Cool Mars-age!

Cool Mars news!:

Mars landers finds soil with Earth minerals
A patch of the red planet 'seems very friendly' to simple forms of life, a researcher says.
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
posted June 27, 2008 at 6:00 p.m. EDT


With a little help, soil imported from Mars could support green beans, turnips, and asparagus.

That's one implication of this week's announcement that scientists had found several water-soluble minerals common to soils on Earth. The soil sample analyzed by the Phoenix Mars Lander at the far northern reaches of the planet also displays alkalinity levels similar to those found in soils in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.

If the single soil sample analyzed so far is any indication, at least this patch of Mars "seems very friendly" to simple forms of life – at least below the surface, says Samuel Kounaves, a Tufts University chemist who heads the team interpreting the results from the lander's wet-chemistry lab.

By turning the soil into a mini-martian mud pie then stirring it, the lab liberated magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, and other ingredients of salts that initially require water to form them. They represent the kind of nutrients that many microbes on Earth crave.

The notion of what constitutes a habitable environment "has become very broad in the past 10 years," Dr. Kounaves adds. The discovery of Earth-like soils hundreds of million miles away means the subsoil environment could have the potential to host a wide range of simple organisms – not to mention string beans.

More broadly, the finding adds one more piece to a growing mountain of evidence that the fourth rock from the sun isn't so out of this world, after all. The more researchers explore the red planet with orbiters and rovers, the more Mars reveals its kinship with Earth.

"The amazing thing about Mars is not that it's an alien world, but that it's actually very Earth-like in a lot of aspects," Kounaves says.

So far, the lander is roughly a third of the way through it's primary mission. Researchers are still analyzing the evidence from the first soil sample that went through a shake-and-bake process to determine other aspects of its composition. One of eight small ovens heated the sample to 1,000 degrees C (about 1,800 degrees F.), revealing traces of carbon dioxide and water that had been bound up in the soil's minerals.

The international mission, spearheaded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, also has a clear learn-as-you-go aspect to it. One housekeeping detail pleased the research team: It found that the scoop can deliver portions of the same soil sample to different instruments, rather than delivering a unique sample to each. This allows them to make a broader range of tests to the same batch of soil, allowing them to draw more-confident conclusions about the samples they study.

NASA's Pheonix Lander

In case you haven't heard, the Phoenix Lander successfully landed near the North Pole of Mars on Sunday! Its going to dig through the ice to hopefully find signs of live or at least chemical compounds that suggest life.

Whats really cool is that the MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) actually captured an image of the Phoenix Lander parachuting through Mars' atmosphere!!





According to NASA's website:

NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.

From a distance of about 310 kilometers (193 miles) above the surface of the Red Planet, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed its HiRISE obliquely toward Phoenix shortly after it opened its parachute while descending through the Martian atmosphere. The image reveals an apparent 10-meter-wide (30-foot-wide) parachute fully inflated. The bright pixels below the parachute show a dangling Phoenix. The image faintly detects the chords attaching the backshell and parachute. The surroundings look dark, but correspond to the fully illuminated Martian surface, which is much darker than the parachute and backshell.

Phoenix released its parachute at an altitude of about 12.6 kilometers (7.8 miles) and a velocity of 1.7 times the speed of sound.

The HiRISE acquired this image on May 25, 2008, at 4:36 p.m. Pacific Time (7:36 p.m. Eastern Time). It is a highly oblique view of the Martian surface, 26 degrees above the horizon, or 64 degrees from the normal straight-down imaging of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image has a scale of 0.76 meters per pixel.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

I love that one of the first things a lander does upon landing is to take a picture of one of its feet on the surface! I think its so adorable! (And yes, I do have an abnormal attachment to inanimate objects!)



"Oooh, look!! It's my foot!! Check it out! I'm on Mars!"

After that, it takes pictures of the landscape . . . enjoy!