All about Mars - Post Mars information here

[American Patriot]

http://english.pravda.ru/photo/report/mars-2473/1/

Damn... that a BIG hole in the ground... on Mars...

[American Patriot]

Some scientists say that the holes can be defined as caves, whereas others say that the holes should be referred to as wells

[American Patriot]

Strange object found on Mars


http://eng.cnews.ru/news/line/indexE...7/11/22/276238

December 22, 2007, Thu 1:28 PM Science

Alexander Novgorodov, the reader of the portal R&D.CNews from Moscow Region, has pointed to an object of unusual morphology found on Mars images made by the spacecraft Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

On the images taken from the orbit an unusual mountain formation is depicted, which seems to have resulted from weathering (erosion) and is located amid the frozen ocean. The given formation drop-like shape (in section), its evidently erosion origin and the unusual structure at the base, which might be conventionally called a 'door' for its physical resemblance, are of interest.


The object unusual form and the presence of a 'door' do not mean the mountain formation is of artificial origin. The mentioned peculiarities are of primary interest because of their morphology.
The other images sent by our reader depict another formation of unusual shape resembling a pyramid with a regular polygon at the base.


1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

The door-like structure at the base of the mountain formation. NASA image

[American Patriot]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/ne...7/posts?page=2 (Thread I found about it)

[Luke]

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids,
in fact it's cold as hell,
And there's no one there to raise them,
if you did,
at least not these days, who knows how my kids would have turned out if raised by amobea? Scary thought.

I would llike to think that I will live long enough to see human beings land and return from the red planet. A childhood fantasy come true. I thought at one time in late 69" it would happen, now not so much.

I would perhaps settle for an unmanned craft returning with soil and atmospheric samples.

Sorry not much information, mostly opinions. Here are some photo's.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gal...lery-mars.html

[American Patriot]

I predict that within 100 years from today, we, that is humans will have made "First Contact" with extraterrestrial intelligent life.

I believe when we actually get people on Mars to verify, we're going to find out that not only is life present there, it is prevalent throughout the entire solar system.

We may only locate bacterial lifeforms, but, I'm betting that we're not unique by ANY stretch of the imagination.

I say this because throughout my life I've wondered from a... rather limited perspective on life... that "God created man in his own image". While I certainly have no qualms with those that believe this, I will say that this was a simplistic explanation written by simple people from what they could understand.

In other words... God probably did create all that we can see and observe, but he sure didn't dilly dally here alone. There is a VAST universe out there, and our own galaxy is 100,000 light years across and contains somewhere between 100 and 200 BILLION stars. From our outpost here on Earth somewhere on the outskirts of the Galaxy we've already discovered well over 150 planets OUTSIDE our own solar system. At least one of them, recently, was discovered to be very similar to Earth, albeit older.

I say this because the star this planet orbits is a red giant, Gliese 581. In the natural birth and death of stars, including our own, there is a cycle through which they go and usually they end up as a Red Giant or a red dwarf star. According to some data I heard yesterday evening this is a large red star and the planet, Gliese 581C has the same face turned toward the star all the time, like our Moon does with Earth.

Basically, over time gravity causes this to happen and eventually the Earth too, will slow and face the same face to the Sun forever after, until it's death when the sun becomes a red giant.

Anyway, back to the point. There's a theory, and granted it's only a theory, but it is a viable theory called panspermia. Essentially this theory says that life is seeded to planets and moons by asteroids or comets.

Comets as most of you know are supposed to be big, rocky, icy things orbiting out around the Oort cloud, an area full of ice and rock and dust. The conditions were perhaps warm enough in the beginning to have formed various forms of simple, single cellular life forms or at least protein strings that, themselves could combine eventually to form those basic forms of life.

All life appears on our planet to have come from simple protein structures at some point or another.... Thus, when these comets are knocked out of their orbits they will eventually fall into the solar system, accelerated by gravitational forces of the sun and planets until they fall into one of the worlds.

There are two places almost certain to have active water. Earth and Europa. Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter. Some of the moons around Jupiter and Saturn as as big as Mercury and Venus. We now believe that not only did Mars have water in the past, perhaps as much as Earth has now, it probably still has a large amount of water there.

On Earth, where there is water, there is life.

I simply do not think that it is a hard reach to discover life on other planets.

I think we will find it on Europa, Mars, and perhaps some of the other large moons. Anywhere there is a possibility of water, we have a possibility of life.

We as humans have this bias that there must be a "habitable band" of heat, light and water to make it happen, and we've been very arrogant about that in the past. I don't expect scientists to change their thinking for some time to come... but, my prediction remains.

Within one hundred years we will have come into contact with someone, or something, that is as intelligent as ourselves, "out there".

[MTStringer]

Ice Clouds Put Mars In The Shade

ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2008) — Until now, Mars has generally been regarded as a desert world, where a visiting astronaut would be surprised to see clouds scudding across the orange sky. However, new results show that the arid planet possesses high-level clouds that are sufficiently dense to cast a shadow on the surface.

---

Mars is not entirely a haven for Sun worshippers. Clouds of water ice particles do occur, for example on the flanks of the giant Martian volcanoes. There have also been hints of much higher, wispy clouds made up of carbon dioxide (CO2) ice crystals. This is not too surprising, since the thin Martian atmosphere is mostly made of carbon dioxide, and temperatures on the fourth planet from the Sun often plunge well below the ‘freezing point’ of carbon dioxide.
Now, a team of French scientists has shown that such clouds of dry ice do, indeed, exist. Furthermore, they are sometimes so large and dense that they throw quite dark shadows on the dusty surface.
“This is the first time that carbon dioxide ice clouds on Mars have been imaged and identified from above,” said Franck Montmessin of the Service d’Aeronomie, University of Versailles (UVSQ), lead author of the paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “This is important because the images tell us not only about their shape, but also their size and density.
“Previously, we had to rely on indirect information – for example, from the SPICAM instrument on board Mars Express - to find out what the clouds are made of. However, it is very difficult to separate the signals coming from the clouds, the atmosphere and the surface.”
Data from the SPICAM Ultraviolet and Infrared Atmospheric Spectrometer indicated that any high altitude clouds are not very thick and made up of much smaller particles, but the CO2 clouds detected by OMEGA are very different. Not only are they surprisingly high – more than 80 km above the surface – but they can be several hundred kilometres across. They are also much thicker than expected. Instead of looking like the wispy ice clouds seen on Earth, they resemble tall convectional clouds that grow as the result of rising columns of warm air.
Even more surprising is the fact that the CO2 ice clouds are made of quite large particles - more than a micron (one thousandth of a millimetre) across – and they are sufficiently dense to noticeably dim the Sun. Normally, particles of this size would not be expected to form in the upper atmosphere or to stay aloft for very long before falling back towards the surface.
“The clouds imaged by OMEGA can reduce the Sun’s apparent brightness by up to 40 per cent,” said Montmessin. “This means that they cast quite a dense shadow and this has a noticeable effect on the local ground temperature. Temperatures in the shadow can be up to 10°C cooler than their surroundings, and this in turn modifies the local weather, particularly the winds.”
Since the CO2 clouds are mostly seen in equatorial regions, the OMEGA team believes that the unexpected shape of the clouds and large size of their ice crystals can be explained by the extreme variations in daily temperature that occur near the equator.
“The cold temperatures at night and relatively high day-time temperatures cause large diurnal waves in the atmosphere,” explained Montmessin. “This means there is a potential for large-scale convection, particularly as the morning Sun warms the ground.”
Bubbles of warm gas rise above the surface and when they reach high levels they become cold enough for CO2 to condense. This process releases latent heat, which causes the gas and the ice particles to rise even further.
What are the particles around which the CO2 ice condenses? On Earth, cloud droplets form around tiny nuclei – often particles of dust or salt. On Mars, the answer remains uncertain. One possibility is that Martian dust is carried to high altitudes. Another potential source of condensation nuclei is particles left behind by micrometeorites entering the upper atmosphere. Or the nuclei may simply be tiny crystals of water ice carried aloft on the thermal updraughts.
“This discovery is important when we come to consider the past climate of Mars,” said Montmessin. “The planet seems to have been much warmer billions of years ago, and one theory suggests that Mars was then blanketed with CO2 clouds. We can use our studies of present-day conditions to understand the role that such high level clouds could have played in the global warming of Mars.”
The results were obtained by the OMEGA Visible and Infrared Mineralogical Mapping Spectrometer instrument on board ESA’s Mars Express. They were published in the 13 November 2007 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research in a paper entitled “Hyperspectral imaging of convective CO2 ice clouds in the equatorial mesosphere of Mars” by F. Montmessin (Service d’Aeronomie, CNRS / IPSL / Université Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines, France), B. Gondet, J.-P. Bibring, Y. Langevin (Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, France), P. Drossart, T. Fouchet (Laboratoire d’Etudes Spatiales et d’Instrumentation en Astrophysique, Observatoire de Paris, France), and F. Forget (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, CNRS / IPSL / Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France).
Adapted from materials provided by European Space Agency.www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080116111952.htm

[MTStringer]

Sulfur Dioxide May Have Helped Maintain A Warm Early Mars

ScienceDaily (Dec. 30, 2007) — Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) may have played a key role in the climate and geochemistry of early Mars, geoscientists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Science. Their hypothesis may resolve longstanding questions about evidence that the climate of the Red Planet was once much warmer than it is today.
The Science paper's authors are Itay Halevy, a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences; Daniel Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences and environmental engineering at Harvard; and Maria Zuber, professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT.
"There is abundant evidence for a warmer climate, perhaps even a liquid water ocean, early in Martian history, between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago," says Schrag, the paper's senior author. "However, scientists have found it difficult to reconcile this evidence with our understanding of how the climate system is regulated on Earth."
Over millions of years, the Earth's climate has been controlled by the carbon cycle and its effect on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. On Earth, there is a balance between carbon dioxide vented from volcanoes and chemical reactions with silicate rocks on the Earth's surface that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to calcium carbonate, commonly known as limestone. Scientists believe that this balance has helped maintain Earth's habitability over the last 4 billion years.
On Mars, there is not enough volcanic activity today to maintain this cycle. But this was not true some 4 billion years ago, when a giant volcanic complex called Tharsis erupted over tens to hundreds of millions of years -- and also a time when evidence suggests Mars had a much warmer climate. However, this carbon cycle on early Mars should have produced vast quantities of limestone like on Earth, and yet almost none has been found.
The new hypothesis points the finger at sulfur dioxide, another gas released by volcanoes. Sulfur dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide, and it is more reactive with silicate rocks than carbon dioxide. On Earth, sulfur dioxide is rapidly oxidized to sulfate, and then removed from the atmosphere. The authors argue that the atmosphere of early Mars would have lacked oxygen, so sulfur dioxide would remain much, much longer.
"The sulfur dioxide would essentially preempt the role of carbon dioxide in surface weathering reactions," says Halevy, the first author of the report. "The presence of even a small amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere would contribute to the warmer climate, and also prevent limestone deposits from forming."
In place of limestone, the authors predict that sulfur minerals would form in any standing water on Mars. This may explain the surprising finding of the rovers that have identified sulfur minerals as an abundant component of Martian soils.
"We think we now understand why there is so little carbonate on Mars, and so much sulfur," Halevy says.
"Our hypothesis may also be important for understanding the early Earth," Schrag says. "Before the origin of life, our atmosphere may have looked much like early Mars. Sulfur dioxide may have had an important role then as well."
If correct, the hypothesis implies that the oceans in which life evolved were much more acidic than previously thought. The early Earth may also provide a test for the hypothesis through the analysis of isotopes of sulfur in ancient mineral deposits.
Halevy, Schrag, and Zuber's work was funded by the NASA Planetary Geology and Geophysics program, the George Merck Fund of the New York Community Trust, and by a Radcliffe Fellowship to Zuber and a Harvard Origins of Life Initiative Graduate Fellowship to Halevy.
Adapted from materials provided by Harvard University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1220140813.htm

[MTStringer]

How Mars Could Have Been Warm And Wet But Limestone Free
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2007) — Planetary scientists have puzzled for years over an apparent contradiction on Mars. Abundant evidence points to an early warm, wet climate on the red planet, but there's no sign of the widespread carbonate rocks, such as limestone, that should have formed in such a climate.
Now, a detailed analysis in the Dec. 21 issue of Science by MIT's Maria T. Zuber and Itay Halevy and Daniel P. Schrag of Harvard University provides a possible answer to the mystery. In addition to being warmed by a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as on Earth, the early Mars may have had the greenhouse gas sulfur dioxide in its atmosphere. That would have interfered with the formation of carbonates, explaining their absence today.
It would also explain the discovery by the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, of sulfur-rich minerals that apparently formed in bodies of water in that early Martian environment. And it may provide clues about the Earth's history as well.
The challenge was to interpret the planet's history, based on the data gathered by the Mars rovers--and especially Opportunity's discovery of sulfate minerals--from just tiny fractions of the surface, says Zuber, who is head of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. "How do you take very detailed measurements of chemical composition at one tiny place on Mars," she says, "and put it into the context of the broad evolution of the planet?" The breakthrough, she said, was when she and her colleagues realized "we'd been after the wrong molecule."
After several years of exploring the role of carbon dioxide and the carbon cycle, she said, they realized "maybe the key is sulfur dioxide, not carbon dioxide."
It was Opportunity's discovery of the mineral jarosite, which only forms in highly acidic water, that set them thinking about how that acidic environment could have come about. Sulfur provided the answer.
The new analysis suggests that on Mars, sulfur went through a whole cycle through the atmosphere, bodies of water on the surface, and burial in the soil and crust, comparable to the well-known carbon cycle on Earth. Through most of Earth's history, carbon dioxide has been released in volcanic eruptions, then absorbed into seawater, where it fosters the formation of calcium carbonate (limestone), which gets buried in ocean sediments.
Instead, the researchers propose, on Mars there may have been an analogous sulfur cycle. Much evidence suggests Mars may once have had an ocean that covered about a third of the planet, in its Northern hemisphere. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) dissolves easily in water, so after being spewed into the atmosphere by the giant volcanoes of Mars' Tharsis bulge, much of it would have ended up in the water, where it inhibited the formation of carbonate minerals but led to the formation of silicates and sulfites, such as calcium sulfite.
These minerals degrade relatively rapidly, so they would not be expected on the surface of Mars today. But they also allow formation of clays, which have been found on Mars, and which added to the puzzle since clays are usually associated with the same conditions that produce carbonates.
The new picture of a sulfur cycle helps to solve another mystery, which is how the early Mars could have been warm enough to sustain liquid water on its surface. A carbon dioxide atmosphere produces some greenhouse warming, but sulfur dioxide is a much more powerful greenhouse gas. Just 10 parts per million of sulfur dioxide in the mostly carbon dioxide air would double the amount of warming and make it easier for liquid water to be stable.
The analysis may also tell us something about our own planet's past. The early Earth's environment could well have been similar to that on Mars, but most traces of that era have been erased by Earth's very dynamic climate and tectonics. "This might have been a phase that Earth went through" in its early years, Zuber says. "It's fascinating to think about whether this process may have played a role" in the evolution of the early Earth.
The work was funded by NASA, a Radcliffe fellowship, the George Merck Fund and a Harvard graduate fellowship.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1221130045.htm

[MTStringer]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1221161922.htm
Mars Rovers Find New Evidence Of 'Habitable Niche'

ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2007) — Inch by power-conserving inch, drivers on Earth have moved the Mars rover Spirit to a spot where it has its best chance at surviving a third Martian winter -- and where it will celebrate its fourth anniversary (in Earth years) since bouncing down on Mars for a projected 90-day mission in January 2004. Meanwhile, researchers are considering the implications of what Cornell's Steve Squyres, principal investigator for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, calls "one of the most significant" mission discoveries to date: silica-rich deposits uncovered in May by Spirit's lame front wheel that provide new evidence for a once-habitable environment in Gusev Crater.
Squyres and colleagues reported the silica deposits at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in early December in San Francisco.
On the other side of Mars, Spirit's still-healthy twin Opportunity is creeping slowly down the inside of Victoria Crater, where layers of exposed rock are confirming findings made at the much smaller Eagle and Endurance craters -- and where deeper layers could offer new insight into the planet's history.
Spirit, which has been driving backward since its right front wheel stopped turning in March 2006, was exploring near a plateau in the Gusev Crater known as Home Plate when scientists noticed that upturned soil in the wake of its dragging wheel appeared unusually bright.
Measurements by the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and mini-thermal emission spectrometer showed the soil to be about 90 percent amorphous silica -- a substance associated with life-supporting environments on Earth.
"This is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence for formerly habitable conditions that we have found," said Squyres, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of Planetary Science, in a Dec. 11 interview with the BBC.
On Earth, silica deposits are found at hot springs, where hot water dissolves silica in rock below the surface, then rises and cools, causing the silica to precipitate out near the surface; and at fumaroles, where hot acidic water or vapors seep through rock, dissolving away other elements but leaving silica behind.
"Either place on Earth is teeming with microbial life," said Squyres. "So this is, either way, a representation of what in the past was a local habitable environment -- a little habitable niche on the surface of Mars."
The discovery was reminiscent of Spirit's journey to winter safety last year, when it uncovered (and briefly got mired in) patches of bright soil that contained high levels of sulfur -- another possible indicator of past hydrothermal activity.
Unlike last year, though, Spirit enters this Martian winter handicapped by dusty solar panels -- the result of giant dust storms in June and July. So the rover's power levels, which currently range between approximately 290 and 250 watt-hours (100 watt-hours is the amount of energy needed to light a 100-watt bulb for one hour; full power for the rovers is 800-900 watt-hours) -- could drop to dangerous levels in the dwindling winter sunlight.
Spirit's perch is currently at a 15-degree tilt on the north-facing slope of the Home Plate plateau, said Jim Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy and leader of the mission's Pancam color camera team. As the sun moves lower in the Martian sky, drivers will nudge the rover to a steeper angle.
"The fact that we've gotten to a good tilt, and we're going to get to a better tilt, is a good sign," said Bell. Still, he added, any work the rover does over the winter -- collecting Pancam images of its surroundings, for example -- will be strictly low-exertion.
"Most of 2008 is going to be a quiet time for Spirit," he said. "It's really about survival."
Adapted from materials provided by Cornell University.

[MTStringer]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1211095141.htm
Building Blocks Of Life Formed On Mars, Scientists Conclude

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2007) — Organic compounds contain carbon and hydrogen and form the building blocks of all life on Earth. By analyzing organic material and minerals in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001, scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory have shown for the first time that building blocks of life formed on Mars early in its history. Previously, scientists have thought that organic material in ALH 84001 was brought to Mars by meteorite impacts or more speculatively originated from ancient Martian microbes.
The Carnegie-led team made a comprehensive study of the ALH 84001 meteorite and compared the results with data from related rocks found on Svalbard, Norway. The Svalbard samples occur in volcanoes that erupted in a freezing Arctic climate about 1 million years ago—possibly mimicking conditions on early Mars.
“Organic material occurs within tiny spheres of carbonate minerals in both the Martian and Earth rocks,” explained Andrew Steele, lead author of the study. “We found that the organic material is closely associated with the iron oxide mineral magnetite, which is the key to understanding how these compounds formed.”
The organic material in the rocks from Svalbard formed when volcanoes erupted under freezing conditions. During cooling, magnetite acted as a catalyst to form organic compounds from fluids rich in carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). This event occurred under conditions where no forms of life are likely to exist. The similar association of carbonate, magnetite and organic material in the Martian meteorite ALH 84001 is very compelling and shows that the organic material did not originate from Martian life forms but formed directly from chemical reactions within the rock. This is the first study to show that Mars is capable of forming organic compounds at all.
The organic material in the Allan Hills meteorite may have formed during two different events. The first, similar to the Svalbard samples, was during rapid cooling of fluids on Mars. A second event produced organic material from carbonate minerals during impact ejection of ALH 84001 from Mars.
“The results of this study show that volcanic activity in a freezing climate can produce organic compounds,” remarked co-author Hans E.F. Amundsen from Earth and Planetary Exploration Services. “This implies that building blocks of life can form on cold rocky planets throughout the Universe.”
“Our finding sets the stage for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission in 2009,” remarked Steele, who is a member of the Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM) instrument team onboard MSL. “We now know that Mars can produce organic compounds. Part of the mission's goal is to identify organic compounds, their sources, and to detect molecules relevant to life. We know that they are there. We just have to find them.”
The research is published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science http://meteoritics.org/index.htm
For more information on the MSL mission and the SAM instrument see http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ and http://ael.gsfc.nasa.gov/marsSAM.shtml
This research was funded by NASA SRLIDA, ASTEP, NAI and ASTID programs; the Marshall Scholarship program; and the University of Oxford, Earth Sciences Department and was carried out in collaboration with the Arctic Mars Analog Svalbard Expedition (AMASE) project.
Adapted from materials provided by Carnegie Institution for Science.

[MTStringer]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1121220939.htm
New Light On Early Formation Of Earth And Mars

ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2007) — A team of scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) and the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the University of California, Davis (UCD) has found that terrestrial planets such as the Earth and Mars may have remained molten in their early histories for tens of millions of years. The findings indicate that the two planets cooled slower than scientists thought and a mechanism to keep the planet interiors warm is required.
These new data reveal that the early histories of the inner planets in the solar system are complex and involve processes no longer observed. Evidence of these processes has been preserved in Mars, while it has been erased in Earth. So Mars is probably the best opportunity to understand how Earth formed.
The formation of the solar system can be dated quite accurately to 4,567,000,000 years ago, said Qing-Zhu Yin, assistant professor of geology at UC Davis and an author on a new paper. Mars' metallic core formed a few million years after that. Previous estimates for how long the surface remained molten ranged from thousands of years to several hundred million years.
The persistence of a magma ocean on Mars for 100 million years is "surprisingly long," Yin said. It implies that at the time, Mars must have had a thick enough atmosphere to insulate the planet and slow down cooling, he said.
Scientists think that early crust formation alone cannot account for the slow cooling magma ocean seen in large planets. This new evidence instead implies that Mars, at one time, had a primitive atmosphere that acted as the insulator. “The primitive atmosphere was composed mostly of hydrogen left over from accretion into a rocky planet, but was removed, probably by impacts, about 100 million years after the planet formed,” said Debaille.
Debaille and her colleagues performed precise measurements of neodymium isotope compositions of nine rare Martian meteorites called shergottites using mass spectrometers at JSC and UCD. Shergottites, named after the first-identified meteorite specimen that fell at Shergotty, India, in 1865, are a group of related meteorites from Mars composed primarily of pyroxene and feldspar.
The scientists examined shergottites because their large range in chemical compositions is thought to be a fingerprint of the formation of their deep sources very early in the history of Mars.
“These rocks were lavas that were made by melting deep in Mars and then erupted on the surface," said Brandon. “They were delivered to Earth as meteorites following impacts on Mars that exhumed them and launched them into space." Mars meteorites are a treasure chest of information about that planet and have been the focus of extensive research by scientists.
The metallic element samarium has two radioactive isotopes that decay at a known rate to two daughter neodymium isotopes. By precisely measuring the quantities of neodymium isotopes, Debaille was able to use these two radiometric clocks to derive the times of formation of the different shergottite sources in the Martian interior.
“We expected to find that their sources all formed at the same time,” said Debaille. “But what we found instead was that the shergottite sources formed at two different times. The oldest formed at 35 million years after the solar system began to condense from ice and dust into large planets about 4,567 million years ago. The youngest formed about 110 million years after the solar system began to condense.”
Debaille and her colleagues found that the scenario that best fits the data is one where a global-scale magma ocean formed from melting in Mars during the final stages of accretion and then slowly solidified over this time period.
“The most recent physical models for magma oceans suggest they solidify on timescales of a few million years or less, so this result is surprising,” said Brandon. “Some type of insulating blanket, either as a rocky crust or a thick atmosphere, is needed as an insulator to have kept the Martian interior hot.”
Vinciane Debaille (LPI), Alan Brandon (JSC), Qing-zhu Yin and Ben Jacobsen (UCD) present these new findings in a paper published in the Nov. 22 issue of Nature.
Adapted from materials provided by NASA, Johnson Space Center.

[MTStringer]

I predict that within 100 years from today, we, that is humans will have made "First Contact" with extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Couldn't agree more, in fact, I think it's going to be much less than that, timewise. Everybody, figuratively, is getting into the space game now.
[/

I believe when we actually get people on Mars to verify, we're going to find out that not only is life present there, it is prevalent throughout the entire solar system.

Again, couldn't agree more, hope I'm still around, you too, Rick.

I say this because throughout my life I've wondered from a... rather limited perspective on life... that "God created man in his own image". While I certainly have no qualms with those that believe this, I will say that this was a simplistic explanation written by simple people from what they could understand.

OTE][
Another area where I think we think alike. My opinion, noone still on this side of the mortal plane has a clue as to the true nature of God, to assume otherwise is just about as conceited as saying we are the only intelligent lifeforms in the entire universe. I really believe we,(almost geezers but 50something ain't what it used to be) are on the edge of seeing things that would really make ole Gomer say "Gollee" and mean it, we've already left Mayberry far behind,hang in there,baby,and keep takin them baby aspirins.

[American Patriot]

Mars had people...... (and I expect Hoagland to be shittin' bricks right now)


NASA
Bloggers buzzing over NASA Spirit rover image magnified to show what appears to be humanoid form walking the surface of Mars — photos, links inside. | VIDEO | PHOTOS

[American Patriot]

Here's the link to the original image, it's too big to post here.

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10214.jpg

[American Patriot]

FNC/NASA
A medium-range shot of the Spirit image, with the mysterious figure indicated.

[American Patriot]

Judging from the image, and various rocks in the foreground, I'd say whatever that is isn't much more than a foot tall at most. If it is a human image (statues?) it is very small, and not a real life form.

[MTStringer]

Remember the fellow on the old board who saw the miniature cities,heavy equipment,etc, in Mars pics? This could resurrect his career!

[American Patriot]

That would be Richard Hoagland. And some of the other guys associated with him.

[Toad]

Judging from the image, and various rocks in the foreground, I'd say whatever that is isn't much more than a foot tall at most. If it is a human image (statues?) it is very small, and not a real life form.

Yes. It's fairly close to the rover and I would guess you're about right on the size. Also, if you go to the large photo:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10214.jpg

Scroll slightly to the right, and down just a smidge, there is a second outcropping of the same color and roughly same size standing upright. Whatever they are likely less common geology outcroppings, certainly interesting, but perhaps not what we would love to find. I certainly don't know, but suspect they are just unusual geology. (Unfortunately)