"Curiosity Rover Finds Evidence That Mars Could ..." Topic

… Have Hosted Life.

"NASA's Curiosity rover has hit pay dirt: strong evidence that ancient Mars could have been a great place for organisms to thrive. The rover's engineers and scientists are extremely excited about these results, which are basically the findings that it was designed and built to discover.

It's been a bit more than seven months since Curiosity touched down at Gale crater, an area that was identified as a potentially habitable environment based on data from satellites orbiting the planet. Almost immediately, the rover uncovered evidence that the place was an ancient riverbed, with a long and complex history of flowing water. In recent weeks, Curiosity drilled into a rock nicknamed John Klein and recovered a sample of powder representing the environment at Gale crater billions of years ago.

Using two very precise laboratory tools called Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin), Curiosity blasted the sample with lasers and X-rays to determine its composition. It showed that between 20 to 30 percent of the rock is made from minerals known as smectite clays that formed in the presence of water that was neutral and not too salty.

"The key thing here is this is an environment that a microbe could have lived in and even prospered in," said geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, the project scientist for the mission, during a NASA press conference on Mar. 12…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Oh no here we go again. EVERYONE knows that Mars is on a back lot at the Huston Space Flight Center where they filmed the moon landing!

VR
James Mattes

I like the fact that they gave a rock a name.

I STILL have my 'Pet Rock'…..and I named him 'Gravel'….because I dropped him (I'd taken him out of the box to play)….and he shattered!

And so now he/they sit in their box, next to my piece of concrete from the Berlin Wall and a package of ash from Mt St Hellens…(note: none of the ash was taken from the park, which is a memorial, it's from the stuff that filled up the streets and towns NEARBY!!!!!)

Then there's my mini-meteor collection, with tektites and some other bits of the different types of meteorites….

Next time, 'Unkle Thulu' promised me a piece of seaweed-encrusted rock from Atlantis!!!!! Woo-hoo!

Slishfully,
Sgt DWW-btod

Wow, DWW, I have all of those, too: pet rock, Berlin Wall chunk, and Mount St. Helens ash. Brilliant minds . . .

My ash is from a friend who drove there a month or two after the eruption. Interesting trivia: It rained while he was there, and I guess there was still enough dust and sulphur dioxide in the air to haze and pit the gloss finish of his car.

When are they going to admit that we are as Bradbury said (I think), the Little Green Men!

"Soylent green is people!!"….oh, sorry…..wrong film…

The Martian Seas disappeared shortly after the Martians excavated their extensive system of canals in order to irrigate their crops. After the seas dried up Aral-fashion, the Martians launched their invasion of Earth which was repulsed with catastrophic losses as recorded by H.G. Wells in 1898.

Did they find Carl Sagan yet?