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Images Suggest Water Once Covered Mars

Reuters
posted: 44 DAYS 6 HOURS AGO
comments: 968
filed under: Science News
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WASHINGTON (July 16) - Minerals in the soil of Mars show it was covered once by lakes, rivers and other bodies of water that could have supported life, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

Was the Red Planet Once the Wet Planet?

Echus ChasmaG.Neukum, ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / Reuters

Mars once was covered by lakes, flowing rivers and other wet environments that had the potential to support life, researchers said Wednesday. Above, Echus Chasma is one of the largest water source regions on the Red Planet.

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Last month the Mars Phoenix Lander found ice on the surface of the planet, but it is frozen hard and covered by red dust. Writing in the journal Nature, a team of scientists shows that the ice is left over from warmer, wetter times.
"This is really exciting because we're finding dozens of sites where future missions can land to understand if Mars was ever habitable and if so, to look for signs of past life," said John Mustard of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who worked on the study.
"The minerals present in Mars' ancient crust show a variety of wet environments," Mustard said.
His team used the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) and other instruments on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to look at colors in reflected sunlight. This helps determine what minerals are there.
"Water must have been creating minerals at depth to get the signatures we see," Mustard said in a statement.

Examining Mars

Mars Lander prepars to dig, July 14, 2008NASA / AP

NASA scientists said Thursday they had definitive proof that water exists on Mars after further tests on ice found on the planet in June by the Phoenix Mars Lander. "We have water," said scientist William Boynton. Here, the lander's Robotic Arm scoop reaches for a soil sample on July 14.

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The clay minerals would have to have been formed at low temperatures, the researchers said.
"What does this mean for habitability? It's very strong," Mustard said. "It wasn't this hot, boiling cauldron. It was a benign, water-rich environment for a long period of time."
The findings fit with the analysis from the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which, besides ice, found alkaline soil that could have supported life.
"The big surprise from these new results is how pervasive and long-lasting Mars' water was, and how diverse the wet environments were," said Scott Murchie, CRISM's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, suggest water interacted with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period on Mars, about 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago.
"In most locations the rocks are lightly altered by liquid water, but in a few locations they have been so altered that a great deal of water must have flushed though the rocks and soil," Mustard said.
Another study, published in Nature Geosciences, found that the wet conditions persisted for a long time. It found evidence of river channels forming a delta where the river emptied into a crater lake.
"The distribution of clays inside the ancient lakebed shows that standing water must have persisted for thousands of years," said Brown University's Bethany Ehlmann.
"Clays are wonderful at trapping and preserving organic matter, so if life ever existed in this region, there's a chance of its chemistry being preserved in the delta."
Reporting by Maggie Fox; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Vicki Allen.
Copyright 2008, Reuters
2008-07-16 18:36:18
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Darndaffyduck2

03:19 PMAug 02 2008

remember noah's ark? 40 days and 40 night? well there is cuz you could see mark on mars look like water has been sucked out in to space by comet or metorite hitting mars to make it water big explosion..notice rover did say it has salt water everywhere on land...so, god probably send metorite hit mars to make water out into sky, water traveled to earth arrive to make lot of rain then someone found mars rock on north pole..we have saltwater everywhere...so, what do you think?

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STaRgAzEr33154

11:14 PMJul 24 2008

R1951GREEN 03:16 AMJul 23 2008 GO MARS SOON!! PRESIDENT BUSH SAY SO. HUMAN GO MARS THREE AND HALF YEAR AGO? WHERE HIS WORD!! DONT DELAY HUMAN TO GO MARS ? WHEN@@@@WTF?

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R1951GREEN

03:17 AMJul 23 2008

GO MARS SOON!! PRESIDENT BUSH SAY SO. HUMAN GO MARS THREE AND HALF YEAR AGO? WHERE HIS WORD!! DONT DELAY HUMAN TO GO MARS ? WHEN?

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R1951GREEN

03:16 AMJul 23 2008

GO MARS SOON!! PRESIDENT BUSH SAY SO. HUMAN GO MARS THREE AND HALF YEAR AGO? WHERE HIS WORD!! DONT DELAY HUMAN TO GO MARS ? WHEN?

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sixeyes4dinner

07:34 PMJul 22 2008

MYeager2 12:45 PMJul 22 2008 TOO BAD AOL DOESN'T HAVE REAL REPORTERS, THE BIGGEST STORY SURROUNDING THE PHOENIX LANDER IS THE SILENCE OF THE TEAM RUNNING IT. KEEPING EVERY BIT OF THE MISSION SECRET, ODDEST THING NASA HAS EVER DONE@@@@@ Silence? There is no silence, quite the contrary. I suppose you would come to that conclusion, if you limited your search for knowledge to AOL coverage. By the way, this is a Reuters article, not AOL. According to my search engine, it took 0.37 seconds to find the official Phoenix website: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/news.php. If you can spare an additional few tenths of a second, you can find other sources that contradict your theory of 'silence', but that wouldn't be a good thing, would it?

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HBurns1351

03:02 PMJul 22 2008

TjHaEcMoAbN - I gather you didn't get the memo. Creationists have been advised not to use the tornado in the junkyard argument because it is too easy for even a grade school student to find the flaw in the argument. Besides the fact that evolution does not rely on chance, the real flaw is that biological organisms can reproduce and pass on changes to genetic information. Now if you're talking about Abiogenesis, you have the problem that Evolution is not Abiogenesis and regardless of your desire to conflate the two sciences, they are not the same.

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benne841

02:36 PMJul 22 2008

tJ, that's where you Creationist make your fatal mistake. Evolution is not Chance. It is SELECTION BY REPRODUCING organisms. NATURAL SELECTION! Chosen by all sorts of mating rituals.

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TjHaEcMoAbN

02:26 PMJul 22 2008

TO BENNEBenne: consider this, a man sees Northwestern airplane parts strewn all over the place on an airplane runway. All of a sudden a tornado comes and destroys everything in the area. When the dust settles, LOOK! there! there is an AIRPLANE! the airplane has been constructed perfectly, not one PART is missing. OBVIOUSLY this story is fake. And a very bad fake at that. Now TRY to think about how much MORE COMPLEX the EARTH is than an airplane! The earth is so complex and so wonderful, we most likely haven't even begun to FATHOM all the wonders that can be found on Earth's surface. Now if you think the story about the airplane is just about the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard (which you should), think about attributing the EARTH, a place unquestionably superior to any airplane you could EVER find, to CHANCE.

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MYeager2

12:45 PMJul 22 2008

TOO BAD AOL DOESN'T HAVE REAL REPORTERS, THE BIGGEST STORY SURROUNDING THE PHOENIX LANDER IS THE SILENCE OF THE TEAM RUNNING IT. KEEPING EVERY BIT OF THE MISSION SECRET, ODDEST THING NASA HAS EVER DONE.

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benne841

11:55 AMJul 22 2008

New44moon: Consider this.....if Evolution were not a biological fact genetic engineering - the transfer of genes from one organism to another- would be impossible. Plant genes can be transfered into other plants, transfered into animals and both plant and animal genes can be transfered into human beings. This can be done BECAUSE ALL LIFE ON EARTH IS BIOLOGICALLY RELATED BY COMMON ANCESTORS!

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