NASA may have found a target landing site for the first manned mission to Mars:
Images recently taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, which is orbiting Mars, show a frozen body of water, about the size of Earth’s North Sea, beneath the surface of Mars.“I believe this makes the possibility of the discovery of life on Mars much closer than was previously thought,” said John Murray, a research scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes in England. Murray led the research group that made the discovery of the frozen sea.
Scientists now say that Mars has been shaped by flowing water, lava, and ice in the recent geological age. The sea formed within the last few million years, as volcanic eruptions or tectonic activity caused the area to flood.
Some gigantic cataclysm opened massive fissures on the surface of Mars some 5 million years ago allowing water from an underground sea to flow over the surface. Judging by the amount of water that gushed forth, scientists believe the underground body of water is about the size of the North Sea.
Finding out whether or not there’s life on Mars may be as simple as walking across the glaciers pictured above (the ice is buried under several inches of dust and volcanic ash) and taking samples. If there is or was life on Mars, the evidence would be in the ice in the form of fossils or, more incredibly, perhaps frozen life forms in the ice itself.
The theory is that water erupted less than five million years ago from the Cerberus Fossae, deep cracks on the Martian surface. These cracks opened up and tapped a huge reservoir of liquid water deep beneath the surface.Pack ice formed on top of that water. It then broke up, before freezing rigid. A crust of dust and volcanic ash, perhaps just a few centimeters thick, has prevented sublimation, the process by which ice erodes over time into water vapor.
“The fact that they are still occurring today means that we have had huge pockets of liquid water beneath the surface of Mars for thousands of millions of years—plenty of time for life to develop,” Murray said.
If life can develop in these subsurface oceans, as many scientists believe, this frozen sea may be the ideal place to look not just for fossils of past life, but for the actual frozen organisms themselves, Murray said.
Both NASA and the European Space Agency are planning rover missions to reach Mars in 2011. The original NASA mission was to be a sample return mission where a rover would scoop up some Martian soil and return it to Earth for analysis. That mission was set back to 2014 due to a cut in funding.
In light of these recent discoveries, perhaps NASA should rethink that decision.
4:27 pm
phendimetrazine diet pills
Abo rescued dewdrops subdividing.Washington cleave journalism prilosec http://ctba.inspidered.com/view.php?url=http://www.4best-health.com/prilosec.html
2:59 am
adult chat network…
A SEA OF ICE ON MARS…