NASA NASA to Announce Mars Mystery Liquid water today

[mfb]

That's the title of the NASA press release (I added the date).

**Nature Geoscience has Embargoed Details until 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT Sept. 28)**

NASA will detail a major science finding from the agency's ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 8:30 a.m. PDT (11:30 a.m. EDT) on Monday, Sept. 28. The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

8 a.m. PDT = 3 p.m. UCT = 5 p.m. CEST (Central European Summer Time)

The panel includes an expert for the HiRISE experiment, a high-resolution telescope in Mars orbit. Whatever they have, apparently images of some area are highly relevant.

One of the panel members is Lujendra Ojha, a PhD candidate. If they include him, it is very likely the discovery is directly connected to his work. According to http://www.lujendraojha.net/band-horizon/:

One of my interest is understanding the formation mechanism of Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL). RSL are active features on Mars that might require flowing water. On Mars, they form and grow during warm seasons and disappear during cold seasons. They recur over multiple years in generally the same location. I use remote sensing instruments on board various Mars orbiting space crafts to understand their geological/hydrological nature. Additionally, I use data from CRISM onboard MRO to understand its formation mechanism.

Those structures are visible to HiRISE. Variations from year to year are not new. Did they see something in action?

Mary Beth Wilhelm is an organic biogeochemist (research interests).

How to combine organic biogeochemistry with Recurring Slope Lineae?Update: Very strong indications of liquid water on Mars - today. Spectroscopy of the RSL shows chemical compounds called perchlorates, and it is expected that they cannot form without liquid water.
This liquid water is probably very salty, which lowers its freezing point. It is unclear if life can survive the high expected salt contents.

 

[Borg]

How to combine organic biogeochemistry with Recurring Slope Lineae?

Hmmm. Suspicion of some non-geologic processes?

Monday's announcement should be interesting.

 

[DennisN]

Those structures are visible to HiRISE. Variations from year to year are not new. Did they see something in action?

Exciting! I'll try to tune in on the broadcast on Monday.

 

[RooksAndBooks]

Expect conspiracy theorists to say that the Mars landing was fake as early as a year after it will happen.

 

[DennisN]

I am adding a link to the upcoming live stream here, in case there are others who'd like to watch it on Sep 28, 8:30 a.m. PT :
Quote: "The event will also be carried live on: http://www.ustream.tv/NASAJPL"

Expect conspiracy theorists to say that the Mars landing was fake as early as a year after it will happen.

Well, now you made it impossible for me to resist posting a link to this sketch.

 

[rootone]

Looking forward to whatever this is about.
After all, the presence of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past is something which now seems indisputable.
Have they found something indicating possible life in the past?

As for conspiracy nuts, well somebody I was chatting with on another site a while ago thinks that the curiosity lander (and the previous ones) are 'government propaganda', and even the government itself is propaganda.
(They were not clear about which government they were referring to, apparently the government is the same guys everywhere on Earth.)
Everything is really being made up by a very small group of 'elites', whatever that is, who control every aspect of every kind of media which is just 'slush' planned to keep to the wider population dumbed down.

Mmm Hmm.

 

[DaveC426913]

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-announce-mars-mystery-solved

Any speculations? I'm not seeing a lot of chatter about it, but it seems they've assembled a lot of top scientists for the announcement.

I'm positing something between
"We've discovered flowing water on Mars", and
"There's no way Mark Watney could survive on potatoes alone."

 

[Vanadium 50]

See https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nasa-to-announce-mars-mystery-solved-sept-28.834469/

 

[mfb]

I merged the threads.

 

[DaveC426913]

See https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nasa-to-announce-mars-mystery-solved-sept-28.834469/

 

[DaveC426913]

"The Saline Slopes of Mars".

 

[DaveC426913]

Bah! Video feed is utterly kerplotz.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Signs of Liquid Water Found on Surface of Mars, Study Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/science/space/mars-life-liquid-water.html?_r=0

 

[rootone]

Hmm, well interesting news OK, but is really a confirmation of what was first suspected a couple of years ago.
Confirmation is undoubtedly a good thing though.

 

[DaveC426913]

Not merely confirmation. Some very interesting implications:
1] We can finally begin to construct a possible mechanism for Martian life.
2] We finally know where to look for Martian Life.
3] The briny areas are on the sides of slopes - terrain that is very challenging for rovers to reach, but trivial for a spacesuited human.
4] We can send people to Mars and they will have resources to live.

 

[mfb]

Even though R.S.L.s appear to be some of the most intriguing features on Mars, no one is likely to get a close-up look any time soon.

R.S.L.s are treated as special regions that NASA’s current robotic explorers are barred from because the rovers were not thoroughly sterilized, and NASA worries that they might be carrying microbial hitchhikers from Earth that could contaminate Mars.

The conditions there are considered to be too good for life to explore them with the current or upcoming rovers. Oh, the irony!
Humans would make the problem even worse, as we cannot sterilize humans or even humans in a spacesuit.

 

[russ_watters]

The conditions there are considered to be too good for life to explore them with the current or upcoming rovers. Oh, the irony!
Humans would make the problem even worse, as we cannot sterilize humans or even humans in a spacesuit.

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

 

[rootone]

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

I have often heard NASA top people referring to the high importance of sterilising exploration craft to the greatest possible extent, so there is at least an implicit sort of 'prime directive' of non-interferance.
I believe the Cassini mission currently exploring the Saturn system will be intentionally crashed on to the planet when it's fuel is exhausted so that there is no risk of contaminating one of the moons.

The motivation for this however is very different to that of the star trek federation of planets directive, which was based in a moral-philosophical reasoning.
In the case of NASA and other missions the reason is more likely to do with not polluting so that future missions won't be producing false positive results.

 

[Monsterboy]

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

http://www.nature.com/news/microbial-stowaways-to-mars-identified-1.15249
I think NASA is worried about spreading Earth bacteria/microbes into the Martian liquid water reservoirs, if that happens and then if we find any recognizable microbes on Mars ,we can't be sure whether they are martians or earthlings.

Although spacecraft go through multiple cleaning steps to ensure that they bear no biological contaminants, previous reports suggest that Curiosity project developers did not follow these planetary protection protocols to the letter.

 

[Michael Lazich]

"4] We can send people to Mars and they will have resources to live."

Not just live; with the presence of a wide variety of perchlorates, it raises the possibility of making solid rocket fuel for a return trip, or further deeper exploration without bringing fuel from home (Earth that is).

Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nasa-to-announce-mars-mystery-solved-sept-28.834469/

 

[DaveC426913]

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

Whether or not there is some larger philosophical issue, they did specifically say they want to be sure that - upon detecting life - it doesn't turn out to be merely Earth contamination from the probe itself.

 

[D H]

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

Yes. It's NASA Policy Directive 8020 and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

There are factions, both within NASA and outside of NASA, who say that Mars is off-limits to humans if we find life on Mars. Some of the proponents of this POV are rather influential. This finding will give those factions an even larger voice. That voice will become very large if incontrovertible evidence of life on Mars is found, even if its only extremely primitive life.

 

[DaveC426913]

... with the presence of a wide variety of perchlorates, it raises the possibility of making solid rocket fuel

Yep. They mentioned that.

 

[DiracPool]

Whether or not there is some larger philosophical issue, they did specifically say they want to be sure that - upon detecting life - it doesn't turn out to be merely Earth contamination from the probe itself.

It seems to be that it would not be difficult to distinguish between an indigenous life form on Mars and recent Earth contamination from rovers and/or astronauts. A genuine indigenous Mars-based life form not due to recent human-created contamination would likely take one of two forms: 1) A truly unique architecture that might not be based on our DNA-based structure, in which case it will be obvious that it is not due to contamination, or 2) a community of extremophile organisms that were seeded on Mars from some "panspermia" event such as an asteroid hitting the Eath eons ago. In the latter case, which I think I much more likely, we would likely see a progress of genetic and phenotypic evolution that would be clearly distinguishable from the comparative phylogeny of microbes on Earth. To put it simply, if we find microbes on Mars and they look exactly like those microbes I find under under my fingernails, then they are probably the result of recent human contamination .

 

[DaveC426913]

It seems to be that it would not be difficult to distinguish between an indigenous life form on Mars and recent Earth contamination from rovers and/or astronauts. A genuine indigenous Mars-based life form not due to recent human-created contamination would likely take one of two forms: 1) A truly unique architecture that might not be based on our DNA-based structure, in which case it will be obvious that it is not due to contamination, or 2) a community of extremophile organisms that were seeded on Mars from some "panspermia" event such as an asteroid hitting the Eath eons ago. In the latter case, which I think I much more likely, we would likely see a progress of genetic and phenotypic evolution that would be clearly distinguishable from the comparative phylogeny of microbes on Earth. To put it simply, if we find microbes on Mars and they look exactly like those microbes I find under under my fingernails, then they are probably the result of recent human contamination .

But rovers aren't able to do the tests needed to discriminate. You'd need another three hundred million dollar mission and another ten years to make a rover with that sophisticated a lab.

 

[rootone]

Not the present curiosity rover, but the next one and also the ESA one could be better equipped to do this kind of investigation.
As far as I know both projects are definitely work in progress with an actual budget.

 

[Monsterboy]

But rovers aren't able to do the tests needed to discriminate. You'd need another three hundred million dollar mission and another ten years to make a rover with that sophisticated a lab.

Plus, unwanted interactions between Earth microbes and Martian microbes might lead to the extinction of Martian microbes ?

 

[DaveC426913]

Not the present curiosity rover, but the next one and also the ESA one could be better equipped to do this kind of investigation.

Imagine an archaeologist saying to his students "Don't worry about stomping all through this dig site of the greatest Neanderthal city ever discovered. We'll be able to reverse engineer the imprints of Neanderthal moccasins from under your sneaker prints. And those KFC chicken bones you're tossing around won't take too long to separate from these priceless bones in the dig with these powerful microscopes and a few months of time. After all, we have unlimited time and budget and resources - because we planned all this ahead of time and we left all the rest of our equipment 50 million miles away. Why, I imagine, after a year of sorting out your pollution, we'll be ready to do some new science."

 

[DiracPool]

But rovers aren't able to do the tests needed to discriminate. You'd need another three hundred million dollar mission and another ten years to make a rover with that sophisticated a lab.

I'm not holding out for any rover to do this job, no matter how sophisticated. I think any serious investigation of Martian life is going to require human "boots on the ground." Again, I try to follow the manned mission to Mars community as closely as I can, and the writing on the wall is that we are probably looking at 2032-33 for the first human Mars landing. Something about the planetary orbits during that time is beneficial. So that's my guess. Any time before that is too soon. Despite people like Robert Zubrin equating a Mars landing to the moon mission, it is waaay more complicated than that. Any time after 2033 is going to lose a momentum we seem to have right now. I think the news conference today just ups the ante on that date, which is a good thing .

As far as the rovers, they were talking up a good game on the Mars 2020 deal with the sample return but I don't have high hopes for that solving the "life" mystery. It would just be too small and isolated a sample to really mean anything. That is, unless it does yield some microbial life, in which case we could be sure that life is rampant about the planet. But I doubt that's what it'll find.

 

[DaveC426913]

I'm not holding out for any rover to do this job, no matter how sophisticated.

The overriding point here is that we can count on a probe to do the job.
The job is: detect life on Mars.
If we've done a proper job of avoiding contamination, we can detect life and do some basic analysis.
It is going to be muuuch harder to detect life buuuuut sort out Earth life from Martian life.

 

[gfd43tg]

Wouldn't microbes on the spacecraft either die from lack of oxygen if they are aerobic, or just from the extreme cold temperature in space?

Also, what if Earth life is actually Martian in origin? Then I don't know if we would detect the difference from microbes on the craft vs Martian bacteria because they would both be based on DNA.

 

[rootone]

Some bacteria are extremely hardy to adverse conditions and go into a sort of suspended animation state where internal chemistry of any kind is minimal until conditions improve.
They can last a very long time in that state.

 

[DaveC426913]

Wouldn't microbes on the spacecraft either die from lack of oxygen if they are aerobic, or just from the extreme cold temperature in space?

The problem they've been facing all along is that microbes can be extremely resilient, surviving even in space.

Also, what if Earth life is actually Martian in origin? Then I don't know if we would detect the difference from microbes on the craft vs Martian bacteria because they would both be based on DNA.

Exactly.

 

[rootone]

Also, what if Earth life is actually Martian in origin?

If some ancient martian bacteria had been blasted into space, probably as a result of an impacting meteor, and eventually arrived on Earth...
(A very big IF of which there is no hard evidence, but it's physically possible).
It is likely that we would eventually find these had also arrived on other bodies even if they didn't survive and procreate in the long term.
The Martian moons and asteroids close to Mars would be most likely, considerably more likely than the one or two that could have made it to the much more distant Earth.

 

[CrackerMcGinger]

I'm not shocked there's flowing water, just that it's at the surface. That's awesome nonetheless.

 

[mfb]

Also, what if Earth life is actually Martian in origin? Then I don't know if we would detect the difference from microbes on the craft vs Martian bacteria because they would both be based on DNA.

Life on Earth today had 4 billion years of evolution - it looks significantly different from life back then. Could be invisible to a microscope, but DNA sequencing (if they have DNA at all - could still be based on RNA or something new that evolved on Mars) would reveal the difference.

2032/2033 looks optimisic, it would mean serious project planning would have to start now.

 

[Bystander]

"In http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2546.html, scientists identified waterlogged molecules — salts of a type known as perchlorates (my emphasis)— on the surface in readings from orbit.

“That’s a direct detection of water in the form of hydration of salts,” said Alfred S. McEwen, a professor of planetary geology at the University of Arizona, the principal investigator of images from a high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and one of the authors of the new paper. “There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt.”

This is a "bit of a leap." Do not be surprised at refutation and retraction.

 

[TheAnt]

That's the title of the NASA press release (I added the date).
8 a.m. PDT = 3 p.m. UCT = 5 p.m. CEST (Central European Summer Time)

The panel includes an expert for the HiRISE experiment, a high-resolution telescope in Mars orbit. Whatever they have, apparently images of some area are highly relevant.

One of the panel members is Lujendra Ojha, a PhD candidate. If they include him, it is very likely the discovery is directly connected to his work. According to http://www.lujendraojha.net/band-horizon/:Those structures are visible to HiRISE. Variations from year to year are not new. Did they see something in action?

Mary Beth Wilhelm is an organic biogeochemist (research interests).

How to combine organic biogeochemistry with Recurring Slope Lineae?

I'll update this post when I know more.

We waited for this to happen for so long!
Every astrophysicist's dream has come true, we might actually find extraterrestrial life in our own solar system!

 

[rootone]

Steady on, this just tells us of good places to look.
There has been nothing detected which is a positive indicator of presently active biochemistry.
We are already fairly certain of there having been quite substantial amounts of surface water in the past, and some of that water would have been a more likely origin of any life (just my opinion of course), than in these chlorine rich slush flows that have been discovered .
I'm prepared for the unexpected though, given the conditions that some extremophiles live in on Earth.

 

[DiracPool]

Also, what if Earth life is actually Martian in origin?

This is another big reason for sending humans to Mars (soon) to sort this out. One of the principle "Earth" life mysteries is what happened to intermediate stages of the evolution of life from inanimate matter to the first prokaryotic cells, which are extremely complex in their function. One theory was that life originated on Mars and that a "panspermia" event there knocked out some already highly evolved prokaryotes that were seeded on Earth a few billion years ago. According to that theory, what we might find on Mars is evidence of those intermediate stages of cellular evolution. I don't personally think that this is what happened, but it is possible. And that's the point, there is so much to learn and rule out or rule in. The presence of liquid water on the surface is simply begging for a thorough analysis. The possibly of finding something unexpected and significant is tantalizingly high.

2032/2033 looks optimisic, it would mean serious project planning would have to start now.

Agreed!

 

[russ_watters]

Yes. It's NASA Policy Directive 8020 and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

There are factions, both within NASA and outside of NASA, who say that Mars is off-limits to humans if we find life on Mars. Some of the proponents of this POV are rather influential. This finding will give those factions an even larger voice. That voice will become very large if incontrovertible evidence of life on Mars is found, even if its only extremely primitive life.

Thanks for the info (and others as well). Not sure how I feel about that (generally negative, but need to put more thought into it), but don't really want to get into it now. Maybe a topic for another thread.

 

[clope023]

2032/2033 looks optimisic, it would mean serious project planning would have to start now.

If you mean the manned Mars mission; the general idea is manned flyby by 2033 and landing by 2037; after the completely unnecessary asteroid re-direct in 2025; there are factions trying to replace asteroid re-direct with a Mars and Venus flyby mission in 2025 which would push forward the Mars landing by a few years.

 

[Monsterboy]

If you mean the manned Mars mission; the general idea is manned flyby by 2033 and landing by 2037; after the completely unnecessary asteroid re-direct in 2025; there are factions trying to replace asteroid re-direct with a Mars and Venus flyby mission in 2025 which would push forward the Mars landing by a few years.

Do we need a manned mission to do this job ? Why can't we send a well sterilised rover better equipped than the current ones to go and do the job?

 

[clope023]

Do we need a manned mission to do this job ? Why can't we send a well sterilised rover better equipped than the current ones to go and do the job?

I wasn't referring to anyone specific job, just the general plan of the manned program; but humans are better equipped to find life on Mars than robots are. If fossils exist on Mars, Curiosity and the 2020 rover and such like are more than likely to gloss over them; though a sterilized rover would probably do just fine with something like flowing water, but even then careful human hands would be preferable.

 

[Jupiter5]

Steady on, this just tells us of good places to look.
There has been nothing detected which is a positive indicator of presently active biochemistry.
We are already fairly certain of there having been quite substantial amounts of surface water in the past, and some of that water would have been a more likely origin of any life (just my opinion of course), than in these chlorine rich slush flows that have been discovered .
I'm prepared for the unexpected though, given the conditions that some extremophiles live in on Earth.

Is water always an origin of any life ?

 

[mfb]

Is water always an origin of any life ?

We don't know, but on Earth they are closely linked.
It is really hard to find places on Earth with liquid water but without life. Don Juan pond was mentioned in the linked news article, but even that is a bit more complicated.

If you mean the manned Mars mission; the general idea is manned flyby by 2033 and landing by 2037; after the completely unnecessary asteroid re-direct in 2025; there are factions trying to replace asteroid re-direct with a Mars and Venus flyby mission in 2025 which would push forward the Mars landing by a few years.

That sounds very optimistic. This article estimates 2030 for the first flight of the fully upgraded space launch system - and you probably don't want to fly to another planet with the maiden flight of a rocket, 5 years of backwards time travel not included.
SpaceX could be faster, but it is questionable if NASA will use this and abandon the SLS.

 

[Baluncore]

Now Coke Cola can build a bottling plant there, and they don't even have to paint the background red.
Imagine the marketing possibilities for a carbonic acid rich, still mineral water.

Does the presence of acidic water preclude shellfish, exoskeletons and animal bones like we see on Earth?

 

[clope023]

We don't know, but on Earth they are closely linked.
It is really hard to find places on Earth with liquid water but without life. Don Juan pond was mentioned in the linked news article, but even that is a bit more complicated.

That sounds very optimistic. This article estimates 2030 for the first flight of the fully upgraded space launch system - and you probably don't want to fly to another planet with the maiden flight of a rocket, 5 years of backwards time travel not included.
SpaceX could be faster, but it is questionable if NASA will use this and abandon the SLS.

I knew it was delayed but that's the first I've heard of the launch system being pushed back that far; asteroid re-direct is tentatively scheduled for mid 2020's and they'll need SLS and Orion for that.

 

[Jupiter5]

We don't know, but on Earth they are closely linked.
It is really hard to find places on Earth with liquid water but without life. Don Juan pond was mentioned in the linked news article, but even that is a bit more complicated.

That sounds very optimistic. This article estimates 2030 for the first flight of the fully upgraded space launch system - and you probably don't want to fly to another planet with the maiden flight of a rocket, 5 years of backwards time travel not included.
SpaceX could be faster, but it is questionable if NASA will use this and abandon the SLS.

mfb , thank you for an article
I am certain that scientists were scientifically aware of differences of Earth's and Martian's atmosphere

 

[mfb]

I knew it was delayed but that's the first I've heard of the launch system being pushed back that far; asteroid re-direct is tentatively scheduled for mid 2020's and they'll need SLS and Orion for that.

There are different stages with increasing payload. A mission to Mars needs much more payload than a mission to L1 or L2.

mfb , thank you for an article
I am certain that scientists were scientifically aware of differences of Earth's and Martian's atmosphere

I don't doubt what the scientists are aware of, I questioned the quality of the news article as at least one statement there is way too strong given the quoted reference I found so quickly.