New Trove of Cassini Saturn Pictures
Eye candy. Or planet pr()n.
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Life Imitates “Atlas Shrugged”
Uh-oh, it looks like Galt’s ”ray screen” was no match for the “Don’t Be Evil” crowd – Google Earth has found Atlantis:
From what it sounds like, a British aeronautical engineer was playing around with the new Google Earth 5.0, which includes undersea data, and noticed something funny off the coast of Africa, about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands, that resembled a pattern of a street grid. According to the United Kingdom’s Press Association, the pattern of streets equated to an area the size of Wales.
In case you’ve had more important things to read about for the past few thousand years, Atlantis was a legendary island city first mentioned by Plato, allegedly a hard-core naval power located somewhere near North Africa that disappeared when it sank into the ocean.
Oh wait…they’re talking about the Atlantis of newage superbeings, not the Atlantis of striking capitalists. Never mind.
Seriously, though, this appears to be an artifact of Google’s data integration. If Google has the same trouble with integration of the ever-growing body of Mars survey data at Google Mars, I have to wonder how many sleepless nights the Hoagland crowd has spent poring over pixels looking for artificial structures, and how many long minutes of in-depth analysis they have wasted verifying the authenticity of these “anomalies”, only to be frustrated yet again with the announcement that their latest “evidence” is only a fluke of how data from different instruments was integrated.
Not that it would stop them from believing they’d found the holy grail of ancient astronauttery, of course.
Good News, Bad News
Good News: There may be lots and lots of earthlike planets in the galaxy.
Bad News: We have no way of getting to any of the others – which is a shame, as such planets would be very useful to those of us fed up with the way things are going on the only earthlike planet we can get to.
But, based on the limited numbers of planets found so far, Dr Boss has estimated that each Sun-like star has on average one “Earth-like” planet.
This simple calculation means there would be huge numbers capable of supporting life.
“Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited,” Dr Boss told BBC News. “But I think that most likely the nearby ‘Earths’ are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago.” That means bacterial lifeforms.
The article doesn’t give any clue as to how Dr. Boss came to that conclusion. How does he know? For all he can guess, these earthlike planets could be crawling with sentient vegetables, blanketed with rock-devouring amoeboid superorganisms, creeping with incomprehensible silicon-chemistry-based hive-mind nightmares, or any number of things we can’t even begin to extrapolate from terrestrial experience. Or dead, for that matter.
Evolution happened here and led to (among other things) us. If physics and chemistry work the same under similar conditions everywhere in the universe, and one takes as a given the likelihood of bacteria-level life on another planet, why wouldn’t it have evolved over time into more complex forms?
Mars Needs Beano
More methane on Mars:
“Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,” said Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.” Mumma is lead author of a paper describing this research that will appear in Science Express on Thursday.
Methane, four atoms of hydrogen bound to a carbon atom, is the main component of natural gas on Earth. Astrobiologists are interested in these data because organisms release much of Earth’s methane as they digest nutrients. However, other purely geological processes, like oxidation of iron, also release methane.
“Right now, we do not have enough information to tell whether biology or geology — or both — is producing the methane on Mars,” Mumma said. “But it does tell us the planet is still alive, at least in a geologic sense. It is as if Mars is challenging us, saying, ‘hey, find out what this means.’ “
Previous posts on Mars methane here and here.
As I’ve said before, extant life on Mars (or just the possibility of it) is a mixed blessing.
On the positive side, a solid indication of life would focus more scientific attention on Mars, and could provide justification for sending humans to explore the planet in person. The benefits from this would be the development of new space technologies and operations experience, and the possibility that humans could, having finally gotten there, maintain a permanent presence as settlers. (And yes, there are no doubt better means of accomplishing the same goal than another wasteful and politics-conflicted government program – or worse, a program based on international kumbayaaism. Just thinking overly-optimistically here of the potential for such a program to disrupt the chicken-egg problem and provide us with the minimal technology set required to establish a beachhead.) Plus, it would be interesting as a scientific curiosity, regardless of the origin to which the methane is ultimately attributed – though obviously more interesting if it turned out to be biogenic, since that attribution would merely answer one question while opening up thousands more – and for its potential to completely derail antiscientific nonsense like intelligent design and creationism.
On the negative side, a solid indication of life could prompt arguments to prevent further direct exploration of Mars by landers or (especially) humans, and take settlement of the planet completely off the table. Such arguments against direct exploration and settlement would center on the risk of biological cross-contamination - concern over some Martian microbe hitchhiking back to Earth and improbably devastating the “defenseless” life on this planet, or that by taking terrestrial biology with us (via microbes on nearly-but-not-perfectly sterilized landers or quite literally by sending human explorers to the surface) we would destroy any scientific value the discovery of life on an untampered-with Mars might yield.1
Further in this vein, there is the possibility that a Mars inhabited by even primitive life would trigger a trekkish “Prime Directive” response, whereby concerned citizens would seek a prohibition on exploration and settlement of the planet based on the ‘self-determination rights’ of microbes to evolve on their own, without outside interference.
It’s impossible to predict exactly what the response would be, of course, since it will depend on the circumstances and the prevailing attitudes at the time of discovery. One hopes rationality will prevail, but one never knows.
1 For an example of keeping an uninhabited place pristine for scientific purity, examine the case of Surtsey: “The scientists have strict rules against not carrying any seeds to Surtsey – the idea behind no human interference is to witness colonization and secession as naturally as possible.” While the quarantine of Surtsey is a nearly-unique and highly valuable scientific experiment on Earth with negligible effects on anyone else, closing off an entire planet to human activity based on the presence of the most primitive forms of life would be excessive.
Good For Them
India’s national space program has launched it’s Chandrayaan-1 probe to the Moon, carrying instruments to map the elemental composition of the lunar surface, search for He-3, and map the terrain, along with a camera-carrying penetrator probe which will among other things analyze the lunar atmosphere on the way down. (You knew the Moon had an atmosphere, right…?)
And all this for only $78M. Hard to believe.
Snow on Mars
Looks like we’ll have to bring parkas and mittens - Phoenix has spotted falling snow on Mars:
NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft has discovered evidence of past water at its Martian landing site and spotted falling snow for the first time, scientists reported Monday. Soil experiments revealed the presence of two minerals known to be formed in liquid water. Scientists identified the minerals as calcium carbonate, found in limestone and chalk, and sheet silicate…
A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.
Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains in May on a three-month mission to study whether the environment could be friendly to microbial life. One of its biggest discoveries so far is confirming the presence of ice on the planet.
Scientists long suspected frozen water was buried in the northern plains based on measurements from an orbiting spacecraft. The lander also found that the soil was slightly alkaline and contained important nutrients and minerals.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that there is water ice and snow near the Martian poles — we can see and measure the evidence from orbit, mixed in with the dry ice. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity generating new and unexpected data about the Martian surface, or the assorted orbiters showing us the surface at a level of detail or in ways we haven’t seen before, Phoenix seems to be more focused on confirming some of the fundamental things that we knew should be happening but had yet to observe directly. Which may not be quite as engaging as the ongoing saga of the rovers or as fascinating as the eye candy from the orbiters, but it’s no less valuable a task.
Movies of Earth
This is cool — a little something extra from an old spacecraft: NASA’s Deep Impact Films Earth as an Alien World
Phoenix Lands on Mars
After a long, strange trip, Phoenix has landed near the Martian north pole.
The image from orbit of the lander descending under parachutes is pretty darned cool.
Not So Risky
Aw, darn. Better luck next time.
1 in 75
Looks like Spirt and Opportunity (and their orbital brethren) may have excellent seats for some upcoming fireworks:
“We’re used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million,” Chesley said. “Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs.”
The asteroid, designated 2007 WD5, is about 160 feet across, which puts it in the range of the space rock that exploded over Siberia. That explosion, the largest impact event in recent history, felled 80 million trees over 830 square miles.
The Tunguska object broke up in midair, but the Martian atmosphere is so thin that an asteroid would probably plummet to the surface, digging a crater half a mile wide, Chesley said.
The impact would probably send dust high into the atmosphere, scientists said. Depending on where the asteroid hit, such a plume might be visible through telescopes on Earth, Chesley said.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is mapping the planet, would have a front-row seat. And NASA’s two JPL-built rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, might be able to take pictures from the ground.
And we thought we were lucky when Galileo was almost in position for Shoemaker-Levy…if it happens, this ought to make for some fun pictures, not to mention some interesting science.
It’s a pity we couldn’t steer a bunch more asteroids (or more appropriately, comets) to hit Mars. A few billion tons of water injected into its atmosphere might do wonders for near-future settlement prospects.
I’m curious, though, as to where this particular asteroid came from — is it one that astronomers have known about for a while, which was only recently perturbed? Or has it only recently appeared on the scene? If the latter, what is the likelihood that a similar asteroid could appear unexpectedly, giving us only six weeks to prepare for a possible impact (such that we could)?
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