Looks like Water on Mars to me!

Originally posted by Tetraspace
Here is the latest information NASA has on its Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

Thanks for the link, but you might also want to check out this site...

marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov...

On the left you will see in the gray listing..
"all raw images"
Spirit
Opportunity

Originally posted by Tetraspace
NASA would not lie to us, there could be a possibility that they are not allowed to share all the information gathered from their research.

So... they don't lie... they just withhold the truth...

Some information is too sensitive and needs to be carefully evaluated before it is released to the public.

Now what could possibly be "too sensitive" to release to the public?
Water on Mars? No they are talking about that... so all I could think of in the "too sensitive for public" category would be life and or aliens

NASA is a scientific community, it is not focused on cover-ups and concealing information.

NASA is also a military outfit. They spend just as much time working with the Department of Defense on Military missions..

Oh don't take MY word for it... read all about it at NASA...

Most of the preceding chapters touched on ways in which the Defense Department assisted NASA. Units such as the Defense Supply Agency, which administered many NASA contracts, the Army Corps of Engineers, which managed NASA's largest construction projects, and the Air Force, which detailed officers to serve as program managers and directors of center operating divisions, provided essential services in support of the agency. This was in addition to the early, once-only transfers of the Saturn project and other launch vehicles, spacecraft like Tiros, contractor-operated facilities like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the technical skills of the von Braun team. Simply to list examples, however, gives only the barest hint of the significance for NASA of the totality of the support; the Department of Defense (DOD) was the one Federal agency with which NASA had to come to terms in order to carry out its mission at all.

The Structure of NASA-DOD Relations

Time to wake up and smell the coffee...

Now then this is not the Alien Conspiracy section its the Science section soo lets go back to finding that WATER...

I need a big enough pool to throw ArMaP into


[edit on 12-6-2007 by zorgon]

Originally posted by nataylor
Just FYI, one of the authors of this paper is Ron Levin, son of Gil Levin who was the PI on the Viking Labeled Release Life Detection Experiment. Gil has been claiming that his experiment confirmed that there was microbial life on Mars.

And going by the pre- landing mission specifications they did find life back in 1976 , and even announced that they did before being told to change their minds, so like his father he is simply telling us the truth whatever the odds against him.

Maybe Mars even has life today. The evidence sent back from Mars by two Viking Landers in 1976 and 1977 was not clearcut (6). In fact, NASA's first press release about the Viking tests announced that the results were positive. The "Labelled Release" (LR) experiments had given positive results. But after lengthy discussions in which Carl Sagan participated, NASA reversed its position, mainly because another experiment detected no organics in the soil. Yet Gilbert V. Levin, the principal designer of the LR experiment, still believes the tests pointed to life on Mars (7). When the same two experiments were run on soil from Antarctica, the same conflicting results were obtained (LR - positive; organics - negative.) Soil from Antarctica definitely contains life. The test for organics was negative because it is far less sensitive than the LR experiment. The same problem could have caused the organics test on Mars to give a false negative.

www.panspermia.org...

In a scientific paper published in 1981, Levin and Straat demonstrated that in pre-flight-to-Mars testing of an Antarctic soil sample (#726), that their Viking Labeled Release experiment found microbial activity in the same sample of soil that was tested by the Viking GCMS.

The tests showed that the pre-flight Viking GCMS test model could not detect organic molecules in Antarctic soil sample that contained life. Yet this would be the instrument used to render the final verdict against any positive evidence of life on Mars that might have been found by the Viking biology instruments.

Strangely enough, one of the other Viking biology instruments known as the Pyrolytic Release experiment found traces of organic matter forming inside its test chamber. This occurred in seven out of nine PR tests.

Oddly enough the NASA scientific community at the time did not consider the matter seriously enough to warrant a full review, and Levin and Straat as a result became labeled as eccentric scientists for pursuing it.

www.spacedaily.com...

So basically the PR experiment was not a valid way to test the LR experiment results and this was well known at the them hence the fact that it was not supposed to be used in that way; they found life and they since they knew it but did not want us to know it they changed the finding and then proceeded to do the following:

Not since the twin Viking Landers set down on the surface of Mars over 24 years ago, has NASA included a biologist, paleontologist, or ichnologist (study of trace fossils) on any of its missions.

Viking was unique as the first spacecraft to land and search for life on another planet. As such, the Viking program enlisted the talents of three Principal Biology Investigators, a Biology Team Leader and co-experimenters.

www.spacedaily.com...

The Spirit rover, and its twin, Opportunity, which is scheduled to land later this month, cannot perform complex chemical or biological tests that could prove the presence of life. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration aims to tackle the hardest questions last, after years of geological spade work to see if Mars was, or still is, conducive to life. The robot geologists are to look mainly for traces of water, examine rocks, minerals and land forms for clues to the planet's watery past.

astrobiology.berkeley.edu...

You are after all quite unlikely to find something you are not looking for or will refuse to acknowledge when found.

Most other scientists disagree.

Most do but 25% tells me that the i am in good company and on the side of the truth .

PARIS — Three-quarters of the 250 Mars science experts meeting to analyze the results from U.S. and European Mars probes believe life could have existed on Mars in the past, and 25 percent think life could be there even now, according to a poll released Feb. 25.

The poll was announced during a press briefing following the First Mars Express Conference, held Feb. 21-25 at the European Space Agency’s Estec technology center in Noordwijk, Netherlands.

The results perhaps reflect the sober caution of scientists who refuse to jump to conclusions before conclusive evidence is in about the No. 1 issue on the minds of everyone attending the conference, held to review a year’s operations of Europe’s Mars Express orbiter.

www.space.com...

Ron Levin has been claiming that photographs from Viking and the current probes have been falsely altered by NASA to hide a blue sky (again, to the contrary to the opinion of many scientists).

This has in fact been proven by some journals/publications.

If the Martian atmosphere were to be completely cleansed of dust, the daytime sky would appear blue, just as our own sky, because of Rayleigh scattering by the molecules (primarily carbon dioxide molecules) which make up the atmosphere. Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s suggested that the Martian atmosphere had much less dust loading than in the Viking years. So perhaps the Martian sky was closer to blue than in the Viking years(or perhaps the Hubble Space Telescope was inaccurate on this matter until repairs were completed in February 1997). However, Mars Pathfinder pictures in 1997 showed essentially the same sky color and dust loading as the Viking landers in 1976.

calspace.ucsd.edu...

So they know they now have to do cover their tracks...

And here is how they managed to get red skies in the first place.

Most of the red Mars images resulted from using filters out of the range of human vision. Even recent rover panoramas and close-ups labeled “approximate true color” are made with infrared filters standing in for red. Olivier de Goursac, an imaging technician on the Viking Lander mission, argues that the glut of phony colors is easily avoidable. “NASA’s rovers have the capability for true-color imaging with the left camera eye, but they simply choose to use the L2 filter [infrared] as their red and the L7 filter [near-ultraviolet] for their blue,” he says. “They do this because they want to maximize the data stream by sending back to Earth images that can be readily used for stereo imaging with the widest possible range in the spectrum.”

www.discover.com...

Levin, a physicist now at Lockheed Martin in Phoenix, knew exactly how to tell if something was amiss. Two years earlier he had written a paper titled “Solving the Color-Calibration Problem of Martian Lander Images.” Like earlier Mars landers, each rover carries a color-calibration target—a set of primary-color squares used as a reference for its cameras. If the settings are correct the, squares seen through the rover’s cameras look about the same as matching squares on Earth. Levin tracked down Mars images that included a view of the colored squares, and what he saw confirmed his fears: “When the color-calibration target is in the same scene as the Martian surface and sky, it looks completely different. The blue panel is red. It’s as if NASA color-coded blue to be red, and green as a mustard-brown color.” The results dramatically transform Mars from an ocher planet to a red one.

The myth of a red Mars should have died in 1998, when the Pathfinder imaging team finished analyzing 17,050 images from the mission. The researchers conclusively showed that the predominant colors of Mars are yellowish brown, with only subtle variations. Subsequent “true color” images of Mars from Hubble duly show a yellow-brown planet. More recently, images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter in January and February of 2004 present Mars as a world awash in browns, blues, golds, even olives—hence Ron Levin’s surprise and dismay at seeing the garish old red Mars resurface in the cutting-edge pictures from Spirit and Opportunity

www.discover.com...

And some more details. www.goroadachi.com...

So they know perfectly well how to arrive at a 'true colour representation' ( or what we would see if we stood next to the landers) yet they keep coming up with these red schemes claiming the following:

Continued

The American space agency Nasa has been accused of doctoring its pictures of Mars to make the Martian surface conform to our impression of the famously red planet.
Nasa has been accused of digitally "tweaking" drab brown scenery to make it redder. It has even been suggested that Nasa removed green patches to hide evidence of life.

The theories gained credence after Nasa told New Scientist that "getting the colours right is a surprisingly difficult and subjective job", the magazine reports today.
Most of the pictures have been taken through green, blue and infra-red filters - instead of green, blue and standard red filters, which would have produced more accurate colours.

Dr Jim Bell, who worked with Nasa on the Mars rovers' cameras, said infrared filters were used because they helped geologists to distinguish rock types.
In reality, Mars appears red largely because of the dust in its atmosphere.

www.telegraph.co.uk...;jsessionid=4QRRQRIU1H00FQFIQMFSFFWAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2004/01/29/wnasa29.xml

I will easily believe it's 'subjective' ( pretty obvious considering it's Never A Straight Answer ) but it also happens to be fact that getting red is not the result of subjectivity but the result of deliberate manipulation.

sci.esa.int...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

Those are from a list i compiled some time ago and i hope they still work.

When you have a looked at the published literature it wont be hard to find a Mars with massive forests, running streams and large lakes&possible seasonal oceans and skies that are quite blue to the human eye.

Stellar

Originally posted by pondrthis
I personally (not to :flame

believe that there is no liquid water on Mars (except for under the ice cap, perhaps).

www.marsanomalyresearch.com... But they have large scale seasonal flooding at least? Why do i find so many pictures with clear shorelines and apparent standing water?

www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.esa.int...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...

Why do some scientist admit that it's not only possible , even within current admitted atmospheric conditions that strangely happens to be just about right, but likely in certain spots on Mars?

"The three papers provide an overwhelming case for new thinking about recent geological activity on Mars," writes Baker in an analysis of the work.

Cataclysmic flooding

Baker said the findings support a 1991 hypothesis, then considered outrageous, that Mars has experienced episodes of cataclysmic flooding in modern times. Water is thought to have formed temporary seas, but researchers had long assumed it all evaporated into the thin Martian air.

Many scientists now agree that much of the water remained.

www.space.com...

And on the surface as so many of those pictures seems to prove.

"First of all, you have to remember that the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is very close to the triple point of water," explains Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "You only have to increase the pressure a little bit to make liquid water possible."

"That's the average," says Haberle, "so some places will have pressures that are higher than 6.1 millibars and others will be lower. If we look at sites on Mars where the pressure is a bit higher, that's where water can theoretically exist as a liquid."

"There are 5 five distinct regions where we might sometimes find surface water: in the Amazonis, Chryse and Elysium Planitia, in the Hellas Basin and the Argyre Basin. Together they comprise about 30% of the planet's surface. That's not to say that liquid water really does exist in those places, just that it could."

science.nasa.gov...

Thirty percent, isn't that a damn large area?

Rumors about what has been actually identified are about as fluid as liquid itself, from water-ice deposits, concentrations of iron, to Martian springs, and even Old Faithful-like geysers.

www.space.com...

A giant patch of frozen water has been pictured nestled within an unnamed impact crater on Mars.

Researchers studying the images are sure it is not frozen carbon dioxide (CO2), because CO2 ice had already disappeared from the north polar cap at the time the image was taken.

The team has also been able to detect faint traces of water-ice along the rim of the crater and on the crater walls.

news.bbc.co.uk...

SPACE.com has learned that NASA has discovered evidence of water on the Red Planets surface. The finding, made bythe Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, fuels hopes that there may be life onMars.

Sources close to theagencys Mars program said the discovery involves evidence of seasonal deposits that could be associated with springs on the planets surface

NASA announces discovery of evidence of water on Mars

It's early summer in the northern hemisphere, and the North polar cap has retreated to about 80 degrees N latitude; the "residual" summer cap, which is composed of water ice, is about one-third the size of the "seasonal" winter cap, which consists mostly of carbon-dioxide frost (dry ice) condensed on the surface. The polar cap is surrounded by a "sand sea" made up of dark sand dunes. A distinct belt of water-ice clouds extends over much of this hemisphere.

hubblesite.org...

Only we see the photo's clearly indicating tidal activity and shorelines so not all the water from those melting polar caps 'evaporated'.

And if these vexing problems weren't enough, recent images from MOC reveal a startling new puzzle. In nearly a dozen different locations on Mars - all of them far from the equator - there are signs that water has been seeping out of the walls of valleys and craters, forming small gullies. Some scientists speculate that this activity is very recent, perhaps occurring within the past 10 years; others say 10 million years is more likely.

Yet many aspects of these seepage gullies defy common sense. "They sure look like water-worn features," says Mike Carr, "but they seem to contradict what we know about the stability of water." They occur not only in the coldest regions on Mars, but on slopes facing away from the Sun, where the temperature rarely gets above minus 50 degrees Centigrade. Yet the water appears to be seeping out from only 100 meters below the surface, a depth at which scientists previously believed Mars's crust to be frozen solid. Scientists are busily working to devise an explanation for this phenomenon.

science.nasa.gov...

A team of researchers from the University of Arkansas has measured water evaporation rates under Mars-like conditions, and their findings favor the presence of surface water on the planet. Water on the planet's surface makes the existence of past or present life on Mars a little more likely, according to the group.

Derek Sears, director of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, and his colleagues graduate student Shauntae Moore and technician Mikhail Kareev reported their initial findings at the fall 2003 meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the AAS.

The researchers have brought on-line a large planetary environmental chamber in which temperature, pressure, atmosphere, sunlight and soil conditions can be reproduced. Sears and his colleagues use the chamber to investigate the persistence of water under a range of physical environments and to study its evaporation.

"These findings suggest that even under worst case scenarios, where wind is maximizing evaporation, evaporation rates on Mars are quite low," Sears said. This implies that surface water could indeed exist, or have existed recently, under the given conditions on Mars.

www.spaceref.com...

And you would be surprised how long i could keep on giving you information you could have found on your own.

I also believe that there is no life higher than microbes (anaerobic bacteria or possibly archaebacteria).
My reasoning?

Your reasoning happens to be entirely wrong and here are some clues as to why a more informed position would not have been hard to manage.

Conclusion and biological interpretation of DDSs: We
found that the circular shape of DDSs is independent from
local small-scale topographic variation. Fig. 4 shows surface
pattern of grooves on the top of the ice coverage, which remained
untouched while gray and dark spotting had been
advancing beneath them. This observation and existence of
DDS-holes may be interpreted so that the development of the
DDSs begins from the bottom of the frosted ice-snow layer.
This may imply that the melting/evaporation process “eats
up” the frosted layer from the bottom where the DDS centers
develop, which become the dark holes of the DDSs.

The bulk radial symmetry, the flowing (seepage) patterns
and the defrosting beginning from bottom of DDSs suggested
us a biological interpretation of the all DDS phenomena.
Therefore we proposed that for interpreting these complex
seasonal phenomena the sublimation processes should
be combined with some kind of biological activity [1, 2].
Under Martian circumstances the only possible solvent is
liquid water with some salt component.

We interpreted the sequence of DDS formation and
changes as a biomarker [8]. If Martian Surface Organisms
(MSOs) exist, they could dwell below the surface ice, which
is heated up by their absorption of sunlight. Later they grow
and reproduce through photosynthesis and they can generate
their own living conditions. Not only liquid water, but even
water vapor can sustain this form of life. Water vapor can
migrate in the soil below the CO2 frost cover supporting the
life conditions for endolithic type communities and this activity
enhances the defrosting/melting process on the top of
the dark dune surface

www.lpi.usra.edu...

Continued

"I stand before you and tell you, quite honestly, I'm shocked by these results," said Michael Mumma, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Mumma and colleagues discovered unusually high levels of methane at two places in Mars' atmosphere: above the Hellas Basin, a giant impact scar in Mars' southern hemisphere, and Valles Marineris, the great canyon system near the Martian equator.

Methane is a gas that, on Earth, is produced naturally by plants and animals, such as in wetlands and in the stomachs of cows. On Mars, methane is much rarer. It isn't produced in the atmosphere and likely would be destroyed there by chemical reactions within a few hundred years.

So finding methane in the atmosphere suggests that something on Mars' surface is producing it, Mumma said. The question is whether that something is alive.

seattletimes.nwsource.com...

His no more 'shocked' than i am but i guess mine is due to the fact that they will not admit what is becoming ever more obvious.

At the same meeting, NASA's Planetary Protection Officer, John Rummel, described the alternative explanations: "methane in the atmosphere...is a detection from the planetary Fourier spectrometer. ESA, the European Space Agency, has put out an announcement that it's been detected at 10 to 20 parts per billion. Well, methane in the atmosphere on Mars can mean one of three things: either vulcanism, possibly microbial life, or maybe cows. We haven't seen the cows yet. I doubt that we'll find them. But one of the other two would be a very interesting thing to find out."

www.astrobio.net...

Cow jokes? I am still happy telling people about trees but i suppose i could have started making cow jokes as well.

In scientific terms, the methane line detected is "very strong indeed," Mumma noted. Using the high-tech infrared spectrometers, spectra of six narrow longitudinal bands across the face of Mars were taken. Such spectra involve analyses of light broken into its rainbow of colors.

"Every one of these longitudes shows a very substantial enhancement in the equatorial zone," Mumma explained. "So this is a very intense source of methane on Mars in this region. It also requires a very rapid decay of methane … more rapid than photochemistry would allow."

On Mars, the photochemical lifetime of methane is very short — roughly 300 years. Therefore, any methane now lingering within the Martian atmosphere must have been released recently.

www.msnbc.msn.com...

A ' very strong' methane line? Where does methane normally come from?

A third option - that it was produced by some unknown chemical reaction - is possible, but unlikely, they say.

Prof Colin Pillinger, the Open University space scientist behind the Beagle 2 lander, said: "This may not say that there's life on Mars, but it doesn't half get close. Whether it is produced by organisms now or from volcanic activity, the primary source of methane is microbes.

"Most of the natural methane gas released during geological activity on the Earth originally comes from the decomposition of organic matter.
"On a planet like Mars, methane doesn't hang around so you have to find a way of constantly replenishing it. It is very difficult to produce except from a biological source."

www.telegraph.co.uk.../news/2004/03/30/wmars30.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/03/30/ixworld.html

So by some reading we know it really has to be life and by the looks of it alot of it... Any chance we have seen what might be part of active biosphere?

www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
barsoom.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...
www.msss.com...

Why so scientist are still doing their best to deny it is obvious but why do you?

-Pictures taken by the rover are not taken in typical visible spectra. They use infra-red and ultra-violet, as well as nightvision techniques. Basically, what looks like water could very well just be sand or a dry clay.

They tend to indicate which instruments were used so you can check before judging.

-The "footprints" of the rover that are well defined could be in clay, not mud. Clay can be entirely dry, it just needed water at some point in order to form (grain size of soil must decrease to a finer consistency).

Sure but why can't it be mud when we can observe frost on the surface and know that temperatures close to the ground may easily allow ( especially when considering the roles of salts in the soil) liquid water that could create muddy topsoil?

It is still too early to say for sure if rocks have weathering rind from the Martian wind, he said. But, he noted, "We may not have to struggle to look at these rocks because Mars may have cleared them off for us."

Squyres described as "bizarre, really weird" the way in which the crater floor seems to have responded to the dragging of the rover's airbags, which deflated after the lander bounced down onto the surface after being released from its parachute. "I don't understand it," he said. Surface pebbles seem to have been squished into the soil around the lander, which appears like layers of cohesive material. "It looks like mud, but can't be mud. It looks like when it is scrunched, it folds up," said Squyres, who added, "This is something I have never seen before."

www.news.cornell.edu...

When one tries so hard to deny observation you can look quite foolish.

NASA's Opportunity rover sent back new images from Mars showing that small spheres previously found on the surface also exist below, in a trench the rover dug. Hints of salty water were also found in the trench, but much more analysis is needed to learn the true composition.

Meanwhile Opportunity's twin rover, Spirit, is about to dig a trench of its own in order to investigate soil that sticks to its wheels, suggesting the fine-grained material might be moist.

In a press conference today, officials said the soil at both locations could contain small amounts of water mixed with salt in a brine that can exist in liquid form at very low temperatures...

Water is the main thing scientists are searching for at Mars, because all life as we know it requires liquid water...

www.space.com...

Moist? Mud? But that ain't possible, right?

Scientists were also surprised by how little the soil was disturbed when Spirit's robotic arm pressed the Moessbauer spectrometer's contact plate directly onto the patch being examined. Microscopic images from before and after that pressing showed almost no change. "I thought it would scrunch down the soil particles," Squyres said. "Nothing collapsed. What is holding these grains together?"

www.sciencedaily.com...

So they can not seem to explain it by any other means than the 'mud' solution but since it 'can't' be mud they will eternally wonder about this 'mystery? Our best minds they tell me....

-The temperatures on Mars reach 500 deg(C or F I forget, still high) in the day and -500 deg at night.

Your not 'forgetting' you 'guessing' and badly at that. Someone mentioned the day and night temperatures earlier but it's admitted that daytime surface temperatures may reach 27 degrees Celsius on some days and over relatively large areas.

Without an atmosphere it is impossible to contain the heat required for this stuff.

But it has a atmosphere and by the looks of it quite a extensive and thick one.

The new high-altitude cloud layer has implications for landing on Mars as it suggests the upper layers of Mars' atmosphere can be denser than previously thought. This will be an important piece of information for future missions, when using friction in the outer atmosphere to slow down spacecraft (in a technique called 'aerobraking'), either for landing or going into orbit around the planet.

These results are published online in the Icarus scientific magazine (vol. 183, issue 2, August 2006), in the article titled: "Subvisible CO2 ice clouds detected in the mesosphere of Mars", by F.Montmessin, J.L.Bertaux (Service d'Aeronomie du CNRS, Verrières-le-Buisson, France ), et al.

Source: ESA

www.physorg.com...

Just how thick you might ask ?

On Earth, the condensing substance is water vapor, which forms small droplets of water (typically 0.01 mm of ice crystals) that, when surrounded with billions of other droplets or crystals, are visible as clouds. Dense deep clouds exhibit a high reflectance (70 to 95%) throughout the visible range of wavelengths: they thus appear white, at least from the top. Cloud droplets tend to scatter light very efficiently, so that the intensity of the solar radiation decreases with depth into the cloud, hence the grey or even sometimes dark appearance of the clouds at their base.

en.wikipedia.org...

Now compare the following images taken from satellites around Mars and from Earth orbit.

Continued

www.msss.com...

www-star.stanford.edu...

hubblesite.org...

It should not be hard to find some for Earth if your interested in proving this to yourself.

Mars is often depicted as a dusty place, and it is. But it can be cloudy on the red planet, too. And Martian clouds are sometimes more like terrestrial clouds than you might think.

In this photo, taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and released earlier this month, clouds surround several of Mars' towering volcanoes. One of them, Olympus Mons, soars 15 miles (24 kilometers) above the surface. What are the clouds made of? Water ice, say scientists at Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the spacecraft's camera.

www.space.com...

And i have few remaining doubts about just how Earth like it is.

-If NASA was doctoring their shots, why would they bother releasing them? It's not public domain, you know.

Because when you hide stuff it's assumed that you have something to hide; disclosing so much information by 'hiding' it in plain sight is far more effective when you largely control the agencies that could interpret that data in ways you do not like.

-Furthermore, wouldn't we have been ecstatic way back in the 60's and 70's if there were in fact aliens?

'We' would but this is not about what 'we' want but what 'they' think we should be allowed to know.

The facts we know about the surface of Mars and the other planets in our Solar System are correct.

Yet they keep changing on a monthly basis? Do you do any reading?

[Alien contact would have been a milestone for humanity and Marsianity so there's nothing to have been hidden.

How people like you arrive on forums such as these are quite the mystery to me....

These are just the facts I base MY opinion on, take 'em or leave 'em.

Nothing remotely valid so nothing worthy of consideration.

Stellar

And then a three-in-one.

Originally posted by Tetraspace
]I don't put blind faith into anything....

That's a good start...

NASA would not lie to us,

They have consistently done so but for the most part they do it well enough so that they can always shrug and deflect the blame. We have however caught them obscuring or changing the true colours of Mars, altering photo's&science data strips to hide or obscure data and lying about their original findings about life on Mars. That is not a comprehensive list but it will have to do for now.

there could be a possibility that they are not allowed to share all the information gathered from their research.

That's still lying to the public who is funding their programs.

Some information is too sensitive and needs to be carefully evaluated before it is released to the public.

Not when the public is paying for it.

NASA is a scientific community, it is not focused on cover-ups and concealing information.

Well only the first administrator of NASA could be called a civilian and the rest have all been military men and in my opinion the purpose of NASA has always been the militarization of space hence their relative great success at keeping even the civilian 'programs' they do run from making full disclosures.

Without the government NASA would not have the funding it needs to pursue its research.

Without the people of America it would not and the people are not getting their money's worth. The pentagon gets plenty of money and NASA funds should not be used in the same secretive ways.

Your opinion on Mars is a good one, but what information and research do you have to back it up?

I am sure my earlier posts will serve to point out at least some of the evidence he is basing his claims on.

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
^
^^...and it's not really the temperatures that make Mars inhospitable to liquid water (on its surface), but instead it's the extremely low atmospheric pressures.

But are the atmospheric levels really that low?

"First of all, you have to remember that the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is very close to the triple point of water," explains Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "You only have to increase the pressure a little bit to make liquid water possible."

"That's the average," says Haberle, "so some places will have pressures that are higher than 6.1 millibars and others will be lower. If we look at sites on Mars where the pressure is a bit higher, that's where water can theoretically exist as a liquid."

"There are 5 five distinct regions where we might sometimes find surface water: in the Amazonis, Chryse and Elysium Planitia, in the Hellas Basin and the Argyre Basin. Together they comprise about 30% of the planet's surface. That's not to say that liquid water really does exist in those places, just that it could."

science.nasa.gov...

What of all the pictures that shows liquid water to be present on the surface of Mars today?

The air pressure is so low on Mars that liquid water almost immediatly turns into water vapor as soon as it is exposed.
I don't doubt liquid water exists underground or under the ice cap, or even that liquid water can exist for a few moments on the surface. But it is impossible for water to be exposed to those low pressures and remain as a liquid...it should all turn to water vapor.

Impossible? Well should the fact that we can observe water on the surface not then suggest that the atmospheric pressure is nothing like what we were led to believe?

Here on Earth, one of the things keeping our water in its liquid state is air pressure. If you put a beaker of water into a vacuum chamber, it begins to evaporate into water vapor, as if it is boiling (without the heat). Granted -- Mars' air pressure isn't that of a vacuum, but it is very low.

Thanks for the physics lesson but this is not a question of stupidity ( most reading know about air pressure and what happens when you raise or lower it) but one of the large volumes of information people are not aware of.

Originally posted by watch_the_rocks
I can't find the thread, but this is a picture I posted in it, if it triggers anyones memory:
Bottom right corner looks a LOT like water, but the same 'water' appears in other parts of the pic, and looks less and less like water.

But i hope you are not reaching a conclusion based on single pictures or pictures at all?

It's ridiculous, all this arguing about whether liquid water is on Mars. If it was there, then we'd know about it.

Well 'we' ,meaning i and good many here and in the science community, do know about it and it may be time for you to look past popular press for your information.

There wouldn't be all this shilly shallying about inconclusive evidence.

It's strange how inconclusive evidence can be when it requires that someone changes their mind about a dearly held belief.

Stellar

Thank you for all that Stellar...

You make rare appearances, but when you do, you sure make an entrance...

Could use someone like you at Pegasus... the pay sucks though

I am sending a U2U with an issue I would like to discuss with you before releasing my source. It deals with the Mars color issue, but I need help with some terms... and mostly I need to download the entire set before they disappear, something that may happen when I post it...

But thanks for the info. It will take me some time to process all your recent posts

The Planetary Society strongly attacks the New Scientist Article:

planetary.org...

I don´t get it.

The Planetary Society Weblog says that [I]"The white square shows you where the image comes from. It's in the middle of Opportunity's Burns Cliff panorama, on some of the steepest slopes that Opportunity saw before arriving at Victoria crater! Those can't be puddles -- unless the amazing "liquid" that puddles here on Mars in a freezing near-vacuum also has antigravity properties."[/I]

Steep slope? Antigravity ? I can clearly see an inmense ammount of rocks, even small ones, in the image. That can not be a slope.

Correct me if i´m wrong or if just made a bad interpretation of the text.

Double post.

Sorry.

[edit on 12-6-2007 by Orion437]

New Scientist and Ron Levin retract story:

n our story about the research, we acknowledge that the claim is highly controversial, citing an outside expert who says it would be "virtually impossible" for liquid water to exist without subliming in the planet's thin atmosphere.

But it turns out the claim is impossible for an entirely different – and much more basic – reason: the terrain in question is on the side of a crater, and is therefore sloped too greatly for water to pool into puddles.
...

But apparently they had, analysing just the smaller images without understanding the larger context of their surroundings – missing the forest for the trees. "I want to retract the claim in the paper that the smooth area we discussed was 'standing liquid water'," Levin acknowledged on Tuesday. "I am sorry that we made such a large mistake."

From the looks of This panorama image, the thing is on about a 30 degree slope.

[edit on 12-6-2007 by nataylor]

So, now they want to do a "mulligan" over at New Scientist? Cowards.

I guess when your sources at NASA threaten to shut you out, you have to start throwing out the retractions.

What a bunch of wusses.

That's ridiculous. The picture is taken on a freaking slope. Even Ron Levin, who claims NASA doctors photos deliberately to hide info about Mars, admits he was wrong. I see no reason he would bend to NASA's will

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
So, now they want to do a "mulligan" over at New Scientist? Cowards.

I guess when your sources at NASA threaten to shut you out, you have to start throwing out the retractions.

What a bunch of wusses.

What are you talking about? It's quite clear that the image was on a slop. I even mentioned this on page one of this thread. Just look at images from Endurance crater. You'll notice that the areas with the rocks with the cracks and crevasses with sand in between are all along the sides of the crater and that the bottom half is all sand, with small dunes formed at the very bottom. It doesn't take much effort to figure this out and realize that Ron Levin is in error.

Emily Lakdawalla pretty much blew this one away in her Planetary Society blog. Of course, the result had not been peer reviewed, and was only a conference paper. It really is a ridiculous claim, and some have gone so far as to label it pseudoscience. IMHO, that's a fair characterization.

Originally posted by jra
What are you talking about? It's quite clear that the image was on a slop.

And the other very many dozens we have of standing water of flooding incidents?

I even mentioned this on page one of this thread. Just look at images from Endurance crater. You'll notice that the areas with the rocks with the cracks and crevasses with sand in between are all along the sides of the crater and that the bottom half is all sand, with small dunes formed at the very bottom.

I always find it strange when some people do such great math when it comes to defending convention but have a hard time with basic addition when what they see is contrary to their beliefs.

It doesn't take much effort to figure this out and realize that Ron Levin is in error.

It does not take much effort to discover that Ron is infrequently wrong while you just keep putting your foot in it.

Stellar

so, why nasa hidding the truth ?

Originally posted by kaoru
so, why nasa hidding the truth ?

The theory goes that NASA has been ordered by The Powers That Be©, to keep people ignorant of the "truth" that the solar system and the rest of the Galaxy is teeming with life, because TPTB believe that the ignorant masses would riot in the streets and burn down the Vatican and just generally go ape, which would make it more difficult for them to keep the general populace in wage slavery and able to supply them with all the golden calves and altars necessary for the required baby sacrifices/cannibalism. Therefore, NASA spends billions in space exploration, but when they find bona fide proof of life, they have to debunk themselves and pretend it's something else.

Or something like that. You'll have to have Henry Kissinger or George Bush, Sr. fill you in on some of the specific details.

[edit on 13-6-2007 by SuicideVirus]