Martian soil 'could support life'

WooPeeA

Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - or, at least, asparagus - Nasa scientists believe.

Preliminary analysis by the $420m (£210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet's soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected.
Scientists working on the spacecraft project said they were "flabbergasted" by the discovery.
The find has raised hopes conditions on Mars may be favourable for life.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7477310.stm

AtomicHorror

Good mineral conditions, reasonable pH. Not at all as salty as was expected. This patch at the very least looks good! New Scientist have stated the soil would be suitable for growing turnips

Couple that with readily available water and it looks like all you need is a greenhouse filled with oxygen...

marco_polo

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Good mineral conditions, reasonable pH. Not at all as salty as was expected. This patch at the very least looks good! New Scientist have stated the soil would be suitable for growing turnips

Couple that with readily available water and it looks like all you need is a greenhouse filled with oxygen...

The thing I find most interesting about all this is do we even need the oxygen tent? Probably for complex life but just for bacteria like creatures probably not. We would still have needed adequate warmth and the liquid water tht results. Do we know fo certain that the water on Mars was once liquid?

The first cells must have been anaerobic because there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. In addition, they were probably thermophilic ("heat-loving") and fermentative.

Link is crap but the first I could find that wasn't a subscription science paper .

http://members.tripod.com/~astrocreepx/pt2.htm

AtomicHorror

marco_polo wrote: »

The thing I find most interesting about all this is do we even need the oxygen tent? Probably for complex life but just for bacteria like creatures probably not. We would still have needed adequate warmth and the liquid water tht results. Do we know fo certain that the water on Mars was once liquid?

Quite true, I specifically meant we'd need a green house for turnips! There are many bacterial species here on Earth which will grow without oxygen. There are also more extreme examples of bacteria which can grow in very cold or very dry conditions. So the possibility of life surviving on Mars is in fact almost a certainty. The real question is whether it ever arose there in the first place, as the current conditions would almost certainly not allow abiogenesis (the initial formation of cells).

It seems very likely that the water on Mars has been liquid periodically, mainly due to volcanic action melting polar permafrost such as the ice that's been seen by Phoenix. Salt deposits found by one of the rovers certainly suggest that at least one of these great floods lasted sufficiently long to erode rocks, take salts into solution and then deposit them at locations where water evaporated. It's not yet clear if any of this lasted long enough for life to form in the same manner we think it did on Earth.

This doesn't rule out panspermia events (life coming from elsewhere), perhaps even from Earth. If one of our various landers had managed to splash down in a Martian sea, any hitchhiking bacteria would not have needed long to settle down.

marco_polo

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Quite true, I specifically meant we'd need a green house for turnips! There are many bacterial species here on Earth which will grow without oxygen. There are also more extreme examples of bacteria which can grow in very cold or very dry conditions. So the possibility of life surviving on Mars is in fact almost a certainty. The real question is whether it ever arose there in the first place, as the current conditions would almost certainly not allow abiogenesis (the initial formation of cells).

It seems very likely that the water on Mars has been liquid periodically, mainly due to volcanic action melting polar permafrost such as the ice that's been seen by Phoenix. Salt deposits found by one of the rovers certainly suggest that at least one of these great floods lasted sufficiently long to erode rocks, take salts into solution and then deposit them at locations where water evaporated. It's not yet clear if any of this lasted long enough for life to form in the same manner we think it did on Earth.

This doesn't rule out panspermia events (life coming from elsewhere), perhaps even from Earth. If one of our various landers had managed to splash down in a Martian sea, any hitchhiking bacteria would not have needed long to settle down.

Ah, with you now.

Good post too, it certainly does seem that it is possible that some extremophiles could indeed survive on mars..

Dave!

I don't really like asparagus or turnips -- come back when it can grow hamburgers

Really though, there's been some pretty interesting findings on Mars lately!