Interesting series of articles about Mars.

[rs]

The thread is that "any life found on Mars is not native but was accidentally introduced by NASA's sloppiness - go back to sleep."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20070921/sc_space/hopeforwateronmarsdimswithsharpnewimages;_ylt=ArWrFBXZvanQ3mIDSc8MINcE1vAI

Hope for Water on Mars Dims with Sharp New Images

Jeanna Bryner
Staff Writer
SPACE.com 1 hour, 12 minutes ago


New images obtained by a sharp-eyed Martian satellite reveal that some Red Planet features once thought to have been carved by flowing water were in fact created by other processes.

The images were taken during the first 100 days of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission and are detailed in a special section of the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science.�

While the results don't confirm or deny the existence of liquid water on Mars' surface, they are no less fascinating, say the scientists involved. For instance, one team found no evidence that flowing water caused bright deposits on the planet. Instead, the scientists proposed dry landslides caused the deposits.

"All findings are good findings," said one team leader Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona.

Philip Christensen of Arizona State University said the MRO results reiterate that "Mars has been fairly dry for the recent past and we need to be careful and not overestimate how much water may have been present, or may have shaped the surface" in ancient times.

"I have been a 'dry Mars guy' for a long time," Christensen said. "These findings are basically saying you look at very high resolution and you do see some evidence for water, there's no disputing that. But you don't see an overwhelming amount of evidence for water."

Lava explosions

The bus-sized MRO orbiting spacecraft, launched in 2005, is equipped with six instruments, including the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, which provides 10 times the resolution of any past Mars imagers. While the MRO images are in some cases inconclusive on the question of Martian water, they are painting a picture of the Martian surface for scientists in unprecedented detail.

In some cases, the images refute past speculation that some of the features were created by flowing water.

A team led by Windy Jaeger of the U.S. Geological Survey in Arizona analyzed HiRISE images of the Athabasca Valles, a young outflow channel system speculated to have been carved out by past catastrophic floods.

"That entire surface is coated with a thin layer of solidified lava, very hard rock that's almost preserved the channel system," Jaeger said, adding: "Catastrophic water floods probably did carve the channel system, but lava flowed through it more recently."

The findings suggest that rather than flooding, steam explosions left behind trails of cone-shaped features found on the floor of Athabasca Valles.

"When water and lava interact it causes a steam explosion," Jaeger told SPACE.com. "And so the lava-covered ground had ground ice in it. And as that water was heated it exploded in steam explosions through the lava."

Dry landslides

McEwen led another research team, which studied a variety of landforms also thought to be associated with past water on Mars. They examined images of gully deposits that had been detected last year by the Mars Global Surveyor. The gully deposits were not present in 1999 images but appeared by 2004. The before-and-after images raised hopes that modern flows of liquid water created the deposits. However, observations from MRO suggest a dry origin, McEwen said.

Both chemical analyses and images of one of the fresh deposits showed no signs of frost or ice and no evidence for even hydrated minerals, all of which could have given the deposits a "bright" appearance.

"We think dry landsliding could've created the bright deposits," McEwen said.

The slopes above this deposit and five other locations are steep enough for sand or loose, dry dust to flow down the gullies, the scientists say. Material uphill could be the source.

In science, discrediting a theory can be just as important as supporting one. "Some science reporters are acting as if we should be disappointed these new bright deposits weren't deposited by water," McEwen said. "We're excited by any advance in understanding Mars no matter what it is."

No ocean

The researchers also ruled out a hypothesis for an ancient ocean on Mars.

The Vastitas Borealis Formation, which covers low-lying northern plains of Mars, was thought to be the result of fine-grained deposits left by an ancient ocean. The new HiRISE images reveal the area, which appeared as flat and featureless in prior missions, is peppered with large boulders.

The mixed-bag of findings intrigue scientists involved.

While Mars is dry now, there remains a lot of water locked up as ice at the poles and beneath the surface away from the poles.

"Ninety-nine percent of Mars is pretty dry and pretty average and not all that exciting," Christensen said. "But the one percent is extremely interesting. So imagine stumbling across an oasis or hot spring out in the middle of a desert. It's a barren desert but gosh that little oasis sure looks attractive."

As an astrobiologist, Christensen says Mars holds plenty of hideouts for life, "I think there are still plenty of places to look for life on Mars."

OK, so the point is that there isn't water on Mars like they thought. Without water you cannot have life. Which means that if you want to find life you need to make sure the life you found was native and not a stowaway.

PHOENIX MARS LANDER
Errant microbes carefully flushed
Tuesday, August 14, 2007 3:22 AM
By Amber Dance
LOS ANGELES TIMES
When NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander rocketed into space Aug. 4, it went, like all missions, with the assurance that as few Earth microbes as possible tagged along.

Hitchhiking microbes could impair the experiments, or worse, an errant microbe could contaminate the planet.

Keeping the spacecraft sterile was the job of an obscure but crucial part of NASA known as the Planetary Protection unit.

The main planetary-protection research center is at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., where Jason Kastner supervises a small team of scientists working in labs that smell of bacterial cultures.

Kastner, an exacting, bespectacled mathematician, is in charge of nitpicking about the exact number of bacteria NASA inadvertently shoots into space.

Phoenix had to be cleaner than most missions, going a step beyond Planetary Protection's sterilizing procedures. Merely killing all the bacteria wasn't good enough for this trip to Mars' north pole in search of signs of water and organic material.

Phoenix scientists had to scrape every bit of organic material from the craft. Even dead bacteria could contaminate the experiments, making it impossible for scientists to distinguish between organics that came from Earth or from Mars.

Since a 1967 United Nations treaty, Planetary Protection has sterilized every NASA mission. Its motto is "All of the planets, all of the time."

NASA's official worrywarts are anxious not only about microorganisms contaminating other celestial bodies but also about organisms reaching Earth.

"If we're bringing samples back to Earth, we don't want to bring back something like the Andromeda Strain," said Kastner's boss, Cassie Conley, NASA's planetary-protection officer in Washington, referring to the Michael Crichton novel in which a space pathogen causes a terrestrial outbreak.

Although Conley doubts that anything dangerous lurks in our solar system, she expects to treat Martian soil as if it were more dangerous than the Ebola virus.

Things likely will be even more uncertain if humans travel to the Red Planet. From a planetary-protection standpoint, humans are dirty creatures. And unlike spacecraft, they can't be baked in an oven until they are free of bacteria.

In that case, Conley said, human presence probably would be limited to those parts of Mars that wouldn't be habitable for Earth organisms.

OK, so this is good, NASA is carefully cleaning their spacecraft, right? Welllllll maybe not...

NASA Clean Rooms Loaded with Microbial Stowaways

Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
SPACE.com Wed Sep 19, 7:00 AM ET

NASA builds its spacecraft in some of the tidiest rooms on Earth, but a few microbial stowaways always manage to survive and sneak a ride into space.

That could be because the space agency's super-sterile "clean rooms" nonetheless support a greater variety of microbes than previously thought, researchers have now found. And, there more of them than expected. NASA is cataloging the potential hitchhikers as a result, so they can be easily sorted from potential extraterrestrial life that might one day be detected somewhere in the solar system.

"These findings will advance the search for life on Mars and other worlds," said study co-author Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a microbiologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Venkateswaran and his group's findings are detailed in a recent issue of the journal FEMS Microbiology Ecology.

Some like it clean

Most bacteria prefer plenty of food and fresh air, but some love "extreme" environments and thrive on just the paint and leftover cleaning solvents found in some NASA clean rooms. Some of the rooms, in which the air is continuously filtered, harbor fewer than 10 particles per cubic foot (0.03 cubic meter)--that's about 100,000 fewer dust particles than an equal cube of outdoor air.

Catharine Conley, an astrobiologist and planetary protection officer at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said a lack of competition may cause the super-clean bugs' surprising diversity.

"The techniques used to identify microbes almost always miss the less common ones," Conley told SPACE.com.

Normal microbe sampling is like choosing animals from a room filled with 1,000 dogs and only 3 cats, she said, and "if you pull 10 animals out of that crowd, they're all probably going to be dogs."

When most of the common bacteria (dogs) are gone, however, the remaining extreme bacteria (cats) thrive on the lack of competition and show up more readily in samples.

Planetary protection

To map the diversity of clean room microbes, biologists got on their hands and knees and swabbed large areas of NASA clean rooms across the nation.

Instead of trying to grow the unseen microbes, which is practically impossible to do, the scientists looked to a key genetic marker found in all bacteria called 16S ribosomal RNA.

Like the method that genomics researcher Craig Venter has used to assess the diversity of bacteria in the world's oceans, Venkateswaran and his colleagues multiplied the genetic markers and decoded the sequences. The result? About 193 unique sequences--indicating 193 different bacterial "species"--were discovered, at least 13 of which were not known to science before.

Conley said the study will be crucial to sorting out the hitchhikers from the real thing during future searches for microbial life on other worlds.

"It's very useful information. We need to know what microbes a spacecraft is taking with it out into the solar system," she said. Conley added that NASA is now cataloging every possible organism it can find in clean rooms, as such a list of critters will help prevent a spacecraft from incorrectly confirming extraterrestrial life in the event that it detects some of its stowaways.

Conley said keeping NASA's facilities even cleaner is a growing priority to prevent "forward contamination" of other worlds during future missions.

"We want to do whatever we can to make sure we don't introduce life to places like Europa or Mars," Conley said.

Hmm. Now one of the big goals with all of the spacecraft we keep sending to Mars is to find life. We have landed (or crashed) a whole bunch of hardware on the Red Planet. So it turns out that the bacteria that escape the cleaning are particularly robust because like life around ocean thermal vents, only the capable survive. These robust bacteria are more likely to survive the journey and once there more likely to carve out a niche. In addition these bacteria present themselves as peculiar and different to what is known.

Methinks this is all the background for a discovery or announcement of the discovery of life on Mars, only to have this controversy be sullied by the possibility that this discovery has been accidentally introduced by previous missions.

I'm guessing if Marvin himself walked up to the Rovers and stared directly into the panoramic camera, NASA would have a ready explanation.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

And here is another blurb about the Phoenix mission in May 2008:
_http://www.popsci.com/popsci/whatsnew/72928694d0c17110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd/3.html

Speaking of "planet" and "evolved," another really big question about the solar system comes to mind—was there, or is there now, life on Mars? The Phoenix lander, set to touch down in the ice-rich Martian arctic this May, could provide clues. Phoenix will use its robotic arm to dig into the topsoil and ice and collect ground samples for onboard analysis. Scientists hope it can resolve a years-old controversy about the presence (or absence) of Martian life. In the late 1970s, the two Viking landers failed to detect any signs of life on Mars. But when, a quarter century later, scientists used duplicates of the Viking's detectors to search for life in the dry valleys of Antarctica and Chile's Atacama Desert—regions on Earth where we know life exists—the detectors failed to find it. Were the Viking landers blind to the presence of life on Mars? Phoenix could find out.

That might be the time they tell us about "itsy bitsy" life on Mars. Would be interesting to watch how all that transpires. The "we introduced it" card is always possible, and I suppose if the initial revelation is a little too "catastrophic" they will use that card to calm people down a little and give them a plausible explanation to cling to as insurance. In fact, I think they're most likely to do something like that so as not to provide absolute irrefutable proof that there is life on Mars, but at the same time to deliver a very strong (but plausibly/theoretically refutable for those who just can't "go there") possibility that it's there. So I wouldn't be surprised that they had intentional "failures" to sterilize the landing craft effectively, as it was all set up beforehand to create a plausible "alternative" explanation for their future revelations. Oh no, this just in, it turns out that NASA's clean rooms are a lot dirtier and a lot less stringent than thought!