NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows on Mars Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Dec. 4, 2006

Dwayne Brown/Erica Hupp
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726/1237

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278

MEDIA ADVISORY: M06-186

NASA SCHEDULES BRIEFING TO ANNOUNCE SIGNIFICANT FIND ON MARS

WASHINGTON - NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec.
6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The
briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium located
at 300 E Street, S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA
Television and www.nasa.gov.

The agency last week announced the spacecraft's mission may be at its
end. Mars Global Surveyor has served the longest and been the most
productive of any spacecraft ever sent to the red planet. Data
gathered from the mission will continue to be analyzed by scientists.


Panelists include:
- Michael Meyer -- Lead Scientist, Mars Exploration Program, NASA
Headquarters, Washington
- Michael Malin -- President and Chief Scientist, Malin Space Science
Systems, San Diego, Calif.
- Kenneth Edgett -- Scientist, Malin Space Science Systems
- Philip Christensen -- Professor, Arizona State University, Tempe,
Ariz.

[Stu]

"Interesting"?



"INTERESTING?"



Are you a VULCAN volcanopele [corrected] ?!!!! Does cold, coppery green blood flow through those veins? Did your left eyebrow merely lift quizically when you saw those images when you peered into your science monitor??

Do you know how long many of us "Out here" have been waiting for these images and this news? What we have there is the strongest evidence yet for Mars being a potential habitat for life, nothing more, nothing less. And I know some sticks in the fresh martian mud will say that that's too optimistic, too simplistic and going over the top - I don't care!!!!! I want to go out and laugh at the sky now! Look at the pictures!! Something poured out down those crater walls for a while. Something... wonderful... Something that is calling to us, siren-like, "Come and look more closely... come... come..."

Imagine standing there, on the rim of that crater, and seeing a gully in flow...



... imagine feeling the rumble beneath your boots as the water breaks through and starts to gush... imagine seeing the water steaming and boiling in the low atmospheric pressure, sliding and slavering down the crater wall's slopes, dying even as you watched it... imagine watching the gushing stop, and the last of the free water evaporate away, leaving behind a glistening snakeskin of freshly-exposed salts, covered with glinting frost, like someone has spilled molten glass from above... Doesn't that make you feel amazed?!

We thought we knew Mars but we don't. We were fooling ourselves all along. It has secrets still, locked away in its rocks, maybe even just a gloved hand's depth beneath its dusty surface. Imagine that, an evolved monkey's hand trailing through the dust of Mars, its fingers digging down, down... what would it find...?

I know this post might seem over the top but I'm sorry, I'm on a high right now and in no mood to be cold and scientific. There wasn't just water on Mars a billion, a million or a thousand years ago, there was water there a couple of years ago, flowing... and there probably is now, as I type this. The implications of that are enormous, simply enormous. We should be celebrating, not downplaying it.

Go on volcanopele, put a party hat on, I dare ya...

[imipak]

"Interesting"?



"INTERESTING?"

I concur. It is interesting; it demonstrated the usefulness of extended missions (and launching long-lived hardware), demonstrated again the power of serendipity and a sharp pair of eyes (Edgett/Malin appear to be saying the first new crater was spotted visually in a wide-angle context image, ie without comparison to the previous image of the same area!) and adds a nice detail to the current state of knowledge about sub-surface fluids. It probably helps eliminate up a couple of alternative explanations for the gullies (and if not, HiRISE et al will do so.) (Tho' AFAIK CO2 ice is still a possibility?) But exciting? More so than, say, the MER EDL, or Opportunity's arriving at Victoria Crater? I confess I was mildly excited when I heard the first rumours of a major NASA announcement, but having seen the names listed (and read this thread), the actual news was pretty much as expected. Spotting new craters is MORE exciting, to me, and I think will be seen to be a more significant single discovery in 10 years' time.

Moreover, I heard someone from the Beagle team interviewed on Radio 4 ("PM"), and he made a point of saying "yes, I know we've had these same stories about "water on Mars!!" every couple of years for the last decade." He was just getting his retaliation in first - I predict comedians (funny and otherwise) will be pointing that out before Saturday morning.

However, liquid flowing down the gullies shouldn't be news to anyone who's been paying attention. The original paper revealing the gullies already made it clear that they were clearly relatively recent features, and it is not that surprising that one or two would trickle for a minute or two once or twice a decade.

I think the image, attractive though it is, looks more like the Three Gorges than Mars From what I remember of the original paper, if you were there on the surface when one of these things was active you'd see a small, narrow strip of dirty water running straight down the slope, subliming as it went; not bursting out under enormous pressure and spraying tens of feet out into the air... the gully would cut much more deeply into the crater wall if it were that violent. I also wonder about the concentration of any putative salts... if it were very high, would that affect the flow characteristics of the water?

Right, I'm off to find another roaring fire to drape my wet blanket over