Posted on 07/03/2016 6:32:57 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Curiosity discovered high levels of manganese oxide minerals in rocks investigated at a location called Windjana during the spring of 2014.
Manganese-oxide minerals require abundant water and strongly oxidizing conditions to form.
Researchers found high levels of manganese oxides by using a laser-firing instrument on the rover. This hint of more oxygen in Mars early atmosphere adds to other Curiosity findings such as evidence about ancient lakes revealing how Earth-like our neighboring planet once was, NASA reported.
The newly announced results stem from results obtained from the rovers mast mounted ChemCam or Chemistry and Camera laser firing instrument. ChemCam operates by firing laser pulses and then observes the spectrum of resulting flashes of plasma to assess targets chemical makeup.
The only ways on Earth that we know how to make these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes, said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, in a statement.
Now were seeing manganese oxides on Mars, and were wondering how the heck these could have formed?
The discovery is being published in a new paper in the American Geophysical Unions Geophysical Research Letters. Lanza is the lead author.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
It took its own picture. What you are looking at is a composite image, made from many photos, and the are cleverly combined to remove the “arm” that the camera is mounted on.
Animation of Curiosity Rover's Arm Movements for Taking a Self-Portrait
Well, it had water. The life bit is a stretch.
Whew! Thanks! That explains it!
The Martians fought Global Warming and WON
It probably spent days sitting here and a ton of pictures were taken so photoshoping would be easy
” ‘But they want trillions of more space dollars to find that out and conclusively determine something which will make no difference whatsoever on the state of things on this planet.’
I couldn’t agree more. Best example - Space Shuttle program. Thirty years, billions of dollars and 14 dead astronauts later - nothing.”
gaffer and oh8eleven have missed the point.
The Space Shuttle’s formal title was Space Transportation System: functional equivalent of a dump truck or a bus. Or possibly a cargo ship, or an airliner. We don’t think of those as flashy or glamorous - they do their jobs in support of other things. And when they wear out or become obsolete, we junk them, typically with less fanfare than NASA, when it sent Endeavour on its nationwide piggyback tour in September 2012.
No one complains about the monies spent operating a dump truck fleet or an airline. At least, Freepers ought not - unless they find value in siding with the moralizers of the whiny Left, who struggle endlessly to spend those “spare billions” on wealth transfer programs. Like SNAP, or Pell grants, or public housing: all those amazing social innovations, every one of them fully grounded in solid science, that return so many tangible benefits.
It had to have had a magnetic field at some time in the past to have an atmosphere. The molten core may have cooled to the point that the field died alomg with the planet?
A friend of mine who used to work on monitoring Soviet/Russian nukes said that the ISS was a make-work program for Soviet/Russian scientists, giving them something less threatening to work on. He wasn’t justifying the ISS, just saying what he thought was the thinking in our government over the years.
Thanks BenLurkin.from 03/01/2004: 04/06/2004: 12/21/2006: So, people involved started looking for something else instead.
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One theory is that Mars lost its magnetic field, so the atmosphere was eventually stripped away by solar radiation.
No molten iron core, no magnetic field, no protection from solar wind, which is mostly charged particles.
Solar wind is like sand paper on upper atmospheres of unprotected planets.
We are blessed to have a molten iron core.
I agree.
Global warming by those pesky Martians.....
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