Mars Exploration Rovers Update - February 13, 2004

Hibernating Martian life between droughts.

"rick++" wrote in message
om...
Hibernating Martian life between droughts.

Sons and daughters of "the blob"? Oh, nevermind.

" George" wrote in message
. ..

"rick++" wrote in message
om...
Hibernating Martian life between droughts.

Sons and daughters of "the blob"? Oh, nevermind.

Petrified gulls' eggs?

On that score the naturalist and explorer Samuel Clemens had some
interesting observations about life in a briny lake near the town of Mono,
California, in his book "Roughing It":

Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet
above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet
higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent,
sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth--is little
graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish
water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its
centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over
with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of
the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.

....

The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong
with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into
them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had
been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands.

....

There are no fish in Mono Lake--no frogs, no snakes, no polliwigs--nothing,
in fact, that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and
sea-gulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the
surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which
looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides. If you dip up a
gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these. They give to
the water a sort of grayish-white appearance. Then there is a fly, which
looks something like our house fly. These settle on the beach to eat the
worms that wash ashore--and any time, you can see there a belt of flies an
inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends clear around the lake--a
belt of flies one hundred miles long.

If you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look
dense, like a cloud. You can hold them under water as long as you
please--they do not mind it--they are only proud of it. When you let them
go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk
off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a view to
affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular way.

....

Mono Lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the ocean--and between
it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains--yet thousands of
sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. One
would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in Kansas.

....

Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of
any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what
it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.

....

In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake, I ought to have mentioned
that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking
masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles
inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock he
will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply
imbedded in the mass. How did they get there? I simply state the fact--for
it is a fact--and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his
leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion.

Project Gutenberg e-text: http://tinyurl.com/yru9p

"Carsten Troelsgaard" wrote in message k...
"sean" skrev i en meddelelse
om...

snip

Doesnt solder tend to bead up on flux? Maybe there is a comparison
there. Or as the martian atmosphere is different then here on earth
maybe certain chemical reactions from heat-caused situations like
crater exposions from incoming particles rocks etc would cause some of
the elements melted in the explosion to `bead up` on the colder
martian surface in a different atmosphere? Then wind distribution
withsand could give it the mix as an earlier post suggests above.
Sean

I don't know - it could, I guess. My current problem is, that the outcrop
judge by structure, is laid out in water: 1) the precipitation (being it
biogen or not, of some sulfate-compound) in water would be very Earth-like ,
2) The lowangle bedding with onlap is an inherent fluid-structure but could
be interpretated from wind-action. 3) The 'fused' or diagenetic appearance
as an outcrop is very 'wet' and Earth-like. 4) Some of the spheres seems
very fragile as probably could be expected for precipitations (gypsum
CaSO4*2H2O wither to waterfree, possibly powdery anhydrite).
I consider the biogen origin a possibility, but ascribe it to express but a
subtle or vague 'livelihood' that may tilt a geochemical balance that under
'almost any circumstance' will be calculated from spontaneous geochemical
equilibriums. Unfortunately we will probably not be exposed to very detailed
mineralogical data, so our speculations will stay speculations. - Looking at
an essentially dry Mars and argue 'wet' leaves a lot to be desired.

Not all observations of spheres conforms well to this 'wet' origin. Some
backbone-geology on what traces flowing water and an accompanying
hydrosphere would leave doesn't fit the picture. - So has Earth-bound
geology come to a halt? Looking at the Mars-desert that could be any desert
on Earth: No .... But most geological Earth-constants does not apply. What
consequences for surface-geology follow from a crust that does not move
continents around and does not renew itself and no longer disappears into
the deep? That could very well make a lot of difference, along with all the
other factors - especially including the perspective that these
Earth-different processes has worked for a long time.... but that's obvious

The 'stabile' crust may after all also make some of the geology easier.
Things are where they always have been: eroded sediments are put into the
holes, - and stay there. A deep sea or lake does not stay deep for a very
long time. And no orogens re-expose the sediment. What would this mean for
the traces we expect to be left by water?
The large-scale morphologic traces of water all conforms to one thing: There
is an overwhelmingly lot more sediment to be carried, than water to carry
it. - maybe a natural consequence of a retreating hydrosphere.

I wish that I right away could account for the wave-climate in a shallow
lake under the given circumstances, but I cannot - but I have reason not to
expect a very choppy and energetic seasurf. If the sediment-sink is off and
'too much' is standard, - what would be the consequence? Evaporites, but
also heterolites, that is an inter-layering of sand and clay - or straight
out laminated strata. Such an occurrence - and that's not much to ask -
could definitely point to a 'wet' origin.

If a hydrosphere 'on the edge' has been a standard, and a shower an ultimate
climatic anomaly - then I could see the raindrops in turbulence aggregate
dust to form spherulites - or raindrops preferentially nucleate around
dust-particles.

Carsten


I am an interested amateur only, so some of your terminology terms
elude me here. But your post is interesting an informative
thanks.Regarding your last idea of raindrops maybe from a severe and
infrequent storm rather than persistent earth like rainfall ? Although
one problem I thought was if it was rainfall it would have to be a
warm environment and the current climate is way to cold for a liquid
water to fall as rain. Anyways ifthe climate was warm enough and if
the nodules are composed of a material that fuses like a fast drying
cement one could possibly recreate soemthing similar here in a lab. Is
there a gas that liquifies at the present mars temp that could fall as
rain to replace the water part of this precipitate theory?

Otherwise in a dry scenario If the nodules are on the surface maybe
they were created more recently rather than be sediments from wind
action that have since been disturbed. Going back to the explosion
idea I suggested before,..
I dont know if there are enough craters to allow the statistical
chance of finding these all over Mars and at the lander site but I was
thinking a bit more on maybe how they were created, if by an impact
crater event.
If lets say at impact either water or another gas either present as
liquid or solid in the projectile or in the sediment ,were to be
instantly heated to extreme high tempratures. The material that the
nodules is made of could also mix in that instance with that breif
extremely hot gas cloud above the explosion site sort of like a soupy
particulate mix of gas and liquid droplets mixed with the nodule
element. As it is forced out and away from the site at great speeds by
the explosion the mixture is cooled rapidly as it spreads out into
the presumabley extreme cold of the martian atmosphere. This would
cause the cloud to precipitate out in a sense into droplets , all
small , and very rapidly `freeze` into shape in seconds as they are
speeding through the extreme sub zero martian atmosphere and then
presumably are hard all consistently sized small frozen droplets when
they land around the impact site. They then over time `freeze dry`
out the liquid water (or whatever liquid it is) in the sun and climate
to the present state of a nodule consisting of just the original
material which could have initialy pre impact have been a powder or
granular material like glass once was sand?
One idea would be to look for similar phenomena at old nuclear test
sites as in essense I am suggesting they a sandy or powdery medium
mixed in with a liquid and as baked `nodules in extreme rapid heating
, cooling and speeding `event` through a cold atmosphere to get the
small sized droplet shape. Maybe the thinner matian atmospher would
aerodynamically produce a rounder projectile rather than the heavier
earth atmosphere which would have elongated the droplets .As I
mentioned this phenomena may also occur similarly at nuclear test
sites.
They then erode by wind into the observed sandy mixture
Sean

"sean" skrev i en meddelelse
om...

snip

I am an interested amateur only, so some of your terminology terms
elude me here. But your post is interesting an informative
thanks.

What conserns Mars, I'm a newbe too

Regarding your last idea of raindrops maybe from a severe and
infrequent storm rather than persistent earth like rainfall ? Although
one problem I thought was if it was rainfall it would have to be a
warm environment and the current climate is way to cold for a liquid
water to fall as rain. Anyways ifthe climate was warm enough and if
the nodules are composed of a material that fuses like a fast drying
cement one could possibly recreate soemthing similar here in a lab. Is
there a gas that liquifies at the present mars temp that could fall as
rain to replace the water part of this precipitate theory?

No, CO2 does not have a liquid fase in the surface temperature/pressure
range. So any application of the idea would take a climatic anomaly away
from the present cold situation.

Otherwise in a dry scenario If the nodules are on the surface maybe
they were created more recently rather than be sediments from wind
action that have since been disturbed.

It's not advisable to do what I did - refere to an instance without a linked
picture. Because the spheres are widespread and have what what seem like
multiple modes or origins - and it confuses the discussion.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...209a/1M1295156
92EFF0312P2939M2M1_mi_RobtE_full-B016R1_br.jpg

This is a detail of the outcrop I refer to

Going back to the explosion
idea I suggested before,..
I dont know if there are enough craters to allow the statistical
chance of finding these all over Mars and at the lander site but I was
thinking a bit more on maybe how they were created, if by an impact
crater event.

I'm a little blank on that

If lets say at impact either water or another gas either present as
liquid or solid in the projectile or in the sediment ,were to be
instantly heated to extreme high tempratures. The material that the
nodules is made of could also mix in that instance with that breif
extremely hot gas cloud above the explosion site sort of like a soupy
particulate mix of gas and liquid droplets mixed with the nodule
element.

I figure that to be the general expectations

As it is forced out and away from the site at great speeds by
the explosion the mixture is cooled rapidly as it spreads out into
the presumabley extreme cold of the martian atmosphere. This would
cause the cloud to precipitate out in a sense into droplets , all
small , and very rapidly `freeze` into shape in seconds as they are
speeding through the extreme sub zero martian atmosphere and then
presumably are hard all consistently sized small frozen droplets when
they land around the impact site. They then over time `freeze dry`
out the liquid water (or whatever liquid it is) in the sun and climate
to the present state of a nodule consisting of just the original
material which could have initialy pre impact have been a powder or
granular material like glass once was sand?

Some seems fragile (atleas to me) others seems to be melted rock - it would
be tempting to unite such a diversity in an impact-event.

One idea would be to look for similar phenomena at old nuclear test
sites as in essense I am suggesting they a sandy or powdery medium
mixed in with a liquid and as baked `nodules in extreme rapid heating
, cooling and speeding `event` through a cold atmosphere to get the
small sized droplet shape. Maybe the thinner matian atmospher would
aerodynamically produce a rounder projectile rather than the heavier
earth atmosphere which would have elongated the droplets .As I
mentioned this phenomena may also occur similarly at nuclear test
sites.

They then erode by wind into the observed sandy mixture

They are observed in diverse places and seems to me to have been produced in
a widespread process and incooperated by different sedimentary processes.
There is a lot of parameters on Mars that differs from Earth - and I think
that most find it surprisingly confusing to puzzle the consequences together
when the desert-surface from a distance afterall looks very Earth-like. I
have in another post tried to let meteorological phenomena be responsible,
but most of the spheres seems too large (to mention one thing) to give such
an idea much credit.
Geochemical considerations may very well hide clues - pressure, temperature,
constituents and complexity should be sufficient to keep everyone at a
distance from even speculating or predicting.

It' a challenging problem.

Carsten

I've just looked at the Sol 27 panoramics for Opportunity, and it is
very clear to me that these are indeed sedimentary rocks. A simple
explanation would be that the spheres are the fossils of some simple
organism, that upon dying, would drop to the bottom and be buried in the
same manner that fossils here on Earth can be trapped in layers of sediment.
You can clearly see that the spheres are trapped in the layers, and that
they are eroding out. The least hypothesis is that the spheres were
deposited in the layers as the layers were forming. They are more durable
than the layers themselves, which is easy to see in the weathering images
from the microscope.
Furthermore, the spheres themselves show some characteristics that are
otherwise extremely difficult to explain using standard geological
processes. As a long time amateur rockhound, I have seen and collected many
specimens, both abiotic and fossils. I could easily understand a sphere
with consistent layering throughout, but not many spheres with similar
markings such as parallel grooves or chevrons.
I have compiled the microscopic images and performed some contrast and
image processing to extract features that are otherwise faint or difficult
to discern, and there are definitely common features on many of the spheres.
In my (perhaps flawed but experienced) opinion, we are seeing fossils.
There, it's been said.
I have a good reason to take this position- in 1992, I wrote an article
about the possibility of life on Mars (which was published in Astrolog
magazine), and used some of the reasoning of Thomas Gold about petroleum
formation and organisms that metabolize petroleum.
In it, I predicted that organisms could still be extant in the rock of
Mars if it consumed petroleum as many such organisms here on Earth do.
Also, I predicted that in that case, we should look for fine grained
magnetite, which is a metabolic byproduct of the digestion process of those
sorts of organisms.
This was four years before the flap about ALH84001 (1996) so in a sense
I beat them to press with at least two good predictions that matched what
they found.
At this point, I am very encouraged by what we are seeing that life did
indeed exist on Mars, and that if we were to bore deeply into the rocks
where petroleum might exist, we would discover that deep inside the planet,
there are still organisms that are alive and well.
After all, a loss of atmosphere here on Earth would not destroy those
organisms that live within the rock.
I intend to post these processed images on my website shortly, as this
is a very interesting development and it is good, reasonable support for
this idea.
Once again, I am not a geologist, but I am a scientist and have been a
rock collector for about 40 years. My opinions could be completely wrong,
but I believe that Opportunity has succeeded in finding remnants of extinct
Martian organisms.

Cheers!

Chip Shults

"Sir Charles W. Shults III" skrev i en
meddelelse ...
I've just looked at the Sol 27 panoramics for Opportunity, and it is
very clear to me that these are indeed sedimentary rocks.
A simple
explanation would be that the spheres are the fossils of some simple
organism, that upon dying, would drop to the bottom and be buried in the
same manner that fossils here on Earth can be trapped in layers of
sediment.
You can clearly see that the spheres are trapped in the layers, and
that
they are eroding out. The least hypothesis is that the spheres were
deposited in the layers as the layers were forming. They are more durable
than the layers themselves, which is easy to see in the weathering images
from the microscope.
Furthermore, the spheres themselves show some characteristics that are
otherwise extremely difficult to explain using standard geological
processes. As a long time amateur rockhound, I have seen and collected
many
specimens, both abiotic and fossils. I could easily understand a sphere
with consistent layering throughout, but not many spheres with similar
markings such as parallel grooves or chevrons.
I have compiled the microscopic images and performed some contrast and
image processing to extract features that are otherwise faint or difficult
to discern, and there are definitely common features on many of the
spheres.
In my (perhaps flawed but experienced) opinion, we are seeing fossils.
There, it's been said.
I have a good reason to take this position- in 1992, I wrote an
article
about the possibility of life on Mars (which was published in Astrolog
magazine), and used some of the reasoning of Thomas Gold about petroleum
formation and organisms that metabolize petroleum.
In it, I predicted that organisms could still be extant in the rock of
Mars if it consumed petroleum as many such organisms here on Earth do.

I think that you have forgot that petroleum is a product of decaying organic
material and that such material - though abundant on Earth - for good
reasons has not (to my knowledge) been found on Mars.

Also, I predicted that in that case, we should look for fine grained
magnetite, which is a metabolic byproduct of the digestion process of
those
sorts of organisms.

Metane-metabolizing organisms 'breath' in a oxygen-deficient environment and
makes it even more so. To expect an oxidized ironcompound in such an
environment does not make sense to me.

This was four years before the flap about ALH84001 (1996) so in a
sense
I beat them to press with at least two good predictions that matched what
they found.
At this point, I am very encouraged by what we are seeing that life
did
indeed exist on Mars, and that if we were to bore deeply into the rocks
where petroleum might exist,

It would be a really big surprise to find oil

we would discover that deep inside the planet,
there are still organisms that are alive and well.
After all, a loss of atmosphere here on Earth would not destroy those
organisms that live within the rock.

I'm not a biologist, but I'm under the impression that we talk bacteria with
cells. That is something that most Earth-organisms share and is believed to
origin in a sea. A wet past on Mars is not obvious (though present) and life
there would in my (not very skilled) opinion have had every chance to evolve
in a profoundly different path than on Earth. So basically I do not
preclude Mars 'life' but that it should be on a sub-bacterial level with a
sphere as a 'random' shape not expressing a cluster of symbiotic organisms
that produces a uniform shape with grooves etc. There is in my opinion a lot
of untested possibilities for a mineralogical origin - but chemistry too is
very different from Earth-conditions, and complex enough make plenty of room
for ideas that is not biological. Thinking chemistry in terms of
bio-chemistry is natural on Earth becaurse every little creture is involved
in chemistry and that a majority of geological processes in Earth
sedimentation involvs their work.

I intend to post these processed images on my website shortly, as this
is a very interesting development and it is good, reasonable support for
this idea.
Once again, I am not a geologist, but I am a scientist and have been a
rock collector for about 40 years. My opinions could be completely wrong,
but I believe that Opportunity has succeeded in finding remnants of
extinct
Martian organisms.

You would probably have to look further back in time to find suitable
Earth-derived 'organisms' to compare to Mars conditions - and there is not
much to look at so far back.

Carsten

February 21, 2004

Greg Crinklaw wrote in message :

Kenneth Chiu wrote:
The data embargo is unfortunate, but it's the way the system
works, for better or worse.

Worse.

Not only is all that true, but the work required to reduce these data
takes weeks.

Spectrogram and spectrograph production from data is easily automated.

At the Tuesday press conference (and I very much
appreciate their keeping us informed regularly,

I am so happy that you are so happy remaining ignorant.

they are under no
obligation to do that either)

Nor are they obliged to be assholes, they actively choose it.

it was suggested we might see some general
results on Thursday.

Which we didn't.

So to sum up our ignorant friend is just being an impatient jerk.

You may post your retraction here at your convenience, as the evidence
of the Thursday news conference directly contradicts your claim.

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net

I now have proof that these spherules are fossils very similar to tiny
crustaceans, similar to tadpole shrimp or trilobites. I have a paper in
submission for publication documenting the method I used for locating the
data. These are absolutely fossils, no doubt about it.

Cheers!

Chip Shults

February 25, 2004

"Sir Charles W. Shults III" wrote:

I now have proof that these spherules are fossils very similar to tiny
crustaceans, similar to tadpole shrimp or trilobites. I have a paper in
submission for publication documenting the method I used for locating the
data.

Feel free to share those methods with US on the usenet.

These are absolutely fossils, no doubt about it.

Proof is mathematical, science is demonstrative.

Besides, Jonathan has already clearly identified the spherules as the gemmules
of a microbial sponge colony : 'porifera jonathanii'.

Nice try, though. Keep up the good work!

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net