NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows on Mars Options

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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.

[SteveM]

Here's Steve Squyre's comment on Life on Mars from his Open University Talk. I transcribed it from the audio file.

Steve (the other Steve, that is. )

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Steve Squyres Lecture at CEPSAR (Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space, & Astronomical Research), The Open University, 7 November 2006

Time: 65:12

Questions:

Stewart Hirst(?): After your 100– 1012 Sols on Mars are you more or less optimistic in finding evidence of life– or not you, but that evidence of life will be found on Mars?

SS: Oh, it’s hard to say. I think that what this has shown us is that early interpretations, going back as far as Mariner 9, that liquid water has been present below the surface and at the surface of Mars were correct. There has been water on Mars; that’s been believed since we first saw valleys in the Mariner 9 images and I think our data show that but you can go much more beyond just saying yeah, there was water on Mars.
Umm.
At these locations – particularly at the Opportunity site, which is, I guess, the more favorable of the two – Uh, as I said there are a number of things here that would be really I think very daunting for life. The acidity, the highly oxidizing character, the highly saline environment. Now you can go to very acidic, very oxidizing, very saline environments on Earth and they’re teaming with life, they’re teaming with microbes. You can find bugs that are perfectly happy at a PH of one: acidophiles. But those are organisms that developed first under more neutral, more normal if you will, conditions and then managed to find a way to evolve into that very challenging ecological niche. If you go to one of these acidophiles, and you measure the PH of their environment, the PH outside of their cell membrane is one and the PH inside is seven. OK and they have wonderful ion pumps across their cell membrane keeps them at a neutral PH inside. Umm. So while life can exist in that kind of environment, whether or not it can get started in that environment is another question.

Now one thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that these two places are just two little pin pricks on the surface of an incredibly diverse and complicated planet. For example, the Omega instrument on the Mars Express, the European Mars Express mission, French instrument, and also now the CRISM instrument on MRO have both detected philosyllicates, clay minerals, at some locations on Mars that may be indicative of more neutral PH at some point. Umm so there are no– It’s a complicated story that’s still evolving. There are a number of places where we see both morphological and mineralogical evidence for water on the surface of Mars. In terms of the habitability, yeah it was habitable but it was a challenge. I think we’ve still got a lot of work to do. I think what we need to do is send instruments like Colin [Pillinger]’s instrument package to the surface of Mars and look for organics and I think we need to bring some rocks back.

68:12

This post has been edited by Steve: Dec 7 2006, 10:55 PM