[extropy-chat] Scientists Report Evidence of Saltwater Pools on Mars

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 gpmap at runbox.com
Wed Mar 24 05:52:33 UTC 2004


>From the New York Times: Mars was once a much warmer, wetter place, with
pools of saltwater that sometimes flowed across the surface, scientists
reported Tuesday. Analyzing findings from sedimentary rocks explored by the
rover Opportunity, the scientists said the rocks now appeared to have formed
under a shallow bed of softly flowing water near a shoreline - not, as
formerly seemed possible, through seepage from underground. It was the first
concrete evidence that water might have flowed on the Martian surface, and
it provided new hints that life may have existed there. "We think
Opportunity is now parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on
Mars," Dr. Steven W. Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator
for the science payload on the Opportunity and its twin Mars exploration
rover, Spirit, said at a news conference here at NASA headquarters. "If we
are correct in our interpretation, this was a habitable environment," Dr.
Squyres went on.
>From Space.com: The discovery re-ignited enthusiasm over Mars as a potential
well for biology, at least in the past. (Researchers are unsure whether any
life that ever developed on Mars -- if it did -- could have endured into the
present era, with Mars being cold and dry.). Most scientists agree that
finding signs of past or present life will likely require sending human
geologists or, in the near term, sending a robot to bring back samples for
study in laboratories on Earth. Meridiani Planum is, for now, the best
destination for such a mission, which NASA has slated for launch sometime in
the next decade.

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