Ping!
Mars needs Visene?
It’s all because of universal warming.
Do you even read your own articles before posting??
Even they didn't even attempt to claim that
So instead of billions, they are thinking Millions of years old, according to the article. Not very YECy...
The argument seems to be that if it only takes a short while for the dust to turn red, if the dust is red it must mean it just happened a short while ago. Is that the way you read it? So if it only takes a day for my wall paint to dry, if my paint is dry it means I must have painted yesterday?
Why is Mars red?"There is something of a paradox about Mars," agrees Joshua Bandfield of Arizona State University in Tempe. His team recently showed that the planet has no large deposits of carbonates, which should have formed if giant pools of water had persisted on the surface. Bandfield suggests that liquid water must have occasionally burst out of the ground, carving channels and gullies, but that it quickly froze again in the frigid Martian climate.
by Hazel Muir
New Scientist
4 September 2003Martian soil may contain detrimental substanceNASA's Phoenix spacecraft has detected the presence of a chemically reactive salt in the Martian soil, a finding that if confirmed could make it less friendly to potential life than once believed... preliminary results from a second lab test found perchlorate, a highly oxidizing salt, that would create a harsh environment... On Earth, perchlorate is a natural and manmade contaminant sometimes found in soil and groundwater. It is the main ingredient in solid rocket fuel and can be found in fireworks, pyrotechnics and other explosives... The first test determined the soil was slightly alkaline and contained nutrients such as magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride necessary for living things. The second test found the highly reactive perchlorate.
by Alicia Chang
August 05, 2008Life on Mars? "Missing Mineral" Find Boosts ChancesNew images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show areas fo Mars where magnesium carbonate is exposed in 3.6-billion-year-old bedrock in Mars's Nili Fossae region.
by Victoria Jaggard
National Geographic News
December 19, 2008
Carbonate minerals contain carbon and oxygen and need liquid water to form. Common carbonates on Earth include limestone and chalk.
Previous missions had seen small percentages of carbonates in Martian dust. More recently the Mars Phoenix Lander found the minerals in the planet's arctic soils.
But until now, evidence for the source of these carbonates in Martian bedrock had been elusive, supporting theories that even if Mars once had bodies of water, they were too acidic to support life as we know it.
"Carbonate, like the baking soda in your refrigerator, dissolves quickly when exposed to acid," said study leader and Brown University professor Bethany Ehlmann yesterday at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
"So the fact that ... carbonate is still present means that the waters flowing through [Nili Fossae] must not have been acid" and could therefore have been conducive to life.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1975123/posts
Like salt used as a preservative, high concentrations of dissolved minerals in the wet, early-Mars environment known from discoveries by NASA’s Opportunity rover may have thwarted any microbes from developing or surviving. “Not all water is fit to drink,” said Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team who is a biologist at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass... “At first, we focused on acidity, because the environment would have been very acidic,” Knoll said. “Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found. This tightens the noose on the possibility of life.” Conditions may have been more hospitable earlier, with water less briny, but later conditions at Meridiani and elsewhere on the surface of Mars appear to have been less hospitable, Knoll said. “Life at the Martian surface would have been very challenging for the last 4 billion years. The best hopes for a story of life on Mars are at environments we haven’t studied yet — older ones, subsurface ones,” he said. NASA’s current rovers and orbiters at Mars pursue the agency’s “follow the water” theme for Mars exploration. They decipher the roles and fate of water on a planet whose most striking difference from Earth is a scarcity of water. “Our next missions, Phoenix and Mars Science Laboratory, mark a transition from water to habitability — assessing whether sites where there’s been water have had conditions suited to life,” said Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Where conditions were habitable, later missions may look for evidence of life.”