"Painius" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 3 Oct 2012 23:27:55 -0400, "jonathan" wrote:


The 'Blueberry' Revolution!


Astrobiology in 2004, around the time the Mars rovers
stumbled into all those mysterious spheres and evidence
of water, looked like this conference below, a handful
of papers with an introduction asking....

"What the hell is astrobiology"?

NASA annual Astrobiology Conference 2004
Abstracts
http://www.aics-research.com/lecture...004/index.html


To this incredibly competitive and robust field
chock full of world class research.....


NASA annual Astrobiology Conference 2012
Abstracts
http://abscicon2012.arc.nasa.gov/abstracts/


This kind of scientific explosion in a particular field
is exciting to say the least, more so considering
the dramatic topic....life elsewhere. But it also
indicates just how many credible people believe
Mars ....should have life.


The blueberries that launched a thousand papers~
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...0P2956M2M1.JPG

Gee.

For a subject that involves extraterrestrial life, which hasn't yet
been proved, and which, around here anybody who mentions it gets an
automatic "ko0k" label, that's a lotta abstracts! LOL !


And they aren't graduate assistant wet-dreams anymore.
But mainstream researchers, and from all over.

The Opportunity Rover has shown everyone a vast potential
ecosystem has and does exist on Mars. So vast and habitable
the assumption is now that microbial life...should have evolved.

Vast stretches of the northern half of Mars have water ice
levels as high as 60% just a few meters below the surface.
And the temperatures rise as you go deeper, along with
more protection from solar radiation. Combined with
the salty soil, there should be a vast subsurface layer with
almost ideal conditions for microbrial life.

The only surprise now would be if life ...didn't evolve.

Look at this MSL rover image from just the other day.
At the very upper right is the mountain it's approaching.
See all those fine layers, one after another? Those are all layers
of sediment, each one formed on the bottom of a body of water
now eroded away and exposed as with the Grand Canyon.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-ima...CAM00440M_.JPG

And the band of dark soil that always seem to follow
the very same outline that a body of water would follow
were it there. Hinting that water ice exists below the
dark soil.

s


--
Indelibly yours,
Paine @ http://astronomy.painellsworth.net/
"Home is where, when you go there, they *have* to let you in."