New Mars rock hints at short-lived lakes

[conjur]

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995004

The Mars rover Opportunity has discovered hints of a type of rock never before seen on the planet. Its presence would mean that any watery periods in Mars' past were cold and short-lived.

Opportunity has been perched on the rim of a 130-metre wide crater dubbed Endurance since early May. It has been using its remote sensing instruments to study the rocks exposed in the steep sides of the crater.

A dark layer of rock, one to two metres deep, particularly intrigued mission scientists because it looked so different to the lighter-coloured rocks that Opportunity had studied at its landing site, the smaller Eagle crater. The composition of the latter rocks indicated that water had once washed over them.

According to Philip Christensen, from Arizona State University in Tempe, the dark layer in Endurance is most likely to be a sandstone made of grains of basalt. This suggestion is based on data from a remote sensing instrument on Opportunity called Mini-TES, which uses infrared radiation to identify minerals.

It returned a signature matching basalt, a kind of volcanic rock. The team speculate that the layered outcrop is a sandstone, comprised of fine particles deposited either by wind or water.



Weather away

"Finding basalt sandstone is not that surprising - there's basalt everywhere " says Christensen, who leads the Mini-TES science team. "The interesting thing is that it argues this may have been a lake, but it must have been cold and it can't have been there for a long time."

This is because basalt is unstable in the presence of water at surface conditions. It could survive immersion in water that was near to freezing for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. But over geological time periods, it would eventually weather away.

To confirm the identity of the rock really, the team needs a closer look. Steven Squyres, principle investigator for the science instruments, said one possibility was a "toe-dip manoeuvre" over the lip of the crater.

However, the slope near the dark rocks is near the limit of what the NASA rover can safely manage. Driving down would put the rocks within reach of the microscopes and drills on the rover's arm, but it would be a risky trip.


Treasure hunt

A safer option is to search for a chunk of the mystery rock that has been ejected from the impact crater onto its rim.

Squyres said Opportunity had already come across one piece of debris in the dust at the crater's edge. This 10 by 30 centimetre piece looks similar to the lighter stone exposed within Endurance, and has been nick-named the "Lion Stone".

Meanwhile, Spirit, Opportunity's twin, is continuing its three kilometre journey to the Columbia hills. The rover drives for at least three hours of each martian day and spends the rest of its time making scientific measurements. Spirit, which recently set a record by driving almost 125 metres in one martian day, should reach the hills in about a month.

The new results were presented at the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Montreal, Canada on Monday.

 

[alzan]

Interesting. Just from what we've discovered with the rovers so far, we'd be fools not to undertake a manned mission to Mars and take a closer look.

alzan

 

[Rockhound]

Why? How does anything that happened on Mars millions of years ago have any bearing on anyone's life other than the few scientists who are investigating this whole matter and who wouldn't otherwise be able to know a dam thing without spending taxpayers dollars on these missions? Don't forget, NASA's own estimates back around 1991 for a manned mission to Mars was 400-500 BILLION dollars! I wonder what the price would be today - probably close to 1 TRILLION dollars. We're talking half the US budget for a mission that has about a 1 in 3 chance of success. Not a really good gamble for this amount of money to find something out that will not touch the average person's life a dam bit.

 

[conjur]

Originally posted by: Rockhound
Why? How does anything that happened on Mars millions of years ago have any bearing on anyone's life other than the few scientists who are investigating this whole matter and who wouldn't otherwise be able to know a dam thing without spending taxpayers dollars on these missions? Don't forget, NASA's own estimates back around 1991 for a manned mission to Mars was 400-500 BILLION dollars! I wonder what the price would be today - probably close to 1 TRILLION dollars. We're talking half the US budget for a mission that has about a 1 in 3 chance of success. Not a really good gamble for this amount of money to find something out that will not touch the average person's life a dam bit.

<sigh>

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/119/1

In 1989 President George H.W. Bush had indeed proposed a Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) that included both a Moon base and a human mission to Mars. NASA initially estimated the total cost for both of these efforts at approximately $400 billion over 30 years. The cost of the Mars mission alone was $172.9 billion, plus $13.85 billion for precursor probes, or a total of $186.75 billion. The lunar base was estimated to cost $209.46 billion. By late 1989, using slightly different baseline assumptions, NASA had produced another cost estimate of $541 billion for 34 years of lunar and Mars operations, also roughly split in half. After this, the media often reported that the costs of Bush?s plan were either $400-$500 billion, or $400-$550 billion. Often the press erroneously reported that these costs were for a single mission to Mars, rather than for thirty years or more of operating bases on both the Moon and Mars. (See ?Aiming for Mars, grounded on Earth: part one? February 16, 2004)

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: Rockhound
Why? How does anything that happened on Mars millions of years ago have any bearing on anyone's life other than the few scientists who are investigating this whole matter and who wouldn't otherwise be able to know a dam thing without spending taxpayers dollars on these missions? Don't forget, NASA's own estimates back around 1991 for a manned mission to Mars was 400-500 BILLION dollars! I wonder what the price would be today - probably close to 1 TRILLION dollars. We're talking half the US budget for a mission that has about a 1 in 3 chance of success. Not a really good gamble for this amount of money to find something out that will not touch the average person's life a dam bit.

You're talking about the Mars 90 Day report. That plan was the biggest pile of sh!t anyone could have came up with. It was basically made to satisfy everyone in NASA. We're talking a moon base and a gigantic spaceship, neither of which are needed. Good thing Robert Zubrin came along and changed that with his Mars Direct mission. This showed NASA that a Mars mission could be done for under $50 billion. The plan NASA has on the books now is more of a Mars Semi-Direct mission that would cost probably $75-100 billion. That's a far cry from the trillion dollars that a lot of the papers print out just to make people pissed off about a Mars mission. Plus following missions are only a fraction of the cost of the original one.

You honestly don't think that possibly finding ancient life on Mars wouldn't change anything in our world? Hell even if nothing is found seeing how it formed would be extremely interesting. $75 billion is a bargain for the amount of science and pride we can get out of the mission.

 

[dbk]

This is money well spent, and we beat the Russians! [/sarcasm]

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: bykim5
This is money well spent, and we beat the Russians! [/sarcasm]

Spending $114 billion on the war in Iraq is money well spent, and we beat the Europeans! [/sarcasm]