Posted on 01/30/2004 12:53:34 PM PST by Mark Felton
PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 30 — The Mars rover Opportunity may have detected the iron oxide — a possible sign of water from Mars' ancient past — that was the original motivation for sending it to a broad plain near the planet's equator, some scientists involved in the project said.
Scientists have been examining data from an instrument called the mini-thermal emission spectrometer, or mini-TES for short, that looks at infrared light radiated from the rocks and soil. The mix of infrared wavelengths identifies certain minerals.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Through your reach the souls of all humanity connect with Mars.
Then that would mean the Mars Rover landed in Boise City or Altus?
Many "great minds" have come to embarrassment through this well traveled path.
The Lure of Hematite
March 28, 2001 -- What makes the Red Planet red?
Scientists think Mars has a bad case of rust. Martian soil is full of iron-bearing compounds that, over the eons, have reacted with trace amounts of oxygen and water vapor in Mars' atmosphere to form iron oxide -- the same chemical that covers innumerable rusty nails in garages and workshops on Earth.
The word "rust" conjures up images of things that are red --like Mars and old nails-- but not all iron oxide is the same color. Here on Earth a gray-hued variety of iron oxide, a mineral called hematite, can precipitate in hot springs or in standing pools of water.
Gray hematite is not the sort of rust you might expect to find on a desert-dry planet like Mars. But perhaps Mars wasn't always as dry as it is today. There are many signs of ancient or hidden water on the Red Planet including flash-flood gullies, sedimentary layers ... and hematite.
In 1998, an infrared spectrometer on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft detected a substantial deposit of gray hematite near the Martian equator, in a 500 km-wide region called Sinus Meridiani. The discovery raised the tantalizing possibility that hot springs were once active on Mars.
"We believe that the gray hematite is very strong evidence that water was once present in that area," said Victoria Hamilton, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University (ASU). "We think the deposit is fairly old. It was buried, perhaps, for several hundred million years or more and now it's being exposed by wind erosion."
Gray hematite has the same chemical formula (Fe2O3) as its rusty-red cousin, but a different crystalline structure. Red rust is fine and powdery; typical grains are hundreds of nanometers to a few microns across. Gray hematite crystals are larger, like grains of sand.
"Red and gray iron oxides on Mars are really just different forms of the same mineral," explained Hamilton. "If you ground up the gray hematite into a fine powder it would turn red because the smaller grains scatter red light."
The coarse-grained structure of gray hematite is important, says ASU's Jack Farmer, head of the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Mars Focus Group, because "to get that kind of coarsening of the crystallinity, you would need to have a reasonable amount of water available" where the hematite formed.
The link between water and gray hematite makes the so-called "Hematite Site" (Sinus Meridiani) an alluring target for future Mars landers as well as for remote sensing instruments on the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft -- slated to launch on April 7th.
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No, but Al suspected it when he invented NASA.
Gore said that finding iron was important but that he was actually hoping they would the lost tribe of wooden people.
Bourbon on Mars. Do tell.
Big projects use big words. Rust is what most people call the chemical (reactive) product of iron mixed with either oxygen, water, or both.
Water is very common in the solar system. On Mars it may be in oases, which would make Mars a lot like Arabia.
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