Posted on 09/28/2015 5:23:47 PM PDT by Kaslin
I was seeing tease lines in the news over the weekend and on the NASA twitter feed hinting at a major announcement which would come out today. That spurred the usual rounds of speculation with the most popular candidate being that they turned up some form of life or perhaps a fossil or something along those lines. (Personally I was pitching for a large black obelisk of some sort full of stars, but you can only ask for so much.) I honestly wasn’t getting my hopes up too far because they’ve played these games before. Rather than just announcing what they’ve got they schedule a briefing some days in advance to try to stoke up excitement and get as much press mileage as they can and then it turns out to be something that never lives up to the billing.
This one, while promising in some areas, didn’t prove to be much different. They think they’ve spotted signs of liquid water on the surface of the red planet.
Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the chances of being home to some form of life.
The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.
Images taken from the Mars orbit show cliffs, and the steep walls of valleys and craters, streaked with summertime flows that in the most active spots combine to form intricate fan-like patterns.
It’s not that the presence of water on Mars isn’t a big deal in scientific terms… it definitely is. But they already knew there was water there. There are ice caps at the poles and there has been a general consensus for a while now that there was probably at least some water trapped under the surface. The fact that it manages to occasionally run in liquid form on the surface in the low temperatures and pressures is interesting from a physics geek perspective, but it’s really not all that huge in terms of news.
So what does it all mean? Our friend Andrew Malcolm has some thoughts and the background of the research at IBD.
Scientists, being scientists, are most intrigued by what they don’t know. Slowly, thanks to Mars rovers and more sophisticated instrumentation circling above that can penetrate the surface, they are seeking to piece together an ancient history that could presage Earth’s future.
Evidence indicates the past presence of at least one vast Atlantic-size ocean, possibly a billion or more years ago. But where did all that water go? And why? If water is flowing intermittently on Mars now, where does it come from? If it flows in that cold, it must be salt water. Soil salts absorbing moisture from the atmosphere? Soil salts drawing up subterranean water?
One concern this is raising for NASA is how to check out the areas with liquid water (presumably the best shot at finding life) without risking contaminating them with life from Earth. Personally I think that ship may have already sailed. We recently found plankton living on the outside of the space station so we’ve pretty much proven that extremophiles can live pretty much anywhere and can even survive for extended periods in the freezing vacuum and radiation of space. We do try to sterilize everything we launch, but are we that effective at the microbial level? I bet there’s already some Earth based microbes hanging out on Mars thanks to us.
What I’d really like to see is some bacteria that’s actually Martian and figure out a way to bring it back and study it. If it has the same basic type of DNA as all the sub-microscopic critters on the Earth that might really tell us something about the solar system and the universe. (And before you ask, yes… bacteria have DNA. It’s just really simple and located in the nucleoid in the bacterial chromosome.) More to the point, if it’s completely different than any life on Earth, then it arose independently. That might really change our outlook on the world, eh?
Disagree with the author
Water in a warmer region of Mars greatly simplifies our ability to send manned missions
Liquid water on Mars might be a hard thing to catch up with. At zero degrees centigrade it’s ice. At 2 degrees centigrade it boils in the thin martian atmosphere.
[ Liquid water on Mars might be a hard thing to catch up with. At zero degrees centigrade its ice. At 2 degrees centigrade it boils in the thin martian atmosphere. ]
Not if it is really really salty....
Then it is 4C
You mean we haven't landed a man on Mars yet??
Has anyone notified Congress?
Sheila Jackson Lee (Democrat)
Member of the U.S. House
of Representatives
from Texas's 18th district
On a visit to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2005, Jackson Lee made embarrassing news by asking if the Mars Pathfinder had taken an image of the flag planted there in 1969 by Neil Armstrong.[2]
Prior to the 110th Congress, Jackson Lee served on the House Science Committee and on the Subcommittee that oversees space policy and NASA.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100409095818/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Jackson_Lee
Just think, 400 years from now we’ll be drinking fancy bottled water from Mars. Or rich people will anyway.
Why not?
That movie still scares me.
“For a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were canals on Mars. These were a network of long straight lines in the equatorial regions from 60° N. to 60° S. Lat. on the planet Mars. They were first described by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli during the opposition of 1877, and confirmed by later observers. Schiaparelli called these canali, which was translated into English as “canals”.
The Irish astronomer Charles E. Burton made some of the earliest drawings of straight-line features on Mars, although his drawings did not match Schiaparelli’s. By the early 20th century, improved astronomical observations revealed the “canals” to be an optical illusion, and modern high resolution mapping of the Martian surface by spacecraft shows no such features.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal
I am so fascinated by the possibilities of life on Mars, forget the life in a mother’s womb headed for abortion, THIS is REAL potential here baby!
I held back posting more graphic pics of the thing breaking through. Glad I did.
As long as the don’t build a desalinization plant....
Budget season for the federal government.
The mess hall/John Hurt chest scene.
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Nice pictures. Didn’t Richard Hoagland make a claim for water seepage on the surface of Mars over 10 years ago? Maybe his mundane “water on the surface of Mars” claim got ignored due to his more spectacular claims that made Art Bell love him?
There have been claims of seeing canals on mars for a long time.
Maybe they were correct, before things dried up for a while.
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