[Shrug]

Unless they say that Marvin wants to negotiate before we go up there and kick his scrawny Martian butt for sabotaging all of our probes, I've little interest.

I've been very busy (though I'll have a little more time now), but even if I were posting at full speed, space science just doesn't scratch my itch, and I hope that people don't come here in expectation of either excitement or profound thoughts on the subject.

My interest is in getting earth life into space, not looking for non-earth life. If all they say manana is that there's water on Mars, that's not news. We've known it for years. If they say they've found amino acids, that's more interesting, but no more so to me than, say, the discovery of some new form of life on the ocean bottom.

Phooey! I was hoping you'd have some inside scoop.

My guess is that the announcement will be of a geological nature, probably water-related.

Actually, the whole Martian thing depresses me. The planet is dead. Looking at that bare terrain, with that close-in, curved horizon, that pink sky, knowing that the air is cold and unbreatheable, and the surface is unprotected against cosmic radiation, is somehow just a downer. The other planets never had a chance to develop life. But Mars' chance, if it ever had one, got nipped in the bud, and now it's just a cold, spent rock. *sigh*... I'll probably read tomorrow's news with relish, though.

Well, I'm hoping for Marvin. Amino acids don't ammount to much, but pen and ink sentients will draw some attention. :)

It VERY depressing to see how barren it is. It helps the "Rare Earth" thesis.

I've decided its time to sneeze on Mars. Send up lichen, nitrogen fixers and whatever extreme climte stuff we have here and let it have a shot. IF we can't get to mars, we'll never leave earth.

Well I wouldn't quite put the discovery of amino acids on another planet of the solar system at the same level as discovery of new life in the bottom of the ocean. For one, the ocean has long been overdue in our exploration, in a way if anti space activitists has a platform to use on their side, would be that we haven't explored the oceans enough and need to look into that more. Secondly, the fact that a rather complex chemical precursor to life that exists on another ball of rock in our solar system would be quite a significant event. But alas, I would think that most likely the hints have led up to just another scientist saying in almost shocking mannerism, "Mars once had water!!!" Its almost to the point where the scientists have gotten caught up in their own water cooler arguments over what exactly to the nth degree constituets water based or volcanic based sedimentary layering action. For me at least I get a kick out of the whole technology thing. We've crafted little portions of our 'Rare Earth' and have already begun to seed the universe with our greatness. Just think about how excited geologists get over finding a tiny rocky peice of another planet on ours. Its a bit of our own contribution to the whole otherwise completely random process.

I am of a mixed mind on this. I hope we find water (good for human settlement), but not life. I fear that in the current environment, the discovery of life would strongly encourage a moratorium on human exploration and settlement of Mars. I think the Ann Claybornes beat the Sax Russells (see Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars) in today's world.

Oops totally forgot to proof that first half before submit....again

Jay Manifold is suggesting mud -- that the wheels have squeezed out some water and that they've got pictures of it freezing out. For what it's worth, if you look at the rear hazcam shots from Spirit for Sol 53, there are a whole bunch of pictures taken in a row -- more than three times what they took from the Rear HazCam on any other day. And taken in pretty quick sequence. 12:26 to 12:53.

So if Jay's theory is right, looks like they took a bunch of pictures in a row to watch the moisture freeze out.

And if there's liquid water -- or at least muck -- then Mars will be a damned site cheaper.

Get over yourself: I never go to this site
for "expectation of excitment or profound
thoughts". More like a daily reminder on how
a little bit of "knowledge" gleaned almost
entirely from the internet, leads to false
conclusions in the hands of people who should
be flipping burgers

I'd expect proof of water or any life precursors in the soil of Mars to increase support for putting people on the planet. Sure, some ideologues might jump on that to argue for a quarantine, but their numbers would be more than offset be others who see the new discoveries as an incentive to go there.

We shouldn't be surprised that the rovers are not sending back images of lichen and little green patches. We've known the place is a desert for a long time. It is still a lot more hospitable than any other place we've looked at. And, it's a wee bit early to elevate the "Rare Earth" thesis. We haven't been anyplace, yet. The Universe is a big place.

I think the Mars rover has found Osama.

The "rare earth" hypothesis is a little premature when we only have a couple of datapoints. Looking at our own solar system, 1 out of 3 ain't too bad.

Does it surprise anyone that the Euros are worried about contaminating Mars? Europe joins race to send humans to Mars

Evaporites!
The outcrop at Meridiani is ~40% anhydrite (very similar to plaster of paris). Implies a lot of water moved through these rocks.

I am disappointed at the "so what" attitude here. Space development needs markets. Markets need resources. This kind of work is locating potential resources - both raw (evaporitic environments are an excellent mechanism for concentrating light elements) and intellectual (hundreds of astrobiologists looking for a ticket to ride).

Trying to do space development without honestly trying to assess resources leads you down the same rat-hole as the space shuttle. That is true of the private as well as the public sphere.

OT: A good assesment of the President's Initiative (needs a new name if it is to survive) by Oliver Morton here.

Upshot - it is the end, not the begining, of federal involvement in space development. Beyond the end of U.S. involvment in ISS, the alt-spacers will have to look elsewhere for capital.

I am very interested in resources, Duncan--I'm just not that interested in whether or not life used to exist on Mars, which is the main point of the exploration and news conference. And I'm more interested in resources closer to home (e.g., lunar and asteroidal), rather than resources at the bottom of another gravity well. That's the kind of mission that would spin my propeller.

I have to agree with Duncan on the importance of the research. This is very important for several reasons. One, it pretty well kills the ?White Mars? hypothesis (that CO2 was responsible for etching terrain instead of water). Rand, we knew Mars had water, but until recently, it was thought very limited, and it wasn?t clear it had liquid water for significantly long periods. That?s pretty well settled now. This also gives valuable information on the geology, which will be important when we go to live there.

Finding life on Mars would be extremely important and would open up many issues ? If it had DNA and similar structure to Earth life it would provide strong evidence to the Panspermia hypothesis, which would open the possibility we could find life something like ours elsewhere. If it wasn?t like earth life, it would open whole new fields of research, not to mention a new line on development of self replicating machines. It would also cause a major controversy if we started to colonize Mars.

My own feeling is that Mars could be the starting place for the real off-earth colonies. It is a lot easier to build a closed ecology where you can easily cheat and find all needed replacement chemicals than in deep space or dry moons, so it would be a good place for early colonies. The gravity well isn?t that deep ? SSTO is straightforward there, and space elevators/tethers/momentum bank systems would be far easier than for earth, possibly doable even with existing materials. It has two asteroid sized moons in low orbit that would be wonderful for developing space infrastructure. I am not a ?Mars first? person, and I fully expect large O?Neill like space structures to be developed eventually, but Mars would be a good place for serious off-world development, and perhaps even terraforming.

Mars' gravity well is only twice as deep as the of the moon, and you have an atmosphere to help with the inbound leg. The overall energy requirements from LEO are similar. Rand has been an advocate of affordable vertical movement within a gravity well three times as high as Mars.
I will also point out that life has a vested interest in finding where the conditions (and more importantly, the materials) of life are possible - why start from scratch? Sure you could probably synthesize a hamburger from half a cubic mile of maria, but we dont have dilithium crystals yet, so why bother?
Lastly, raw space resources are not going to be competitive on terrestrial markets with home grown stuff for at least a couple of generations (outside of energy maybe) and if nanotech takes off it will never will. The capital for nearterm space development will have to come from value added exercises like tourism, maybe geriatrics, and yes, the demands of the pointy headed ones.

The twin killers for living in space are radiation and micro-gravity. The idea that ISS research will allow us to develop bio-tech solutions for radiation and micro-gravity is far-fetched, IMHO.

One "off the shelf" solution for the radiation:

Astronauts can live behind large hydrogen rich radiation shields (aluminium emits too many daughter particles). Boron doped polyethylene is a great potential radiation shield.

Restoring TransHab to ISS would be a great start. Is Sean O'Keefe considering adding a TransHab to ISS?

Anyway, one problem with all radiation shielding is that its heavy. We need large lifters to bring it up from Earth. A shuttle C lifting a 75,000 kg water tank could prove very useful for Rand's vision. Launch a plastic CEV on Delta IV and fill 'er up with a thick layer of water from the shuttle C lifted tank and then get going.

But it is expensive to lift water from Earth. Made-on-Mars polyethylene can be sent to Luna with less rocket fuel than made on Earth polyethylene. Even less delta-V nneded to reach an asteroid mining site from Mars rather than from Earth.

Therefore Mars water is a critical resource. Mars magnesium is a source for potential solid rocket propellant to lift the stuff up out of the Mars' gravity well. Our ability to actually live on Mars is what opens up the rest of the inner solar system and Luna and the asteroids.

Start with Martian H2O and CO2 and a nuclear reactor and a simple chemical processing plant and then making plastics is pretty easy. Ship the Mars plastic to Luna and use that to protect your lunar settlements from astronaut killing radiation. Build your asteroid mining habitat out of Mars plastic and fill the rad shields with Mars water, until asteroid belt ice deposits are located.

A solution for the gravity.

Tether a Soyuz and Progress nose to nose and practice tethered flight. If we use a refuse filled Progress scheduled for re-entry and incineration and also a Soyuz on its way to rotate ISS crew down to Earth then the added cost of such test flights would be essentially zero, right?

If Sean O'Keefe was serious about our going beyond LEO we would start doing stuff like this right now. Spin up a Soyuz/Progress tandem for next to nothing and add TransHab to a revised final ISS design.

Otherwise Jeffrey Bell and Oliver Morton just may be right and the Bush plan just may be the beginning of the end, not the end of the beginning.

The fact remains that it is deeper than the moon, and it's many months away in travel time, versus a couple days.

And while I'm not as pessimistic as you about the near-term prospects for direct earthly uses of extraterrestrial resources, that's beside the point, since I wasn't proposing that.

Rand is saying that's he's more interested in gettng humans in space than finding evidence of life on Mars. Agreed, but I suspect finding that evidence would generate a bit of support for getting humans of this particualr planet. Even Buddhists step on ants, so I'm not worried about potential pleas to quarantine Mars.

And. on the one hand, it would be handy to have a lot of native resources on hand if you're trying to live on Mars. But, a profitable resource extraction business means it's gotta sell for more here than it costs to dig it out and haul it back here from Mars. We'll have to see.

In the meantime, why not build private sector capacity and infrastructure by figuring out how to sell 24-hours or so in orbit for $100k or putting a batch of NASA-rejected research packages on the Lunar surface for a reasonable price.

...and it's many months away in travel time, versus a couple days.

A fair point. But also fair to ask how long exactly do you intended to stay on the moon. If it is any longer than a few months, you might as well go to Mars.

After all, the whole lunar water thing is still very much up in the air.

I will grant you one advantage of cislunar space - energy. Sustained surface operation on Mars basically require the nuclear option. However today's announcement makes it more likely IMHO that usable uranium ore bodies might exist on Mars.

And my point was that astrobiology (and other science) may a potential near term market, as much as tourism. Ignore nerd power at your peril!

Rand, the *real* significance could be heard in the press conference... To me (at least) it sounded like they all but explicitly stated that there's going to be a sample return mission to the Opportunity site, so they can determine the "when" and "for how long" of the liquid water. I think another consideration is that this may change some things for the '09 rover, which may now be targeted to Meridiani.

(Too bad nobody had the foresight to spec in a long-lived transponder for the MERs -- would make precision landing at the Opportunity site somewhat easier...)

- Eric.

Time is an issue for human travel and establishing human colonies. It is not a big issue for material transport. Luna has almost no volatiles. Oxygen isn't a problem but hydrogen is a big "maybe," and there isn't any good information on nitrogen and a bunch of others. Earth, Mars, and perhaps some NEO asteroids would be more likely sources. In any event, it certainly is good reason for more science missions to help decide.

Duncan: I'm not convinced on resource cost versus earth sources, for some materials at least. For instance, if we start NEO asteroid mining, I think it is possible the price of platinum could drop dramatically. I wonder what that would do to fuel cell economics ...

Sad news. This was one of the last comment threads Gary Utter graced.