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NASA
In this artist's conception, Mars astronauts come upon one of the Viking landers that touched down in 1976.
The quest to learn about life on Mars has been lowering its sights for the past century, but researchers think they finally have the right strategy for addressing the key mysteries surrounding the Red Planet: Were the conditions right for living things to arise on Mars? And if so, what happened?
The romantic vision of Mars that many folks held onto in the early 20th century is on full display in Hollywood's 3-D blockbuster, "John Carter," which makes its debut Friday. In the movie, a visitor from Earth journeys along Mars' deserts and rivers, encountering green-skinned aliens, airship-riding warriors and, of course, a fetchingly clad Martian princess.
In August, which is probably around the time that "John Carter" comes out on DVD, the real-life Mars will take center stage. NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover is due to touch down at the end of a rocket-powered crane and become the latest robotic visitor from Earth. It will take pictures, drill into rocks, scoop up soil and perform chemical tests. If those tests match the science team's wildest dreams, the $2.5 billion mission will reveal ... a smattering of organic molecules.
NASA
Dave Beaty is chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"We want to find places that have high potential for habitability and high potential for preservation," David Beaty, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me. "The actual test for life would be a subsequent mission."
Beaty will discuss the 21st-century plan for exploring Mars at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT) on Wednesday as my guest on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show that airs online as well as in the Second Life virtual world. Please join us by clicking onto BlogTalkRadio or teleporting into our Second Life auditorium. If you just can't make it, you can download the podcast after the show via BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.
How times have changed
NASA's expectations for the Curiosity rover mission — also known as Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL — are far less ambitious than the expectations that were common in the late 1800s, when millionaire astronomer Percival Lowell thought he saw evidence of a canal-building civilization on the Red Planet. The "canals" turned out to be visual illusions, and they weren't the last illusions surrounding the search for life on Mars. In the 1950s, the most famous rocket scientist of the age, Wernher von Braun, declared that a quarter of the Red Planet was "covered with a sort of plant life that our biological knowledge cannot quite encompass."
Such illusions were shattered once spacecraft came close enough to take pictures of Mars' magnificent desolation, starting with the Mariner 4 in 1964. Scientists saw a cold, dry world, with no verifiable signs of life on the surface. The Viking landers detected hints of organic activity, but not enough evidence to resolve the uncertainty. Since then, no additional evidence has come to light.
"Virtually every mission to the surface of Mars provides no evidence for anything," Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory mission, told me. "We don't expect to see any evidence for anything that might represent macroscopic life. At this point, we understand why that is. With reference to our own planet, if you go to extreme environments on Earth, places like Antarctica ... the only things that you would really ever see in these extreme places are microorganisms or other simple organisms, like lichens. We're not asking something special of Mars, we're just conditioning our expectations based on analogs to extreme environments here on Earth.
"You put deserts and extreme cold together, and you're not kidding anybody," he said. "You know you're looking for something that's probably going to be very small and highly specialized, with adaptation to an extreme environment."
Best places on Mars
Before they search seriously for that kind of life, scientists have to figure out the best places to look. That's what the MSL mission is all about. Grotzinger, Beaty and other members of NASA's Mars science team think the rover's destination in Gale Crater could be a promising place to sample billions of years' worth of geological layers. Rather than looking exclusively for present-day life, MSL's scientists will be hunting for chemical indicators that point to potential habitability as well as the prospects for preserving the traces of past life.
Scientists suspect that Martian surface may not be the best place to find those chemical indicators, due to the exposure to harsh radiation and oxidation. But if Curiosity can drill or dig a little deeper, it should have a better chance of finding intact amino acids and other chemicals that have been linked to life.
"If MSL were to make a pretty good discovery ... that may be enough to cause a subsequent mission to go back to that exact spot," Beaty said. But even if Curiosity doesn't hit a home run, the observations made in Gale Crater should provide enough geological diversity to give scientists a better sense of where future life-seeking probes should be sent.
Tough times ... and tough questions
Right now, NASA's Mars exploration program is going through tough budgetary times, and it's not yet clear how those future missions will be laid out. But Beaty is confident that NASA will continue to send robots to the Red Planet, with humans eventually following in their wheel tracks.
"Mars is widely thought to be the ultimate destination, at least for the foreseeable future," he said. "It may not be the next destination. We may have to go some other place first — to the moon, or a near-Earth object — to develop the experience to go onward to Mars. But I think the current view of the strategy is that those things would be way points on the way to Mars, and Mars is the object of greatest interest."
The big reason for that interest has a lot in common with the reason why Percival Lowell, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others looked so longingly at the Red Planet a century ago.
"The thing that's fascinating about Mars is that the period during which the planet as a whole was habitable was such a narrow window that opened early in its history, say, from 4.2 billion years ago," Beaty said. "There's evidence of channels and valleys and clay minerals, but then somehow the water was lost. Where did the water go?
"If Mars was able to establish life during the period when water was there, did it find a refuge — for example, in the deep subsurface — or did it just die out? ... And if Mars didn't have life, an equally important question is, why not? We have to know that, too. If it had all the right conditions, and Earth developed life while Mars didn't, what was different?"
To delve into these questions and other Martian mysteries, tune into "Virtually Speaking Science."
Join us at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday on "Virtually Speaking Science," which is broadcast on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world at the MICA Small Auditorium at Stella Nova. Many thanks to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for co-sponsoring the Second Life event. The hourlong show will be archived on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. Check out these other podcasts from "VSScience":
- Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
- Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
- Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
- Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
- Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
- Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
- Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
- George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
- Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
- Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
- Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize
This is the second of a two-part series about Mars in fact and fiction. For the fictional side of things, check out my interview with "John Carter" film director Andrew Stanton.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
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Marvin & Marcia. the Mars equivalent to our Adam & Eve
http://www.gargaro.com/webpages/marvinandmarcia.jpg
Maybe all the water went to brewing coffee?
Wait, could that happen here?
"We don't expect to see any evidence for anything that might represent macroscopic life"...and if we do we'll drill into it till we don't.....hehe...(you'll have to see my posts from 2004 to really get it).
Nice article alan, as usual. I had a thought the other day watching a pbs show on the phonix lander, they put the soil at ph 7 or 8 or so.....if thats so, perhaps these bots could have suitable rods that poke into the soil and violla, instant battery!!...a ground rod and a rod made of some material with the opposite PH!!...once the local cahrge is depleted, time to move on!...maybe not a ground breaking observation (pun) but with energy so vital to missions, every possible bit of energy harvesting must be examined...allthough I am a member of batf, someone else can walk the idea over there though, I'm busy right now, just give me some credit for it!!.
As for ancient Macro life, hmmh...maybe once again we are peering through the looking glass when what we need is to stand back and take in the bigger picture...anyone know how big the biggest organism on earth is?..(hint, big, miles x miles big)...(other hint, it's almost entirely underground)...right now we are just poking around so when the boots hits mars, they got a good chance of finding those big lizard eggs....and then they can name the out post Los Huevos, iffens they ain't chinese boots (whole nother issue at that). Very few sci-dudes or sci-dudettes explain that the sun was bigger during that (guessed at) window of life as we know it time span. Oddly, the quicksand like material we see now seems to be capable of many of the features we consider as the results of large pools of h20...and of course titan has large pools of liquid, making the whole point a good reason to get some biologists, geologists, bunch-of-other ologists (and some politicians by popular request) into boots and on mars ASAP.
Meanwhile, ensign kirk can tell ya a lot about scantily clad green skinned women from his days at starfleet academy. Personally if I was looking for martian life right now, I'd be checking out that big olympus mons thingy and the caves around it, I'd forget green and set the scanners for ruddy brown, very slow moving, and giving off oxygen as it consumed peroxides and co2....something that could burrow and scamper and HATED water......exothermic no doubt.....in case any one was wondering....
Hopefully, the landing goes well and they get some good science. As history has shown, it's a very tough place to even get to, and it's amazing that we puny humans have accomplished so much.
" Puny" as "us" in comparison to the one who created it all.
Do you mean the JPL? It is a large organization.
No, no, no, Tony! He means CERN, the LHC, and the 'god particle'. Duh!
Interesting article Alan. I have thought for a long time that our missions to Mars will only turn up fossils of microscopic organisms at best, but even that will be enough to prove to the nay-sayers that there is other life out there and that NASA is worth our time and money. Although I do not think we will find anything more than micro life on Mars, John Grotzinger is completely wrong in his statement about Antarctica (Emperor Penguins!?).
Ray - I believe you are talking about the Honey Mushroom colony found in Oregon. While an interesting idea, this type of fungi is parasitic and therefore not a likely candidate for life on Mars. I would be on the lookout for something that lives purely on the atmosphere (or lack thereof) and/or sunlight.
Why are we wasting money on this? There's too many hungry children on earth to spend money looking for microbes on a wasteland.
There's also a 150 foot wide asteroid that's going to come within 17,000 miles of the earth next year that we have no way of stopping if something causes it to change its course and head directly towards the earth. We should be protecting ourselves, not trying prove something that means nothing.
"Why are we wasting money on this? There's too many hungry children on earth to spend money looking for microbes on a wasteland."
When you can tell me how much is already being spent on that before raiding NASA's pockets, get back to me...
"There's also a 150 foot wide asteroid that's going to come within 17,000 miles of the earth next year that we have no way of stopping if something causes it to change its course and head directly towards the earth. We should be protecting ourselves..."
'If something.' We know how it's moving. Newton's Laws of Motion and statements on gravity still work. We need to be watching more carefully for objects we don't know about at all (and there are those who will tell you that the chances of a serious impact in the near future are so small, that worrying about that is a 'waste,' too), but once we know what's going on, predictions are pretty much like clockwork.
"...not trying prove something that means nothing"
So, the prospect that life may have arisen completely independently of Earth means nothing to you? I feel sorry for you...
We can feed the hungry children any time we want to. And we can explore our world at the same time.
Ralph, if you are so concerned, for just pennies a day YOU can help feed the children. There are a ton of organizations that will gladly accept your money. It is not NASA's job, but as we continue to look to the future advancements in food harvesting and storage will help feed the hungry (children and adults). And you may well want to consider that, as our population soars above seven billion humans, we will need to look for resources not available on Earth to support our population before we ALL are hungry.
What if we found an edible life form that grew like bamboo and tasted like chicken? Then space exploration would have fed the hungry children.
I have to agree - to a degree - with ralph. We - the human race we - should spend more efforts preventing hungry children. We can start by dismantling the catholic church. They are very good at promoting the idea of creating more hungry children in 3rd world nations. Following this are all other organized religions that are against birth control. If we do this, the governments in these countries might finally be able to regain control of their spiraling populations.
No religion needs to be dismantled, but their faith communities need to come to the realization that there are more than seven billion humans on Earth. This isn't the Middle Ages, when half (or more) of your children may die well before you do. Advancements in hygiene and medical care have greatly improved our lives, but this planet does not have infinite resources.
'Dismantle' major religions? (and who, exactly, would 'we' be?)
A lot of history has been made (and blood shed) when they try to do that to each other, but they're all still here. Good luck with that....
I see no reason why any of you that want to spend money on hungry children cannot send your paychecks to them. Of course you may find out that the governments of those poor countries will rip you off, or those pictures of those starving children is a con game. What you learn is that it is the local conditions are causing the hunger, war, droughts, over population, people moving out of the countryside into the cities and more. You may find yourself having to pay off local or national polilticians to feed those hungry kids. Also, you may find out those kids are much better at surviving than you will ever be. I will stick to Mars where at least I have some idea where my money was spent.
Well I think we should harness the wind, and get it to calm down. It just blows too hard sometimes.
Here is something else to think about when asking about will life exist in other parts of the Universe.
Here is another thought to fathom. "Cynosural gate open!" "All ships go now!" "Let's goto work!"
I was looking through the pimple popping video's on You Tube because I was bored and came across this video of Congenital ichthyosis.
Basically what C.I. is is the rapid production of skin cells which is commonly referred to as skin disorder.
This got me to thinking, what would cause the human body to create skin cells at such a rapid rate?
Then I thought about the evolution of the Earths atmosphere. During the evolution of the Earths atmosphere there would have been varrying era's of when the cloud coverage was less which allowed more harmfull UV radiation to bombard the Earths surface. In order for primordial humans to exist they would have needed to have a celluar production center that produced skin cells to rapidly cover the interior cells from the harmful UV radiation from the Sun during these times. If the skin cells did not reproduce rapidly enough the UV radiation would cause the vital orgins cells to die thus causing the human to die.
Slowly as the Earths atmosphere stabilized the celluar production factor responsible for producing the protective layer of skin cells, which is called the Mitochondrion Cell, slowly reduced the rate at which skins cells were produced based upon the amount of UV Radiation that was slowly blocked as the Earths atmosphere evolved into our present day atmosphere.
We all know that staying in the sun for to long causes sun burn which is actually the result of the suns UV rays penetrating the skin to the less protected systems underneath the skin.
During a time when the Earth's atmosphere was less evolved and not able to block the suns rays out our body would need to have developed skin cells very rapidly or our forming cells would be destroyed by the Suns UV radiation in the form of cancers.
The post that accompanies the video says that the skin is slowly scrubbed away and eventually the newborn develops a somewhat normal skin covering.
So what we are seeing in the video is a possible DNA sequence leap from a time in the planets evolution when the Earth was bombarded by more UV radiation than weare bombarded with today.
I am also quite convinced that the deformaties that we see today in newborns where people think of the DNA as being retarded is nothing more than the DNA sequencing from a time when humans were evolving where varrying amounts of UV radiation would have determined the thought processes of the human as being geared more towards producing skin cells for protection.
Eventually as the Earths atmopshere evolved to block out more and more harmful radiation from the Sun, the Mitochondrion cells in our body then switched gears to allow other systems, especially the brain, to evolve thinking and thought processes that have built modern day Earth.
Bascially this same process would occur for alien lifeforms across the galaxy where the mitochondrion cells of the alien life would need to be able to evolve to the point at being able to rapidly produce skin cells to protect the vital organs within the body.
The second criteria for life to exist at a sentient level would occur on planets where the atmosphere evolved over millions of years and slowly blocked the harmful radiation of the sun out to a point where the cells could switch focus from protecting the vital organs inside of the body to adding more and more brain cells as the life evolved past the basics of protecting vital organs to producing what we have before us today.
C.I. Video ***Warning - This video may make your stomach queezy.***
All of the areas that I have drawn my conclusions from come from basic science classes that I have taken while in High School.
All of the knowledge necessary to understand life existing in the Universe is their at the High School level of science.
Be more intelligent....don't be a Rush Limbaugh.
My predictions: No signs of life will be found. Minor evidence will be found of components needed for life found on earth but not much different than what has already been found.
Mars has no life and never has. The discussion will then turn to why Earth but not Mars.
Somewhere along the way someone will plant some form of life and "find" it and present it. That find will end up in all the school books before it is discovered it was a fraud but even then it will linger in schools as proof mars had life.
Desperation to prove a belief will always bias science.
I agree with LaVall. Carl Sagan hypnotized so many of his generation that watched Cosmos into believing that there has to be something out there... The movie 'Contact' said 'it would be incredible waste of space' if there was not life out there'. I do like that movie, it was entertaining. But at the same time, it is still Science Fiction. Not real. Yet like the article above. The guy is mixing science fiction and reality - IE. John Carter. You see they really really want something to be true.. so it supposedly HAS to be. But there is no evidence.
Jeezus, people already know enough about why life lives not to have to discuss "why Earth but not Mars." My prediction on your fraud scenario: Never going to happen.
But yet the same can be said about a 'creator'. There is zero evidence for him/her/it but yet many still believe. Why is THAT fine but looking for life elsewhere other than Earth not?? Just as MANY religious have said before, just because there's an absense of evidence doesn't make it false. It can go both ways...
What is the sense of looking for life on Mars? It can't amount to much if it exists or ever existed. Wouldn't that lead reasonable people to think, well, so what? What are the chances that life exists elsewhere in the Universe? Probably astronomically good chances, and would that not cause reasonable people to say well, so what?
Or has this mass hysteria from our ignorant past gotten well and truly out of hand?
Because it would be cool.
Humans are curious.
dubina, as the article states, the reason to look for places that have the right chemical requirements for life. As part of that, you are also looking for places that would support a human exploratory mission and, eventually, a colony.
If there were life on other planets, that might be kind of interesting.
God has never told us in Scripture, one way or the other.
Maybe we will find a planet without sin, that doesn't need a Saviour.
The problem is, If that happened, we would just mess it up with sin, then that planet would need a Saviour, just like Earth.
Heck, in that case, we might as well quit looking, we don't need more sin.
Maybe life on another world has no idea what 'sin' is, Edward. The idea of 'sin' is a construct of man to keep people in 'check' or in line with what is the accepted view of the masses. Plus, if life were found outside of Earth it wouldn't be "interesting", it would be the pinnacle of finds for all humanities past, present, and future. "Interesting" would be the understatement of all time.
3rd rock from the sun ....life pollution..
not sin at all...just junk mail..
James
... or junk mail.
y dont we have uniq Organisation for space...as each country wants there own space exploration...wasting money and accessories in individual work..we the whole Earth should act as one country in regarding space JOB.
thy Speak abt mars....wat abt moon...is water find on moon?.....if so or not ..wats the strategy for colonizing in moon......and wat the favourable minirals we got on moon that cld help human life to servive on moon...???
Ok, first off stop writing like you're texting someone. Secondly, we don't have a 'unified' space program because (in my opinion) nothing would get done. One country would want something one way and another country would want it some other way. Then, there'd be a LOT of bickering and arguing then everyone would get pissed at each other and go home having accomplished squat.
There's been plenty of joint ventures (the ISS) but not sure a completely 'unified' space program would work as I stated above. And, yes, there's been a few minerals found on the Moon that could be used. If memory serves me, I believe it's helium (maybe hydrogen) three that we could use for rocket fuel to go beyond the Moon. Anyone remember for sure what it was on the Moon we could use? The problem is setting up a work station to retrieve it then getting it back. Basically a logistical nightmare. You gotta start somewhere though, right?
Google search IMAGES"Jerry Lehane Mars" for about 30 pics of Life on Mars,People,animals,high tech,fossils,more.Or get the shock treatment slideshow 1000 pics evidence of life on Mars Cut to the chase since 2004 plus some Viking images of live beings staring at the landers(1976).Why waste time.Give us the TRUTH we PAID for.
Add H T T P for the link ://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a221/jlehane3/?albumview=slideshow
OR just go to P H O T O B U C K E T . C O M for acct "jlehane3" because links here are censored...bummer truth lovers.People on Mars look like us mostly and have advanced civilization from what I've seen. Guess who designed the rovers in 1987?