Surprising Further Evidence for a Wet Mars 192
Riding with Robots writes "When the robotic geologist Spirit found the latest evidence for a wet Mars, 'You could hear people gasp in astonishment,' said Steve Squyres, the lead scientist for the Mars rovers. 'This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there.' The latest discovery, announced today, adds compelling new evidence for ancient conditions that might have been favorable for life, according to the rover team."
Looks like ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Looks like ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Looks like ... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article....the dead 6th wheel's new mission is as a plow of sorts.....
"One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. That churning has exposed several patches of bright soil, leading to some of Spirit's biggest discoveries at Gusev, including this recent discovery. "
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Perhaps they already did [marsanomalyresearch.com].
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Oh, be quiet (Re:Looks like ...) (Score:2)
Re:Looks like ... (Score:5, Informative)
While this does appear to be an interplanetary bug-as-a-feature, the rovers' wheels were actually designed to be able to scrape off the top layer of soil and expose what's underneath.
Obviously, not to the degree this disabled wheel has, but still, they very much had plans to scratch below the surface of Mars.
- RG>
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classic.
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Have you tried keeping it on Mars?
I was going to post this (Score:2)
Steve Squyres is my freaking hero.
Ok great... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ok great... (Score:5, Informative)
Ice on the poles, a given. Easy. There are even some moons who're thought to have it. This, though, means that there was water there, liquid water, in larger quantities, far from the poles. And this water could have been the engine for life. Long, long time ago, granted, but still.
It's not that there was water, it's where they found it.
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We can't even get a car to DRIVE across habitable terrain... how in bloody hell do you think we can engineer a robot to crawl subterrainian caverns and search for life?
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If they can get a signal from inside a subterranean cabin, I do believe cingular owes me money.
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Banth and mad Zitidor tracks (Score:2)
I really was expecting Thoat prints, as they have been assumed to be much more common in both wild and domestic species.
I hope the next rover mission lands near the lost sea of Korus, where the mysterious river Iss empties.
Cheers
The next high-tech haven? (Score:2)
There's no crying in baseball! (Score:5, Interesting)
No offense to Gertrude Weise, but -- huh?
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Re:There's no crying in baseball! (Score:4, Funny)
By the way, in reading the article, I notice that Spirit is near something that NASA is calling "Home Plate." So I assume that's what the baseball references are. There's also a "Virginia Bell" [baseballhistorian.com] (not be confused, I assume, with this Virginia Bell [javasbachelorpad.com]), "Kathryn Beare" [baseball-reference.com], and "Janice O'Hara" [baseball-reference.com].
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they give a name of every single geological landmark they find. and given that the definition of "landmark" is very broad (pretty much anything bigger than a sizable rock), they're just burning through names.
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Still more evidence... (Score:5, Insightful)
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After we dusted the surface with the first few manned missions where insertion didn't quite work as planned (like many of the robotic missions have done), then perhaps. Just start with the cost of the rovers and start multiplying by tens, lots of tens. I doubt your "science" advancements as well. I think we would be looking at golf balls being hit off the Valles Marineris, numerous flag-postings, and speak-with-a-scient
Re:Still more evidence... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully the costs of manned space flight are coming down. alt.space is that crusade. Then all these heady justifications for why we need to spend so much tax payer money will go away too. If we're lucky, NASA's role in manned space flight will be completely transformed and science will finally be recognised as the secondary motivation that it always been.
The purpose of manned space flight is not science. It's not spin-offs. It's not pork projects. It's not "national pride". It's not communications. It's not even about the limits to growth on our tiny planet.
All that stuff is just reasons we make up to keep the population paying for it. We need these justifications to explain why someone who barely has enough money to make rent should be paying for a space station.
The purpose of manned space flight is human unity. It's the global selfless dedication to a goal greater than all of humanity. It's what we learn science and build surplus economies to achieve. It's the purpose of being alive now. We need to get off this rock right now. We need to be more than just one planet. We need this so that we can look up at night and know there are people up there. Not just a scientist or two.. but an entire civilization.
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Manned space flight == "It's the purpose of being alive now"
is simply "pie in the sky"
I am alive because my parents were successful in procreation. My purpose is of my own making.
There is no higher power that can issue an edict declaring the purpose of my (or anyone else's) life.
I apologize if I've taken your comments beyond what you meant.
There is a fine line between the arguments for manned space flight and the
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Talk about an out of place sig... that was like a bad morning
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We need to get off this rock right now. We need to be more than just one planet. We need this so that we can look up at night and know there are people up there. Not just a scientist or two.. but an entire civilization.
I know that's a very popular view, but I personally disagree -- I don't agree it's necessary, and I don't think it's practical anyway. But this isn't the right story to have that, uh, debate... I wish someone would do something relevant to the question, publish it, and there'd a be a good ol' Slashdot flamefest on the subject and we could all get ourselves into nice entrenched positions... Well, time will tell which of us is right, anyway.
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Just to be devil's advocate:
It's not necessarily meaningful to extend the duration of a pursuit that's not necessarily meaningful. It's like multiplying a non-negative unknown variable. Sure it might be positive and you end up with a larger number, but it could also be zero and you end up with zero anyway.
-How important is 2008 in the grand scheme if you live till 2059?
With a longer life, the
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The issue is, you get to decide what's meaningful, important, and what's worth having your money spent on. For you, space travel ranks high. And that's fine, and that's your right to feel that way.
But for o
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I'd say taking government money and spending it on something that's not weapons is a noble enough purpose. The more, the better.
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We can also wait until the technology improves enough..
Maybe pouring 'space money' into say Drexler's type nanotechnology would result in being able to go truly to space *faster* than spending money on sending dinky little spaceship to the moon or mars with men inside..
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That is, if it doesn't involve the chance to blow people up on purpose.
NASA -- Budget: $16.8 Billion (per year)
Iraq War cost: $425+ Billion
Amazing what we can find the money for when we try.
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But putting a man on Mars requires a huge infrastructure to provide food, water, habitable temperatures, earthlike atmospheric pressures, shielding from radiation, so on and soforth. Plus, it all has to have double or triple redundancy, or the risk will become too high to be acceptable to the public, which increases the complexity, mass, and expense of that stuff accordingly. And then it all has to be hauled to Mars, and bac
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humans a thousand times more efficient (Score:2)
Still he is grateful for the robots. Much better than nothing.
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That sounds more like littering than exploration.
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Martian walks into a bar (Score:3, Funny)
Bartender said, "We're a bar, we just serve alcoholic drinks."
Martian said "Well, since I'm not an alchohol-based life form, could I just have a glass of water instead?"
And that, friends, is why Mars is Dry.
Hardly surprising ... (Score:2)
Well, I mean, you know
Something surprising ... (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently we're still working out which measurement system we're using.
-Rick
No Proof Here. (Score:2)
Oh, nevermind...
Let's hope we don't find actual life there (Score:5, Interesting)
The theory in a nutshell: There are a handful of steps life must go through, to the best of our knowledge, before a rotating disk of star dust can bear intelligent life that colonizes space and thus ensures its survival. The reason why we don't see life everywhere around us is that one of these steps is so improbable or difficult that only very few, if any, aspiring colonizers of space make it past that crucial step and go extinct. The question is, are we, homo sapiens, already beyond this step? If we never find alien life, chances are we have passed this point. For every life form we do discover, the probability that we yet have to reach this point increases.
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Why can't them be a lot of slightly rare steps? I think it is not that hard, since we can't even estimate the probabilities of most of them.
If so, we may have few hard steps at future. Or may have already passed through all of them.
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Well, since we don't have any self-sustaining colonies off of the Earth, I'd say there is at least ONE difficult step we haven't passed yet.
Gee, what a consolation prize (Score:2)
Re:Gee, what a consolation prize (Score:5, Interesting)
If we do survive and thrive, diversity will be the least of our problems.
The old "loneliness of the stars" bit is as out of date as, well, Star Trek, as out of date as the idea that "crossing the stars" will be done in tin cans carefully coddling our meat sacks. That may have made sense to 1950s science, but it's obvious nonsense to anyone who uses 21st century science. It's going to be way stranger than Star Trek. You will pine for the days when it was as simple as Star Trek.
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Good point. I don't know about the grandparent, but I look forward to seeing you in a few thousand years to discuss this again. Fortunately I plan on living forever; so far so good.
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The problem I have are the people who still think that the future is going to look like Star Trek. We can now be very certain that of the basic choices,
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Almost without exception, species in Star Trek either act ra
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Unless you're
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The only way other alien life on other planets reduces our chances of colonizing other worlds is if they are hostile towards us, or they have a habit of destroying worlds we could have potentially inhabited, or in some other way interfere with our progress so as to become non-independent. Though the theory makes a tiny bit of sense because we can probably presume that other space-faring races are much more likely to have t
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Likewise, if you ro
OK. Let's man a mission to mars (Score:3, Funny)
Finding new things is surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Standby to be shocked! [google.com]
I'm no rocket scientist, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, I'm not saying it's not Martian in origin, but it just doesn't seem like there's any question that it's Martian and I'm curious as to why. But of course, they ARE rocket scientists and geologists, so I suspect they've looked into this possibility.
Why so surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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The question isn't whether water exists, but either or not it is in the free-flowing liquid form.
Still the chances of a planet with a 4 billion year history having had, at some stage, temperatures and pressures suitable for liquid water, are not so remote that evidence of this having happened should be particularly startling.
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Damp Bedrock? (Score:2)
The Olivine Question (Score:3, Insightful)
There may have been life on Mars. There may be significant amounts of water in the form of ice on Mars. It's exciting and it will take a long time to sort the geologic or areology of Mars [wikipedia.org]. We should be going to explore Mars because it is an interesting world, not because it might have water or harbored life. Those discoveries are the icing on the cake. Because if those are the reasons we go an don't find anything, that will tell us something, but we will be disappointed and may not be able to get public support nor the tax dollars for future missions. We should look for evidence of life and water, but that shouldn't be our sole focus nor should we expect to find either.
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Quayle was right! (Score:2)
"We know there are canals on Mars; and if there are canals, there's water."
Now just wait for the next phases of his prediction: "If there's water, there's oxygen; and there's oxygen, we can breathe."
Mars, here we come!
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What's next? Nixon humor? A quip about old Lyndon B?
MER - most successful JPL mission /ever/ (Score:3, Interesting)
I do wish NASA were investing more in the DSN though...
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"Clement for organisms" (Score:2)
Hot jupiters, Wet Mars, Hot Ice - gosh (Score:3, Funny)
Mars Rover Spirit finds water! (Score:2)
Squyres is Awesome (Score:2)
What now? (Score:2)
Steve is a master at playing up new discoveries, but we already got the message 3 years ago.
Re:Sand? (Score:5, Informative)
Silica [wikipedia.org] or Silicon dioxide, is the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal settings is silica, usually in the form of quartz because the considerable hardness of this mineral resists erosion. However, the composition of sand varies according to local rock sources and conditions.
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Deserts typically have internal drainage basins that accumlate and store water underground.. where the water occasionally springs to the surface, you get an oasis.
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Re:Sand? (Score:4, Funny)
Solvents (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA concludes that water had to be present as a solvent. I'm sceptical.
Silica is a polar molecule ( tetraheral: two oxygen atoms and two unlinked electron pairs equally spaced around a silion atom ). It ought to dissolve in any polar solvent, such as ammonia. And ammonia was almost certainly present during the formation of mars.
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Re:Solvents (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, both water and ammonia should dissolve a glass bottle. At room temperature they just do it very very very slowly.
You think that's bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Solvents (Score:4, Interesting)
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Be sceptical; water means money. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's easy:
1. get observation
2. concoct a theory INVOLVING WATER OR LIFE which explains the observation
3. report observation as evidence for water or life
The scientest who says "nah, it's just a reaction involving volcanic stuff and light, etc." is due for a bad employee review. He's not a team player.
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Re:Sand? (Score:5, Funny)
I hope not, women are from Venus.
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Right! (Score:2)
You're right - something caused that wetness (Score:2)