http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24920193-952,00.html

I guess they have to be careful when formulating newspaper story headlines so that they achieve the required objective. To convey a sense of truth ? Don't be daft - the objective is to sell newspapers.

I guess if they put Traces of Methane on Mars, nobody would read it, and if they put "Traces of Methane which may or may not be due to life or geology" it wouldn't fit in a headline.

Some people just read the headlines. For some people that fall into that category, they have found life on Mars already. Maybe it's not intelligent life - maybe Mars is just inhabited by knife wielding bogan racists who have an aversion to anything that comes from Earth, the blue planet. If it's not red, it's dead. They can't come here and wear space helmets - they could be concealing explosives! or worse - Religious texts.

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16408-rover-five-years/1

This month, NASA's twin Mars rovers are celebrating their fifth anniversary on the Red Planet, long outlasting the three months they were scheduled to survive (find out the three secrets to their success). This gallery highlights the rovers' biggest discoveries and most stunning images.

NASA's twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, blasted off Earth on 10 June and 7 July 2003 and landed on opposite sides of the Red Planet on 4 January and 25 January 2004, respectively. Their mission was initially scheduled to last three months. (Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech)



Almost immediately after landing in a region of Mars called Meridiani Planum, Opportunity made a watershed discovery: rocks at its landing site had formed in ancient acidic lakes. The evidence came from hematite - which almost always forms in water - in the form of tiny spherules called "blueberries" (pictured); distinctively curved lines of sediment that resulted from the gentle sweeping motion of a water current; and sulphate salts that may have been left behind when salty water evaporated (though other researchers have argued that volcanism or meteorite impacts could explain the sulphate sediments). (Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS)



Unlike its twin, Spirit did not immediately find evidence of water at its landing site in Gusev Crater. Orbital images had suggested the crater was once an ancient lake, but Spirit turned up little besides basaltic lava flows for its first six months on the planet (the lava may have buried evidence of any lake sediments once there). But the rover enjoyed a reversal of fortune when it reached the higher terrain of the Columbia hills, which are even older than the approximately 3 billion-year-old volcanic plains on Gusev's floor. It found intriguing sulphur-rich rocks that appear to have formed in the presence of water. The rock in this image, named Clovis, contains an iron-bearing mineral called goethite that can form only in water. (Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell)



In January 2005, Opportunity found an unusual, metallic-looking rock (pictured) near its discarded heat shield. It used onboard spectrometers to confirm that the rock was made of iron and nickel, showing that indeed it must be a meteorite that had fallen from the sky - the first meteorite ever found on another planet. In April 2006, Spirit followed suit, spotting two iron meteorites. Such metallic meteorites, which make up just a few percent of the space rocks expected to litter the Martian surface, are easier to identify based on their appearance and spectral properties than the more common "stony" meteorites. (Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell)



In March 2005, Spirit captured images of two dust devils - vortices that lift dust from the surface into the air - in one day (one can faintly be seen in this image). It was the first time any had been seen on Mars since the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. Around the same time, a separate dust devil apparently also swept the rover's solar panels clean of a year's accumulation of dust, restoring their power output to 93% of initial levels. (Image: NASA)



In April 2005, Opportunity got stuck as it was crossing a series of shallow, sandy ridges. It ultimately spent about five weeks trapped on a 30-centimetre-high ripple of soil nicknamed "Purgatory Dune" (shown here in this vertical projection woven together from images from its navigation camera). When it got stuck, its primary objective had been speed. It was cruising along at 200 metres a day and most of its software safeguards - which could have detected that its wheels were slipping - were turned off. That caused the rover to dig itself in more deeply than it would have otherwise. Mission members learned from the mishap, freeing the rover by driving it backwards and instituting periodic wheel 'slip checks'. In June 2006, those changes helped the rover quickly extricate itself from a sandy spot nicknamed "Jammerbugt", Danish for the "Bay of Lamentation". (Image: NASA/JPL)



On 19 May 2005, Spirit captured this spectacular view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater. This was voted the most popular image in a rover photo contest. (Image: NASA/JPL/Texas A and M/Cornell)

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/space/06/25/mars.water/index.html?hpt=T1

(CNN) -- Conditions favorable to life may once have existed all over Mars, the European Space Agency said Friday.

Two spacecraft have found evidence that liquid water was widespread over the red planet.

The ESA's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have discovered hydrated silicate minerals in the northern lowlands of Mars, a clear indication that water once flowed there, the ESA said.

The two spacecraft had previously found thousands of small outcrops in the planet's southern hemisphere where rock minerals had been altered by water, it said. Many of these outcrops are in the form of hydrated clay minerals known as phyllosilicates. They indicate the planet's southern hemisphere was once much warmer and wetter than it is today.

No such sites had been found in the northern lowlands until this week, the ESA said. The northern lowlands are covered in thick blankets of lava and sediments up to several kilometers thick and that had hampered efforts to probe what lay beneath.

The ESA's Mars Express found the first hints of water in the northern plains, but the outcrops were small and more detailed observations were needed to confirm the evidence, the ESA said.

NASA's Orbiter provided higher resolution data that showed at least nine northern craters with phyllosilicates or other hydrated silicates, the ESA said. The finding was reported this week in the journal Science.

Those minerals formed in wet environments and were identical to those found in the southern hemisphere.

"We can now say that the planet was altered on a global scale by liquid water more than 4 billion years ago," said the report's lead author, John Carter of the University of Paris.

Scientists said it's difficult to draw conclusions about the type of environment that existed on Mars when it had water, but they do have some clues.

The sites "are rich in iron and magnesium, but less in aluminum. Together with the close proximity of olivine, which is easily modified by water, this indicates that the exposure to water lasted only tens to hundreds of millions of years," said Jean-Pierre Bibring, the OMEGA principal investigator from the University of Paris.

The scientists' search concentrated on 91 sizeable craters where incoming asteroids have punched down the planet's surface by several kilometers, exposing "ancient crustal material," the ESA said.

The results could also suggest sites for future Mars landers, because evidence of water during the planet's early history suggests conditions in those spots may have been favorable to the evolution of primitive life, the ESA said.

I don't think there was ever life on Mars, but I agree that there was liquid water once.

If there was ever life, it would have been very primitive. I'll explain that if anybody is interested.

People make astonishing assertions about Mars. There is a lot of wishful thinking.

I believe one theory which some accept as probable is that bacterial
or some other sort of single cell life  started on Mars & moved
to earth via asteroids colliding with Mars -
which broke off small pieces of rock containing life that
subsequently landed on earth.

One powerful reason is that conditions for life were at least a
billion years in advance on Mars compared to the Earth.

The real search on Mars is for fossilised remains of single
cell organisms.
To find life still living there, would be a bonus.

Wouldn't it be great if that Mars rover found a piece of
rock with some fossil remains?
I don't think it carries a microscope - unfortunately as
fossilised bacteria is too small to be seen with their camera.

freediver wrote on Jun 26^th, 2010 at 10:55pm:


It comes down to the fact that conditions were very extreme. The evidence indicates that the atmosphere was very thick at one stage - thick enough to support liquid water at the surface, but the conditions were highly acidic (as indicated by the presence of certain minerals)

Of course we base a lot of our conclusions on Earth based life - It's a sample of one, but life which uses oxygen in cellular respiration has a considerable energy advantage to anaerobic respiration eg Iron, Sulphate etc. There is nothing that suggests that Mars ever got to the stage of having oxygen-generating microbes such as Cyanobacteria which changed the atmosphere on Earth.

As a result, any life that may have existed would have been anaerobic, and consequently much less able to evolve.

That's it in a nutshell. It's an opinion. I don't claim anything more than that.

Don't stress too much about Muso's conflicted views on spirituality, he has had an each way bet, and failed to get a collect on either.
Understandable as it may seem to try and distance oneself from the more extreme and strident adherents of any contrived proposition, it can leave one exposed and vulnerable, when there is a real position of integrity at stake.

All that aside, the issue of Life On Mars is of concern to me primarily for what version is the most enjoyable, and outside of the original, I find this contemporary rendition by a somewhat haggard looking and unglamorous David Bowie, particularly well done, but must admit to a lifelong love for so much of his music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOo8J_CLCA4&feature=related