Posted on 09/16/2005 9:44:14 AM PDT by LibWhacker
The original home of the world's most famous space rock, the Allen Hills Martian meteorite, has now been identified, thanks to data from the orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey and a better understanding of cratering dynamics.
The rock, called ALH84001, has been the subject of intense study ever since 1996 when scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center startled the world by reporting that fossilised microbial life might be embedded inside it. The rock, which formed at the very dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, was blasted from the surface of Mars around 17 million years ago by an impact and made its way to Earth, landing in Antarctica.
While the claim remains highly controversial, the JSC scientists say further study has bolstered the evidence for fossilised life in ALH84001. So the discovery of the rock's place of origin on Mars could make that spot a strong candidate for a future landing by robots or people searching for extraterrestrial life.
The analysis, based on the rock's mineral characteristics, was presented by Vicky Hamilton of the University of Hawaii at this week's meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Tennessee, US.
Perfect match
Hamilton looked for matches between the laboratory spectrum of the meteorite, a mix of orthopyroxene and basaltic minerals, and data from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer and other instruments on the orbiters. "There was only this one place, in all the places we can look that aren't too dusty, that had a composition that was consistent with the ALH84001," Hamilton told New Scientist.
The site is in the Eos Chasma, a branch of the enormous Valles Marineris canyon system. Hamilton has examined it further using topographic and thermal data and high-resolution imagery. "Putting this all together, it's all consistent with this being the source region," she said.
The pinpointed area is a “lobate flow”, the kind that occurs when an impacting object strikes a fluid-rich soil, as is the case with many Martian craters. There is a crater about 20 kilometres in diameter there, which cratering studies have now shown indicates a large enough impact to eject the rock out of Mars' gravitational field.
There is no single "smoking gun" piece of evidence that proves this was the place the meteorite came from, Hamilton concedes: "There isn't any piece of information that makes this a unique interpretation, other than the fact that we haven't seen any other suitable places."
Fascinating picture
Everett Gibson, one of the JSC scientists behind the original findings of possible signs of life in ALH84001 says the picture put together by Hamilton is "fascinating”. And like his work, there was “no single line of evidence that says, ‘ah, this is it’," he notes.
The meteorite is believed to have first formed deep beneath the Martian surface, and was later transported to the shallow depth from which it was propelled into space.
The Eos Chasma location fits that. The 4-kilometre-high cliffs bordering the canyon have exposed rocks from various ages in the Martian past, and impacts or erosion could have brought the rock to the canyon floor - along with rocks from a major portion of Mars' history.
That makes it a prime site for a landing mission someday, Hamilton said. It would be an opportunity to sample rocks from a wide variety of ages, all in one place. And, if it really is the launchpad from which ALH84001 began its interplanetary travel, it may also be the place where the mystery of whether the rock's unusual contents really are signs of ancient life is finally unravelled.
Better yet, lets look at this a more logical way. Mars has the same type of rock formations as the earth. Catastrophic events on earth have buried and mixed all these diferent types of formations common to all planets, simularities which they have share, because they were all formed the same way.
...the scientists then asked for additional funding so that they could further contemplate the origin of the lint in their belly buttons.
I really wonder why they fear revelation of facts so strongly...
Maybe I should really light a fire and mention the epitome of sinful words: "evolution"...</SARCASM>
Some folks around here need a much bigger God...
Rocket science huh?
Lets see, using the hair- brained BBT, the entire universe was formed by nothing exploding, creating these base gases, hydrogen, helium and heavy helium, etc which turned into quasars which then exploded, creating all these minerals (rocks, with fossils in them now they say) with where spewed all over the universe and slowly gathered together and formed planets. The deep rock was pushed up by a volcano or metor strike on Mars send speeding to earth and created life, 4.5 billion years ago. And they just upgraded the age of the universe to 14.5 billion years, so that means Life on Mars occured, and died fossilized, was deeply buried at the birth of the universe. Let's not even fathom how everything somehow organized itself into balanced order during all this kaos.
I hate to tell you, But that's not rocket science, that's quackery.
Mini minds huh? I design and build things that would boggle the minds of these telescope peeping "rocket scientists". It seems that the can take an impossibility which violates the basic laws of physics, add even more stupidity to it and mini minds will believe it without even taking the time to investigate these "theories".
Probably because they are incapable of doing so.
Aw, damn! I'm an elitist snob, can't I play too?
Sure you can. Any theory you can come up with is valid until proved wrong. But, there are a hundreds of "rocket scientists"
Which dispute this BBT quackery, you can always use their models, none of which have been disproved either.
In fact, I have a unique theory of my own. Our entire universe exists in a bugs turd, this bug that created that turd, (our big bang) it's universe exists within another turd, and so on and so on for infinity. Our while concept of time is but a micro second in this bugs concept of time, and so on and so on. Because time didn't exist before the creation of our universe, it's forbidden for us to think beyond that moment. I don't know why exactly, but I've been told that.
This identifying the possible origin of the chunk of rock is mere taxonomy with an eye toward evolutionary theory. Taxonomy as a precursor of science is about on the scientific level of naming the animals. But, Newtonian mechanics does allow for interchange of small amounts of material between planets, which doesn't go far toward verifying bosonic string theory.
Now, that's quackery! Just lots of scientific-sounding terms thrown together -- with no comprehension of modern cosmological thinking.
Get back to us on cosmology -- when you've passed high school science...and have learned the difference between a quark and a quasar...
In the meantime, welcome to the fourteenth century!
The bosonic string theories are all unstable. It's just as well that bosonic string theory is unstable, because it's not a realistic theory to begin with. The real world has stable matter which satisfy the Pauli Exclusion Principle where two identical particles cannot be in the same quantum state at the same time.
And sometimes the meteorites are worshipped as gawd by stone age death cults with nuclear weapons!
Kill A Commie For Mommie
Seven Dead Monkeys Page O Tunes
That's exactly what I say too! Quackery! That is how the BBT is described.
That's why we invented fermions.
Maybe "Allah" had DNA bits bits on it and thats how Arabs came to be.....
I'm on it. Making a list of topics that need refreshing so I can read this string theory text. It is probably just an exercise; nobody is even pretending anymore that we are getting any closer to the true nature of reality.
It says dawn of the solar system, two different things.
Wow! Kinda makes my theory of a Flying Psgetti Monster as creator of the universe and the designer of evolution pale in comparision - though my version IS much more, um, palatable, if you will.
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