Bront's Forums

Thats right folks, yesterday NASA released its proof that they have found water on Mars.  For those of you who care, that is a pretty significant discovery.  For therein lies the possibility that Mars may have once harbored life of some kind.

Same stuff.

And yes, I read about it.  There's an article about it somewhere.  I'll post a link when I can.

And fortunately, this isn't that lame bottled water on a mars bar joke going around.

I'm a little skeptical, that they even found 'water' ice yet.  The best articles I can find don't say they found H2O but say they found a bright substance which must be Ice and which evaporated, but couldn't be CO2 ice because it evaporated too slowly. 

I always find the water = life concept odd.  It takes a lot more than water to sustain life.  It is mathematically impossible for it to have started in the brief time our solar system has had planets to sustain it.  Which is why we have the frantic theroies about Panspermia and such.   When you pay attention to the 'science' they are really flailing around trying to explain life.  IMO they should stop grasping and just build on true science.  We should only explain, what we can explain.  It's cool to think about life elsewhere, but science really shows that there is not life out side of earth's influence.  It's mis-leading to imply otherwise.

But maybe I've missed an important piece of information.  Did anyone else find better evidence presented that they found actual water on mars?  Something better then ice which evaporated too slowly to be CO2?

I have to post a correction, they managed to get a scoop of soil/ice to the TEGA which has the capacity to heat the sample to 1000 degrees C, and measure at what points things melt and vaporize.  It can then send the vapor through a spectrum analyzer.  It can do this 8 times.  It has 8 one shot carteriges that can do this.  They couldn't get the ice into carterige because it would freeze on the scoop.  Interestingly, they found if they waited the ice would start to melt and they could then poor it into the TEGA.  (rocket science?)  They didn't say what caused the melting, if it was heat from the machine or native weather.  I wish they where more discriptive about the important facts. 

 I can't get information that tells me the raw data that they equate to H2O.  This still leaves me skeptical but I'm less so today.  Of the many times they've claimed water on Mars this might actually be true.