" spends only $7.5 billion, so we could easily defend our nation from "evildoers", feed all the hungry children, house the homeless, and provide quality education to anyone who wants it and still have money left over to send humans to Mars and the Moon, and push ourselves into space.
Don't blame NASA for taking money from important programs. Blame the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex who would rather build things that blow up than feed starving children.
Re:What is this all about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, maybe not. An actual living organism from Mars would be tremendously interesting, simply because it did evolve somewhere else. We'd get to see an evolutionary 'what-if' question answered.
Looking at the differences--and similarities--between terrestrial and Martian organisms could be incredibly illuminating. Looking only at Earth life, and Earth fossils, and Earth biochemistry is like examining in detail one grandmaster chess match. Interesting, challenging, surprising, and complex...but it doesn't explore all the aspects of the game.
Life on other worlds would be an opportunity to examine another game. The rules (physics) are the same for everyone, but the game is different each time you play.
Mind you, I agree that we're not doing a great job of managing the diversity of life we have here on Earth. I am utterly gobsmacked at all the useful compounds extracted so far from extremophilic organisms. Then again, Martian life would be the utimate extremophiles--near vacuum, hard radiation...very impressive.
Re:Water on mars (Score:2, Insightful)
We know that the polar caps are white - they may be water, or they may be frozen CO2.
That is unless, of course, you know more than the rest of us, you sly devil.
Re:The spherules (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do the numbers? Indeed! (Score:1, Insightful)
But then again most of the reactions that keep us alive are extremely unfavorable. Of course all those are driven by the couple that are favorable.
I guess life is about cheating physics. Playing with the rules to make something that is virtually impossible an everyday occurance.
The Certainty of Water (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not?
Serious question here - I've heard this from others before, and choose now to respond to it. There is no Prime Directive outside of Star Trek yet, so there's nothing legal we're violating. Moral law, maybe? Whose? What moral code states that "thou shalt not interfere or impede the progress of alien civilizations"? Certainly thousands of years of human history show that we frequently do otherwise, particularly Europeans (Native Americans, Africans, Indians, etc.)
Another way of looking at it - if we stay on just this one planet, there's a strong likelihood that at some point, maybe not too far away, we'll be wiped out by a comet collision. Don't we, as an intelligent species, have a "right" to attempt to survive by colonizing other planets? In fact, don't we have a "duty" to our children and grand-children to act to ensure the survival of the species? Mars obviously doesn't have technological-age life on it. It might have proto-life that could someday develop into intelligent life, but what obligation do we have to it? Vice versa, what obligation would it have to us, were our positions reversed and Martians were exploring Earth?
Here's another view... Are you vegan? No? What "right" do you have to eat all those cows and chicken and fish, thus ensuring that they will not live longer to pass on their genes to future generations, generations which someday might evolve into more intelligent life? (If you are vegan, disregard this). I feel that the right that lets us eat other animals to ensure our survival - the "right" of survival of the fittest - is the same right that lets us also explore other planets and potential contaminate the proto-life there.
If Mars was currently inhabitated by intelligent, communicating life, that might be different, but unlikely - in such a case, we'd just want to make sure that we wouldn't contaminate them with something deadly to them and vice versa (i.e. smallpox blankets). However, with no life communicating with us, or showing any evidence of intelligence, I think we have no obligation towards protecting their path of evolution. Also, simply by existing, we're altering their natural environment (lot of RF coming off the Earth). Should we stop all broadcasts, because we don't want to increase their chances of mutation beyond what they would normally get in the universe? It's an extreme position, but it's the natural extension of what you suggest.
I feel we have a duty to expand and colonize, until we run into another intelligent species. At that time, we can negotiate. Until then, though, our first obligation is towards humans.
-T