Mars Rover Spirit finds best evidence so far of possible Microbrial Life on Mars

Nasa says its Mars rover Spirit has discovered "the best evidence yet" of a past habitable environment on the planet's surface.

Click Here for Link

Could it be? We've been down this route before with that Martian meteorite found in a snowfield on earth. Maybe NASA is getting ready to put its toe in the water, so to speak, to test reaction to the possibility of extraterrestrial life......again?

I would think this would be the logical route for NASA to slowly expose the public to proof of ET life. The mainstream news covered extensively a few years ago the "Black Smokers" and life around them on the ocean floor of the earth. It'd be perfect to acknowledge evidence of life around an ancient "fumarole" on Mars, wouldn't it?



[edit on 12-12-2007 by CreeWolf]

[edit on 12-12-2007 by CreeWolf]

Fantastic news! yes there was life on mars about 10 thousand years ago. but the storms came and people had to be evacuted to earth. some didn't make it during the trip and died in space.

Great find, CreeWolf: star and flag

The link to the NASA's press release:

Mars Rover Investigates Signs of Steamy Martian Past
marsrovers.nasa.gov...


Silica-rich foil

Thank you for sharing this important news

Originally posted by jedimiller
Fantastic news! yes there was life on mars about 10 thousand years ago. but the storms came and people had to be evacuted to earth. some didn't make it during the trip and died in space.

That's a fantastic story, are these your own thoughts or have you any evidence to go with this claim?

Thanks CreeWolf, flagged.

reply to post by jedimiller


Fess up Jedi. You were with them; right?

I'd love to hear the source of this one as well. Please share?

I'd say this is a highly inaccurate headline. They didn't find signs of a microbial life. They found something that is habitable to microbial life on Earth. This is like saying that the caves they found on Mars are the best evidence yet that bears lived on Mars, just because you can find bears in caves on Earth.

The story is great, but the headline (and hence, this thread title), is inaccurate.

Originally posted by CreeWolf

Nasa says its Mars rover Spirit has discovered "the best evidence yet" of a past habitable environment on the planet's surface.

Click Here for Link

Could it be? We've been down this route before with that Martian meteorite found in a snowfield on earth. Maybe NASA is getting ready to put its toe in the water, so to speak, to test reaction to the possibility of extraterrestrial life......again?

I would think this would be the logical route for NASA to slowly expose the public to proof of ET life. The mainstream news covered extensively a few years ago the "Black Smokers" and life around them on the ocean floor of the earth. It'd be perfect to acknowledge evidence of life around an ancient "fumarole" on Mars, wouldn't it?



[edit on 12-12-2007 by CreeWolf]

[edit on 12-12-2007 by CreeWolf]

Creewolf, do not let anyone steal your thunder. I believe with 100% certainty that life as well as microbial life exists on Mars. I believe NASA knows this and eventually will release the news on the next ground zero mission findings called Phoenix, scheduled to land on Mars in 2008.

The Viking ground zero missions have already proved that microbial life lives on Mars. I believe it was another cover up by NASA once the news started to reach the public back in 1976 during our bicentennial year in the U.S. This info has to be released slowly for the other missions can be funded and carried out in the future. Many will argue the findings were inconclusive I say dream on. Rik Riley

[edit on 12-12-2007 by rikriley]

reply to post by nataylor


"Mars Rover Spirit finds best evidence so far of possible Microbrial Life on Mars"

What is wrong with the headline? True, I didn't capitalize the "Possible" part, which is staying true with the Spirit of the headline (pun intended). I think most Moderators would agree that there isn't anything wrong with an eye-catching headline so long as it isn't an outright fabrication.

Perhaps I should have went with "Space-Car finds Dirt".

Originally posted by Chemicalbrother

Originally posted by jedimiller
Fantastic news! yes there was life on mars about 10 thousand years ago. but the storms came and people had to be evacuted to earth. some didn't make it during the trip and died in space.

That's a fantastic story, are these your own thoughts or have you any evidence to go with this claim?

This guy rarely has anything to back up his posts. I'm thinking this is like a 10-year old sitting at the PC with milk and cookies after school.

Anyway, the big question becomes is this all the evidence there is, or is NASA holding out again? Still, this is great new information. Amazing what's been learned from those intrepid little rovers!

[edit on 12/12/2007 by centurion1211]

reply to post by CreeWolf


I don't have any problem with your post. You just repeated the headline. But the headline is inaccurate. The story mentions nothing about finding any evidence about microbial life. It's about finding geological evidence that there are structures that are similar to structures on earth that are habitable to microbial life. Again, as I pointed out, this is like jumping to the conclusion that if you find a cave on Mars, then it's the best possible evidence yet that bears lived on Mars just because bears live in caves on Earth.

The headline really should read "Best evidence yet of possible microbial life habitats on Mars."

As much as I would like for this to be true, I have to agree with nataylor. I'm not faulting the OP, as this was just a copy of the headline. But this doesn't even qualify as circumstantial evidence.

It may be that here is a likely spot for further exploration, due to X and Y and Z factors. But in my opinion, it is no more than that.

Is it just me or does some of the displaced soil around the Rovers tread marks look "dampish"? It certainly appears darker in color and clumps a bit differently to the lighter colored top soil.

Can anyone else confirm what I'm looking at? Is it a light and shadow thing or does the top soil undergoe some type of "bleaching"/fading?

I can see it now:

Right before NASA puts the rover into hibernation they decided to make a daring move on the new found soil! In an amazing turn of events they've managed to find something startling! Evidence of microbial life on our friendly neighbor, Mars. Although the rover was sacrificed in this attempt, it was well worth the chance of total failure and a loss of a great scientific tool.

Back to reality:

Blam! The interest in space exploration is sparked all over again across the globe. Imagine the amount of funding they'll get for any mission after such a discovery. The new space race has started, we all know that. Even without this discovery Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and the U.S are preparing to place humanity up on the moon permanently. Helium-3 is the goal and it's a grand undertaking that will cost billions... Just imagine how perfect it would be for them to discover life outside of our little blue ball. NASA would get such a huge boost due to public interest, it'd be unbelievable and would overshadow the first space race.

Not to mention, they wouldn't have to change a thing about their official plans! It's already a known fact there's no interest to put man on Mars before they test HAB on the moon. This'll just speed things up a'tad, allowing the U.S to be the prominent player (again) indefinitely.

Ah well, it doesn't matter. The next 40 years are going to be wild no matter what happens.

reply to post by Donoso


Another possibility. Maybe NASA is ready to take the Rover program "black"!?

Originally posted by rikriley
I believe with 100% certainty that life as well as microbial life exists on Mars.

How do you believe with 100% certainty?
Are you 100% certain that you believe?

The Viking ground zero missions have already proved that microbial life lives on Mars.

Sources Mr. MissInformation, Sources ...

I believe it was another cover up by NASA once the news started to reach the public back in 1976 during our bicentennial year in the U.S. This info has to be released slowly for the other missions can be funded and carried out in the future.
[edit on 12-12-2007 by rikriley]

The information that you believe has to be released. But in this case thats just your believes ..

Originally posted by tep200377

Originally posted by rikriley
I believe with 100% certainty that life as well as microbial life exists on Mars.

How do you believe with 100% certainty?
Are you 100% certain that you believe?

The Viking ground zero missions have already proved that microbial life lives on Mars.

Sources Mr. MissInformation, Sources ...

I believe it was another cover up by NASA once the news started to reach the public back in 1976 during our bicentennial year in the U.S. This info has to be released slowly for the other missions can be funded and carried out in the future.
[edit on 12-12-2007 by rikriley]

The information that you believe has to be released. But in this case thats just your believes ..

I am a 100% believer in what I believe LOL I believe that life exists on Mars

Me Mr. Missinformation? I do not think so I still stand by Dr. Gilbert V. Levin's findings of microbial life forms living on Mars.
www.biospherics.com/pressrelease/pr073097.htm
Rik Riley

I agree that the headline of the linked article is misleading but that's not the OP's fault. The OP's title is perfectly suitable.

While I'm not a believer in ETs visiting Earth and things of that nature, I do find it nearly impossible to believe that there aren't alien life forms residing on planets somewhere in the universe. I also believe that Mars harbors some type of microbial life, most likely somewhere beneath it's surface. It seems that NASA is incrimentally gathering evidence to suggest this and hopefully within the next few years we'll have some sort of confirmation

Originally posted by tep200377
How do you believe with 100% certainty?
Are you 100% certain that you believe?

Why not just tell us why you think the original claim , that they found life, was retracted when the information never changed? Why did the administrators decide that the pre-mission specifications for 'life' were no longer 'accurate' when they were positive for life?

Sources Mr. MissInformation, Sources ...

Since rik is not actually introducing information you can hardly call it misinformation! What i am about to do might however be called that if you wish to defend the lie that life was not found in 1976!

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...

But over a quarter of a century later, exactly what the robotic twosome did detect remains hotly debated. The scientific squabble centers on one Viking biology investigation: the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment. It used a small measure of scooped up soil, stirred together with a nutrient "soup" containing carbon-14.

The idea was that any living organisms present would digest the radioactively labeled nutrient solution, then belch off gases as life metabolized the nutrient. And guess what? The LR experiments on both Landers coughed up puffs of radiolabeled gas - evidence for microorganisms in the soil of Mars.

Another Viking experiment, a gas chromatograph mass-spectrometer (GCMS), built to identify organic molecules on Mars, found none to analyze.

That find threw the LR results into question. A default position adopted by a majority of scientists was that no life was present at the Viking sites. What the LR device yielded, said many of those assessing the Viking data, was a false positive result.

www.space.com...

So the instrument they used to throw out the evidence of life on Mars has been proven to be unable to find life on Earth. Do you think that instrument should ever have been used to judged the instruments that clearly worked?

The information that you believe has to be released. But in this case thats just your believes ..

This information has been available a long time but obviously it would have been very hard to find , for lay people at least, without access to internet!

Stellar

Originally posted by InfaRedMan
Is it just me or does some of the displaced soil around the Rovers tread marks look "dampish"? It certainly appears darker in color and clumps a bit differently to the lighter colored top soil.

Sure it does and your not the only one that thinks it looks 'dampish'.

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...

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...

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...

AM: In the corner of the Pancam image, where the airbag appears to have scraped along the ground, there's a rock - I think it's a rock - that Steve Squyres said looked "mud-like."

NC (Nathalie Cabrol): We all said that. When we looked at that we said, It's mud-like. But that's just looking at a picture. We still don't know its composition. The thing is that this material seems to be cohesive, to look like mud. It's going to be very interesting to find out its composition.

I'm thrilled because when you look at it, you can see a patch that has been removed by the scraping. It has been flipped over, but it's still sticking to the rock. This is probably something we haven't seen anywhere else on Mars, and it's going to be really interesting to look at it more closely.

Is there any moisture in this? We don't know. Is there some salt, and we're seeing particles sticking together? Once again, we're just in awe, and looking at strange things that look like things we know on Earth. It doesn't mean that they are.

www.astrobio.net...

Can anyone else confirm what I'm looking at? Is it a light and shadow thing or does the top soil undergoe some type of "bleaching"/fading?

So as you can see they see it but are doing their damnest not to 'presume' that it might in fact be exactly what it looks like. This is the type of science that gets done , or in fact not done, these days and it's no surprise that 'we' 'officially' still don't know if there is life on Mars THIRTY YEARS after they first sent test equipment. At this rate of 'exploration' i would be dead and buried before they 'officially' admitted the blatantly obvious!

Stellar