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Mars Rover Sees Strange 'Veins' On Planet's Surface

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Shonnon
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« on: April 04, 2015, 05:59:24 pm »

Mars Rover Sees Strange 'Veins' On Planet's Surface (They Look Like Ice Cream Sandwiches)
By Macrina Cooper-White

Posted: 04/03/2015 3:43 pm EDT Updated: 04/03/2015 3:59 pm EDT


The discovery of strange, mineral veins on Mars has planetary scientists buzzing. And no wonder: the find may shed new light on the Red Planet's watery past and could even help reveal whether Mars was once habitable.

NASA's Curiosity rover spotted the prominent veins in "Garden City." That's the name scientists use for a geologically rich site on towering Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons), a mountain that rises almost 3.5 miles off the Martian surface.

A composite image of the veins was made by combining 28 separate photos taken on March 18, 2015 by the right-eye camera of the rover's Mastcam instrument.

(Story continues below image.)
mars veins
This March 18, 2015, view from the Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a network of two-tone mineral veins at an area called "Garden City" on lower Mount Sharp.

"Some of them look like ice-cream sandwiches: dark on both edges and white in the middle," Linda Kah, a member of the Curiosity science team at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said in a written statement.

According to Kah and her colleagues, the veins -- which jut out 2.5 inches above a patch of eroded bedrock -- likely formed when fluids moved through cracked rock and deposited minerals. The light veins are made of calcium sulfate, which has been found by the rover in other nearby locations, according to the researchers.

The dark veins? They're a bit of a mystery.

“There’s something very different of these veins than what we have seen prior [sic],” Kah told the Los Angeles Times.

The researchers hope further analysis will yield new clues about the chemical make-up of the fluids that deposited the veins, as well as the changing environmental conditions on ancient Mars. So far, they believe both types of veins formed after the mud in a lake at Mount Sharp's base dried up and hardened, Space.com reported, and the dark veins were deposited prior to the light ones.

The finding adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that ancient Mars had key ingredients for life. Just last week, Curiosity discovered a biologically useful form of nitrogen in samples of sand and mudstone.

The rover landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 and reached the base of Mount Sharp on September 11, 2014.
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Shonnon
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« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2015, 06:00:25 pm »

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« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2015, 06:02:35 pm »

 Chris Carberry Become a fan

CEO, Explore Mars

Rick Zucker
Rick Zucker

Director of Political Outreach for Explore Mars.

We Were Supposed to Be on Mars by Now! Why Aren't We?



Humanity's advancement into space has not progressed quite as predicted. In the 1960s and 1970s, futurists, as well as science fiction movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or the old campy television show, Space 1999, took it for granted that regular passenger flights, moon bases, interplanetary exploration, and other extraordinary advancements in space would be a reality before the end of the 20th Century. We have obviously fallen well short of that vision, but as fantastical as that speculation may seem today, it wasn't entirely based on wishful thinking or flights of fancy.

After the United States successfully landed humans on the moon, there were high level discussions at NASA and elsewhere that advocated for sending humans to Mars by the mid-1980s.  In view of the truly remarkable speed in which America achieved the Moon landings, Mars by the 1980s didn't seem all that far-fetched at the time. Unfortunately, political reality interceded.  After convincingly beating the Soviets to the moon and after only a few successful landings, funding for the Apollo Program was canceled, and instead the focus of the space program was shifted in a direction that would leave us circling in Low Earth Orbit for 45 years. Which brings us to the present day.  Sending crewed missions to Mars by the mid-2030s is now an integral part of official U.S. space policy.  Public discourse has swelled on this topic since the successful test of the Orion capsule this past December as well as the discovery of organics, nitrogen, and evidence of an ancient ocean on Mars.  But, is this objective realistic or is this truly a case of wishful thinking?

Several factors have recently materialized that could finally set us on a course to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.  The first and perhaps most important factor is that there is far more consensus on Mars exploration than there ever has been before within NASA, within the aerospace community, and among policy makers.  Not everyone agrees on how we will get there or where we will go along the way, but Mars by the mid-2030s is the majority consensus. A unified coalition of these players could have a powerful and lasting impact.

Recent polling also suggests that there is strong public support for human missions to Mars when actual NASA budget levels are understood by poll participants.  One of the biggest issues commonly raised regarding Mars missions is whether we can actually afford to go to Mars. However, the answer to that question appears to be 'yes.'

Much of the opposition to Mars exploration is based on disinformation and distraction tactics that imply or even claim outright that Mars would bust the budget or endanger Social Security, which, given actual budgetary facts and context, is preposterous. Many aerospace experts believe that humans to Mars can be achieved without large increases in the NASA budget; indeed, that most increases would be attributable to the need to counter inflation.  One can therefore argue that it would be fiscally responsible for NASA to commit to sending humans to Mars rather than spending a similar level of funding on less ambitious or constantly changing goals.

Timing and circumstances enabled President John F. Kennedy's call in the early 1960's for America to land a crew on the Moon before that decade was out to become reality. We can't replicate the circumstances that existed in that decade, and we shouldn't even try; for while Apollo was a spectacular success, it proved not to be a sustainable model for space exploration.

While presidential leadership is still important, we may not need another Kennedy-esque presidential speech. Momentum for Mars exploration is developing far more organically than other human mission objectives in the past.   Rather than the program being dictated from top to bottom, we seem to be building (at least the overarching goals) from bottom to top.  This is quite significant and may be the interplanetary 'missing link' that could create the political sustainability required for a long-term program. Indeed, these and other current topics will be the focus of the Humans to Mars Summit, taking place in Washington, D.C. from May 5 to 7, 2015.

Humans won't be visiting a nearby star or even the moons of Jupiter anytime soon, but we may finally have the opportunity to move out into space and on to Mars -- to explore, to discover, and to develop.

Chris Carberry is CEO of Explore Mars, Inc. Rick Zucker is Director of Political Outreach for Explore Mars, Inc.
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