Mission to Mars - Life on Mars

Auditor #9 wrote:

Also in London Indo today

Martian soil 'good enough for asparagus'

Hmm, I'd love to see packets of that in my local Superquinn. Could you imagine the food miles on a product like that!

http://www.breakingnews.ie/World/mhqlcwaucwkf/

Water found on Mars!

It doesn't sound as though you could make a cup of tea with it.

Does this mean that we could plant asparagus? Or is it much too cold.

I highly recommend this short "Planets for Dummies" link which has some beautiful photographs and clearly describes how the different types of planets are formed, and of what elements.

http://www.ztn.net/mars/solarsystem/

Stunning photos on that website cactus - from the Voyager mission to the gas giants. The landscape of Mars above looks very bright doesn't it so you'd wonder if it ever gets warm enough to grow stuff... the bbc news page a month ago reported that 'Martian soil could support life' - i.e. the asparagus reference.

Quote :

Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - or, at least, asparagus - Nasa scientists believe.

Preliminary analysis by the $420m (£210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet's soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected.

Scientists working on the spacecraft project said they were "flabbergasted" by the discovery.

The find has raised hopes conditions on Mars may be favourable for life.

"We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life, whether past, present or future," said Tufts University's Professor Sam Kounaves.

Have you any idea what the reference to soil alkalinity means? I guess plants don't much like acidic soils but where do these conditions derive from? Acids and alkalines are related to oxygen quantities if I remember right. Anyway, we won't have to bring a load of soil there when we go colonising in two decades time.

Here are the nighttime temperatures



http://tes.asu.edu/webdata/may_temps.html

Bit frosty for much to survive there at night and peculiarly it's warmer at the north pole because of the season that it is on Mars, which is tilted towards the Sun just like the earth and experiences similar physical seasons. The blue areas are colder because the fine dust loses its heat quickly.

The daytime temperatures seem to vary wildly from place to place too - have a look - very cold but not unusual here on parts of this planet during the day ...



And of course there's already a forum out there discussing the possibility of life on mars
http://www.newmars.com/forums/index.php

With the conditions above it's not out of the question that a Mission to Mars could see eventual colonisation of the planet using a lot of the resources there.

The weather on Mars doesn't seem that different to an Irish summer. We should adapt easily.

Forget all that science stuff, this guy and his friends have "conclusively demonstrated" that there is intelligent life on Mars. He uses the ESA Mars Express mission photos to show evidence of artificial constructions on the surface of Mars in the Hale Crater.

Note: He scrolls forward to page 21 but it's really on page 27 - they've moved the damning photo



I'm telling you Rockefeller is up there with his people, the bastid

They should build a huge wall on the moon so we can all see what the Great Wall of China looks like from space.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

They should build a huge wall on the moon so we can all see what the Great Wall of China looks like from space.

lol

If you watch that you'll see that he shows con clusively that there are not only walls up there on Mars but fields, buildings, churches, roads, greenhouses etc. etc. etc.

Unfortunately you are at work and aren't allowed to watch that amazing youtube video - it'll blow you away man. The Rockefellas are there I'm telling ya - youngdan was right.

I would not discount the possibility of there being life on Mars at some stage in the past. Is there going to be life on this planet one years from now is the question not to mention 1 billion years.

I'm dreaming of a Red Christmas



Uploaded today
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=2sCEQB5hJf4

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080929-mars-snow.html

Quote :

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has dug up new clues to the red planet's wet past and has witnessed what could be a current water cycle in the form of falling snow, scientists announced today.

From its landing site near Mars's north pole, the lander has collected and analyzed soil samples that show minerals on Mars that are associated with liquid water on Earth.

National Geographic have some pages of Mars photography that look incredible unless you are an Australian or from Arizona (?) Although, put on some rose-tinted glasses and you could almost see an outcrop just beyond the Ailwee cave in North Clare ...






Last week the Telegraph reported that there was strong evidence of glaciers on Mars which were three times the size of Los Angeles

Quote :

The glaciers, buried under rocky debris, are said to be more than three times the size of Los Angeles, up to half a mile thick and skirt the edges of mountains and cliffs.

Scientists believe they may be remnants of an ice sheet that once covered the planet's mid-latitudes.

Samples drilled out of the ice could provide a record of Martian life, as have similar glaciers in Antarctica.

Large deposits of frozen water have already been found around the Martian poles. Scientists now know that enormous reserves of water exist in other regions of the planet.

The hidden glaciers, which extend for tens of miles from areas of high ground, were uncovered by ground-penetrating radar carried on the American space agency Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Telegraph

Quote :

Methane on Mars could suggest presence of life

METHANE GAS in the Mars atmosphere could indicate the presence of life on the planet, Nasa scientists have said.

Methane is usually a byproduct of microbial organisms on Earth and, at a press conference last night, Nasa said the gas had either biological or geological origins.

Nearly 19,000 tonnes of methane was detected using Earth-based telescopes based in Hawaii, which scanned 90 per cent of the Martian surface for seven years.

The gas was present in the northern hemisphere during the Martian summer and later disappeared, suggesting that it was recently created.

Nasa scientists believe the process could be biological or alternatively created by serpentinisation, which occurs when rocks rich in certain minerals react with water, releasing methane.
..
She said the methane could be the “exhaled breath of a microbial ecosystem” and was a “very important new piece of information”....

Read more >>>>> Irish Times

I wonder would a greenhouse effect happen if you fired a few asteroids into those glaciers?
Even if they didn't contain methane surely we'd see an increase in temperature?


Although morally speaking would this terraforming not be vandalism to the 'pristine' Martian landscape?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming

Pax wrote:

I wonder would a greenhouse effect happen if you fired a few asteroids into those glaciers?
Even if they didn't contain methane surely we'd see an increase in temperature?


Although morally speaking would this terraforming not be vandalism to the 'pristine' Martian landscape?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming

I love that set of fictional stories of Mars - Red, Blue, Green Mars. They fired comets and asteroids which had ice - I don't remember methane but would any gas do ? - at the atmosphere of the planet and that contributed to a Greenhouse effect.

They also dug a massive hole down into the centre of the planet where some radical engineer-politician was nearly killed by someone throwing a bulldozer down into it. Feckin mighty story - check it out by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Pax wrote:

I wonder would a greenhouse effect happen if you fired a few asteroids into those glaciers?
Even if they didn't contain methane surely we'd see an increase in temperature?


Although morally speaking would this terraforming not be vandalism to the 'pristine' Martian landscape?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming

I love that set of fictional stories of Mars - Red, Blue, Green Mars. They fired comets and asteroids which had ice - I don't remember methane but would any gas do ? - at the atmosphere of the planet and that contributed to a Greenhouse effect.

They also dug a massive hole down into the centre of the planet where some radical engineer-politician was nearly killed by someone throwing a bulldozer down into it. Feckin mighty story - check it out by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I'll really have to bump that trilogy up my SF to-read list. I tend to fly through science fiction or fantasy so it should be a cool read.

If we fail with asteroids, then Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons (methane and ethane) than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
We could create a container ship that would scoop it up and use some of it to launch to Mars...

Or, instead of messing up our planet with Flourinated Greenhouse Gases* we could terraform Mars with it.

*
http://www.environ.ie/en/Environment/Atmosphere/ClimateChange/FlourinatedGreenhouseGases/

Pax wrote:

Or, instead of messing up our planet with Flourinated Greenhouse Gases* we could terraform Mars with it.

*
http://www.environ.ie/en/Environment/Atmosphere/ClimateChange/FlourinatedGreenhouseGases/

Electronics are now contributing to Greenhouse effects on this planet !!!? Luckily they haven't invented a detector yet to register the atmospherically hazardous and very dangerous gas that is emitted when people think in certain way.

Thanks bit of Jesus.

There's tons of stuff spewing out up there now on Mars and egg-heads reckon we should go up and have a closer look. The Telegraph has an article saying that volcanic activity is supposed to be at and end there yet something is spewing out the methane they're seeing.

NASA aren't sending anything else up there until 2011 - probably broke.

Quote :

Life On Mars: New Mission Needed say Scientists

Their call follows the discovery of "substantial plumes" of methane on the planet, a gas which is made by living organisms.

But methane is also created by other, purely geological processes, such as the oxidation of iron.

Nasa announced on Thursday that the methane plumes had been found by powerful telescopes.

However, they do not know what caused the gas emissions.

Scientists believe such large quantities of the gas could only be caused by biological means or the presence of volcanoes. It was thought that there were no active volcanoes on the planet.

About 90 per cent of methane on Earth is caused by living organisms, which make it as a by-product of breaking down food.

Dr Michael Mumma of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre said: "Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas."

He cautioned: "Right now, we don't have enough information to tell if biology or geology - or both - is producing the methane on Mars.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/27/mars-snow-space-technology-nasa

It's snowing on Mars ...

Quote :

...
or at least in the sky above it. This is just one extraordinary piece
of information being sent back to us by the landers, probes and rovers
scanning the planet. Home to the largest mountain in the solar system
and a canyon as long as the US is wide, it is a world as fantastic as
any imagined by JG Ballard


Cape St Vincent, one of the cliffs of the Victoria Crater. Photograph: Ho New/Reuters

High in the sky above Mars, it is snowing right now. Very gently snowing. The snow does not settle on the rubble-strewn land below - not these days, anyway - but instead vaporises into the thin atmosphere long before it reaches the ground.The first flakes of snow, on a planet that until fairly recently was believed to be waterless, were spotted just a few months ago. A Nasa lander near the planet's north pole was scanning the sky with a laser when it noticed the telltale signs of snowfall. The probe, called Phoenix, announced the news in a radio signal that was picked up by an
overhead orbiter and beamed back to Earth. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/15/mars-life-methane-nasa

Quote :

Giant plumes of methane on Mars may be the belches of buried microbes

Nasa is keeping an open mind, but says there is an urgent need to analyse the methane clouds for other chemicals that would either confirm or rule out life as the cause


Nili Fossae, one of the regions on Mars emitting methane. The area was already a proposed landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory because of the presence of mineral-rich clays (red). Photograph: AP/Nasa


The search for extraterrestrial life has received a tantalising boost with the announcement that Nasa scientists have detected wafts of methane on Mars that could be the emissions of microbes living deep beneath the surface.A seven-year survey of the red planet using three powerful ground-based telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and Chile spotted giant plumes of the noxious gas being released from the ground in the northern hemisphere during the Martian summer.....

http://machinenation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=690