Scientists find evidence of salt water flowing on Mars

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/08/scientists-find-evidence-of-salt-water-flowing-on-mars/

by petercooper • 15 years ago

132 42 15 years ago

blog.chron.com

There is likely to be a lot more info shortly as there's currently a live press conference going on (encouragingly, the BBC has interrupted its normal news coverage to cover the entire thing).

th0ma5• 15 years ago

official nasa link post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847114

bfe4• 15 years ago

Three cheers for the science journalism in this link. The reporter clearly conveys the facts of the announced findings, includes images of candidate flowing water on Mars with captions as they appear in the original paper in the journal Science, and does a Q&A with a third party scientist who gives knowledgable further analysis. Anyway, this is really exciting.

pxlpshr• 15 years ago

chron.com is Houston's major newspaper. We're cheering for more NASA funding. :)

I love this comment:

The Bible didn’t say anything about god creating life on Mars.

hugh32• 15 years ago

Whose internet law is it that says that any sufficiently advanced idiot is indistinguishable from a troll? Or is it that any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from an idiot?

bfe4• 15 years ago

Of course, the Martian Bible also doesn't say anything about god creating life on Earth.

pyre2• 15 years ago

It's a good thing that "flowing salt water" isn't alive then. His/her head might asplode.

TheRevoltingX• 15 years ago

The bible says there's life in other places that aren't earth.

jordank• 15 years ago

Another choice comment:

On each planet is something ice on one, sand, lava, on another, etc., This is where we get our weather from in some ways. Our Earth is in the solar system of these other planets revolving around them.

I'm just not sure that's how it works...

mukyu• 15 years ago

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/740 the paper

doctoboggan• 15 years ago

I think it is the general population's consensus that there is no life on mars. With the minuscule amount of area we have explored, I think there is ample opportunity to still discover life. Considering most landing sites have been selected for their ease of touchdown and not possibility of life, I'd day we still have a fair chance of finding it. This is especially true in light of these new findings.

bfe4• 15 years ago

Great point that most people don't get. As Robert Zubrin said, you could drop 100 Spirit/Opportunity level rovers into the Rocky Mountains and probably never find prehistoric fossils, while a team of four human scientists would easily find a lot. The probes are amazing and important, but no substitute for sending humans.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

I think there's also an element of the scientific bias for assuming the mundane leaking into the public. Which is fine, but scientists have learned to temper that by maintaining a strong sense of curiosity and determination.

Personally, my gut instinct is that the chances of life having existed on Mars at some point are quite high, above 90%. But the evidence for such may be very hard to come by. What if all life on Mars had never advanced beyond a unicellular level? What if most/all life died out one or two billion years ago? How challenging will it be to find evidence of that life? Especially when we only have a few robotic explorers to work with?

athom• 15 years ago

Microbial mats look like one of the most promising candidates, and NASA has a team seriously exploring this possibility: http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/students/this_month/page6.cfm

These mats tend to build up in layers, and often form structures known as stromatolites. You can find some examples both at the NASA team's site (http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/students/this_month/page2.cfm) and here: http://www.evolutionaryresearch.org/stromatolites.htm

There used to be a page up, claiming to show the remains of actual stromatolites on Mars, but it seems to be completely gone now (Spirit Finds Stromatolites, http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsstro.htm). The Wayback Machine has it at http://web.archive.org/web/20081120022703/http://www.xenotec... but I'd probably rank its credibility with the Face On Mars.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, all actual stromatolites in these links are definitely of terrestrial origin! (At least, I think they are)

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

Personally I couldn't care less about finding microbial life. I want to find animal-sized life or heavy vegetation. That Mars might house single-celled life does nothing for my excitement.

owenmarshall• 15 years ago

Seriously? Remember, we all started as microbes.

Finding any life outside our planet would be a huge discovery; even if it's billions of years away from growing legs, we could learn so much about life in its early stages, which could answer some big questions about our own evolution.

BasDirks3• 15 years ago

Perhaps World of Warcraft is appropriate for your level of interests.

kevindication• 15 years ago

FTA: "But the evidence is, so far, weak."

lotharbot• 15 years ago

It's known that Mars has both ice and water vapor, and that further, summertime temperatures are warm enough to sustain liquid water.

It's the atmosphere that makes this a bit surprising. Martian atmospheric pressure is less than 1% that of earth in the deepest valleys, and about .006 atm on average. If you look at a phase diagram for water [0], you can see that at .006 atm and below, water goes directly from solid to gas ("sublimation"). Even slightly above that pressure, there's only a tiny temperature range in which liquid water will exist.

I would guess that's why they've theorized very salty water. Its lower freezing point is going to allow for liquid water in a bigger temperature range at typical Martian atmospheric pressures.

[0] http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~gladish/teaching/eao/week2.html - top of the page

bfe4• 15 years ago

IIRC, Mars's global atmospheric pressure is about 25% higher in the southern summer than in the southern winter, due to differential sublimation and condensation of carbon dioxide, from the southern ice cap as well as from the soil at lower latitudes, and southern hemisphere summer temperatures can range all the way above zero celsius -- so there's quite a range of weather conditions to which any briny water would be subjected, especially in the southern hemisphere.

Edit to add, the Martian southern hemisphere seasons are more extreme because the effects of its significant eccentricity and its axial tilt are additive there, while they counteract each other to moderate the seasons in the north.

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

Why are we wasting time looking for microorganisms on Mars when Europa might have fish?

BasDirks3• 15 years ago

Because Mars is rather close to Earth. It's going to be very exciting to see what Europa offers us.

Sukotto2• 15 years ago

  ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

orky56• 15 years ago

It's closer and we have so much evidence already on other phases of water (vapor and ice). This excites people since it will be the closest source of water outside of Earth and could be the motivation to send Man over there.

Europa is so much further and just to look for the fish would require equipment to penetrate the surface for the off chance there is water underneath.

serichsen• 15 years ago

It may be an indication for salt water, but there are other explanations. For example, also sand can have something similar to fluid dynamics. You need to take the low gravity and thin atmosphere into account and do real calculations or simulations to gain further insights.

Scientists find evidence of salt water flowing on Mars

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