MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

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MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by bystander » Fri Oct 09, 2015 2:25 am

NASA's Curiosity Rover Team Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars
NASA | JPL-Caltech | MSL Curiosity | 2015 Oct 08
[img3="Strata at Base of Mount Sharp - Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A view from the "Kimberly" formation on Mars taken by NASA's Curiosity rover. The strata in the foreground dip towards the base of Mount Sharp, indicating the ancient depression that existed before the larger bulk of the mountain formed.
"]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/ima ... 839_ip.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
A new study from the team behind NASA's Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity has confirmed that Mars was once, billions of years ago, capable of storing water in lakes over an extended period of time.

Using data from the Curiosity rover, the team has determined that, long ago, water helped deposit sediment into Gale Crater, where the rover landed more than three years ago. The sediment deposited as layers that formed the foundation for Mount Sharp, the mountain found in the middle of the crater today.

"Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago, delivering sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp," said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and co-author of the new Science article to be published Friday, Oct. 9.

The findings build upon previous work that suggested there were ancient lakes on Mars, and add to the unfolding story of a wet Mars, both past and present. Last month, NASA scientists confirmed current water flows on Mars. ...

Wet Paleoclimate of Mars Revealed by Ancient Lakes at Gale Crater
California Institute of Technology | 2015 Oct 08

Deposition, exhumation, and paleoclimate of an ancient lake deposit, Gale crater, Mars - J. P. Grotzinger et al
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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by Sawngrighter » Fri Oct 09, 2015 4:16 pm

Marvellous how new discoveries completely turn upside old "knowledge" .. for instance .. 'Mars was always dry and arid.'

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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by geckzilla » Fri Oct 09, 2015 8:56 pm

How old is this knowledge you're talking about? The water on Mars thing and the search for that water has been going on for so long that it's a long running joke at this point. That APOD is over ten years old! Back before we had really nice telescopes, some scientists thought seasonal vegetation might be a good explanation for the variation in some splotchy surface brightness seen throughout the Martian year. Turns out it was just sandstorms.
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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by neufer » Fri Oct 09, 2015 10:07 pm

geckzilla wrote:
Sawngrighter wrote:
Marvellous how new discoveries completely turn upside old "knowledge" .. for instance .. 'Mars was always dry and arid.'
How old is this knowledge you're talking about? The water on Mars thing and the search for that water has been going on for so long that it's a long running joke at this point. That APOD is over ten years old! Back before we had really nice telescopes, some scientists thought seasonal vegetation might be a good explanation for the variation in some splotchy surface brightness seen throughout the Martian year. Turns out it was just sandstorms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal wrote:
<<For a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were canals on Mars. These were a network of long straight lines in the equatorial regions from 60° N. to 60° S. Lat. on the planet Mars. They were first described by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli during the opposition of 1877, and confirmed by later observers. Schiaparelli called these canali, which was translated into English as "canals".

Some people went so far as to propose the idea that the canals were irrigation canals built by a supposed intelligent civilization on Mars. Percival Lowell was a strong proponent of this view, pushing the idea much further than Schiaparelli. He theorized that an advanced but desperate culture had built the canals to tap Mars' polar ice caps, the last source of water on an inexorably drying planet.

While this idea excited the public, the astronomical community was skeptical. In 1909 the sixty-inch Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Southern California allowed closer observation of the structures Lowell had interpreted as canals, and revealed irregular geological features, probably the result of natural erosion.

In 1907 the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace published the book Is Mars Habitable? that severely criticized Lowell's claims. Wallace's analysis showed that the surface of Mars was almost certainly much colder than Lowell had estimated, and that the atmospheric pressure was too low for liquid water to exist on the surface; and he pointed out that several recent efforts to find evidence of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere with spectroscopic analysis had failed. He concluded that complex life was impossible, let alone the planet-girding irrigation system claimed by Lowell. The influential observer Eugène Antoniadi used the 83-cm aperture telescope at Meudon Observatory at the 1909 opposition of Mars and saw no canals, the outstanding photos of Mars taken at the new Baillaud dome at the Pic du Midi observatory also brought formal discredit to the Martian Canals theory in 1909, and the notion of canals began to fall out of favor. Around this time spectroscopic analysis also began to show that no water was present in the Martian atmosphere.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' influential A Princess of Mars (1912) describes an almost entirely desert Mars, with only one small body of liquid water on the surface.

The arrival of the United States' Mariner 4 by NASA in 1965, which took pictures revealing impact craters and a generally barren landscape, was the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Mars could be inhabited by higher forms of life. A surface atmospheric pressure of 4.1 to 7.0 millibars and daytime temperatures of −100 degrees Celsius were estimated.>>
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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by Ann » Sat Oct 10, 2015 5:08 am

I have a book at home, translated into Swedish, that was written in the Soviet Union in 1959, in the aftermath of the triumphant Sputnik mission. The name of the book in Swedish is "Mot andra planeter", which might be translated as "Towards Other Planets". (Don't ask me what the book might have been called in Russian.) The name of the author is given as P. Klusjantsev.

In the chapter about Mars, the Swedish translation from Russian, translated into English by me, reads:

When one looks at Mars, one gets the impression that Martians really should exist. Do you know why? Well, it's because the vegetation of Mars runs along very straight lines across the desert. Nowhere in nature do you find examples of naturally growing forests in such straight lines. Nowhere do rivers run dead straight as if their riverbeds had been laid out with rulers.

Only man-made constructions are that straight, for example railways, canals and forest lines grown for protection.

And then we find, as we move across the red sands of Mars, that someone has constructed a canal out of concrete with a system of pipings, which we had thought was just a crack in the ground.

There is nothing incredible about such an assumption. Water is scarce on Mars, as we just said. The Martians have to grow plants, both in order to get food and in order to purify their air. Also these belts of vegetation serve as protection against sudden sandstorms at the same time as they beautify the landscape. The Martians can build an extensive system of irrigation on their planet. Snow melts and water flows along the canals to where it is needed. The canals were made straight for the sake of convenience.


This book was originally written in Russian in 1959, as I said. In my home in the 1960s my parents had a Readers Digest's coffee table book about "nature". There was a chapter about dinosaurs in it, and there was another chapter about going to Mars. The chapter about going to Mars said that tourists would be going to Mars in the year 2000. When the tourists got to Mars they would find Martian vegetation and Martian rivers, but no little green men. I don't know what happened to that book, but I strongly suspect that the chapter about Mars was written by an American in the very late fifties or, more likely, in the early sixties.

So I agree with Geck that the idea of (relatively plentiful) liquid water on Mars has been around for a long time, and it was certainly alive and well in the early sixties.

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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by geckzilla » Sat Oct 10, 2015 7:16 am

Mars has often been said to presently be dry, even back when wild fantasies of canali were rampant. Perhaps the canali fantasy added to folklore of a dry, dying Mars to the a general public thirsty for such a story. I can't recall having ever read anyone state definitively that Mars was always dry. On the contrary, I can recall frequent stipulation about its possible wet past and whether wind or flowing water helped shape various structures. It's definitely dry now and that dryness, whether by accidental supposition or by actual science has always one of the key features of the red planet for modern astronomers. Theories of wetter, perhaps more Earthlike times are far more tantalizing than a dry history. If dry theories have indeed been dominant in the past then perhaps I don't remember them because they are boring.
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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by saturno2 » Sat Oct 10, 2015 12:37 pm

Very very interesting

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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by Sawngrighter » Sat Oct 10, 2015 8:03 pm

Dry Red Wine comes to mind.

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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by neufer » Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:35 pm

http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=6130 wrote: Map of Curiosity Mars Rover's Drives to 'the Kimberley' Waypoint

<<This map shows the route driven by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover during March and April 2014 in its approach to and arrival at a waypoint called "the Kimberley," which rover team scientists chose in 2013 as the location for the mission's next major investigations. The numbers along the route designate the sol number of reaching that point. These are the number of Martian days, or sols, since Curiosity's August 2012 landing. The arrival drive, on Sol 589, was on April 2, 2014. The drive entering the area of this map, on Sol 572, was on March 16, 2014.

The Kimberley (formerly called "KMS-9") was selected as a major waypoint for the mission because of the diversity of rock types distinguishable in orbital images, exposed close together at this location in a decipherable geological relationship to each other. The base image for this map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. North is up.>>
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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by neufer » Tue Oct 13, 2015 6:50 pm

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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by bystander » Tue Oct 13, 2015 8:16 pm

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Re: MSL: Curiosity Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

Post by neufer » Fri Oct 16, 2015 12:41 pm

http://www.universetoday.com/122899/opportunity-rover-prospecting-for-water-altered-minerals-at-crater-rim-in-marathon-valley/#more-122899 wrote: <<Nearly 12 Year Traverse Map for NASA’s Opportunity rover from 2004 to 2015
This map shows the entire path the rover has driven during almost 12 years and more than a marathon runners distance on Mars for over 4163 Sols, or Martian days, since landing inside Eagle Crater on Jan 24, 2004 – to current location at the western rim of Endeavour Crater and descending into Marathon Valley. Opportunity discovered clay minerals at Esperance – indicative of a habitable zone – and is currently searching for more at Marathon Valley.>>
http://www.universetoday.com/122453/exomars-heads-to-the-red-planet-in-2016/#more-122453 wrote: ExoMars Heads to the Red Planet in 2016
by David Dickinson on October 16, 2015

<<Will the EDM Lander become the first successful non-NASA lander to approach the Red Planet? Along with weather and atmospheric measurements, the EDM Lander will also make the first electrical field measurements from the surface of Mars. Unfortunately, EDM’s life will be short; Roscosmos originally intended to supply a 100-watt plutonium-powered RTG for the lander, but later opted to use an on-board battery. The EDM’s lifespan will be measured in a few days, at best.>>
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