Martian Dust Devil

Watch a dust devil work it's way across the Martian landscape in this NASA clip.

Not being a meteorologist, I wonder what that says about the density of the atmosphere. How much atmosphere does there have to be to reproduce this?

Over at Mac Tonnies' blog, I saw a link to an article which really put some things into perspective. Rather than try to explain just how crazy it seems, and how far off track we seem to be as a species, let me just do what Mac did, and give you a title:

"Instead of sending HUMANS to Mars 11 times, the USA sent them on a Mission to Iraq"

While it's not exactly new news to a lot of people, more evidence of water flowing on Mars has come forward. This time images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter seem to show rocks that have been recently weathered by flowing water.

As the evidence mounts I wonder how long it will be before NASA starts working the very real possibility of water on Mars into their future plans. I also can't help but wonder long NASA has known about the water, and why most of the exciting Mars news most recently seems to come from scientists outside of NASA studying NASA data.

UFO Media Matters has a review of a few of the images from Mars Anomaly Research up under the title "Is NASA Still Touching up Photos?" The blog points out a few of the more striking images that look as though they've been obfuscated, and links to Mars Anomaly Research for more. A long time ago I used to check out Mars Anomaly Research pretty regularly, and while I think the analysis went a bit overboard from time to time, I think it hit the nail on the head regularly as well. I haven't been there in a long time, but I'll have to get around to checking it out again soon to see what's going on there now.

Scientists who have been studying Mars and the atmosphere there believe that there's a possibility of huge water reserves. They believe that the rate of atmospheric escape, 20 grams per second of oxygen and CO2 to space, doesn't account for most of the atmosphere that Mars is thought to have once held.

Recent evidence seems to show that water flows on Mars still from time to time, leading the team to believe that Mars might very well hold huge reservoirs of water close below the surface. While Dr. David Brain(yes, that's really his name...), believes that extrapolating the current rate out over time ignores the possibility of variable rates that may have taken more of the atmosphere and water out into space, he also thinks that some of the ancient water and CO2 is still stored in hidden reservoirs.

Of course, the possibility of water on Mars not only points toward the possibilities of life currently on Mars, it also means that putting people on Mars would be much easier in the not too distant future. Mars missions under development are sure to be on the lookout for proof of these hidden reservoirs.

A couple of months ago I wrote about an article which suggested that, perhaps, life on Mars might have evolved to use hydrogen peroxide as an intracellular fluid. Taking that a step further, there was a paper presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle which supposed that if life were on Mars, and did use hydrogen peroxide as part of its intracellular fluid, then the Viking experiments to find life on Mars would have actually killed it, rather than identifying it. Lets hope NASA takes the time to think through the possibility and tries to find this type of life next time they send a probe to Mars.

Thanks to Mac Tonnies for pointing out a nice little article from Meta Research on the Mars face. Titled, "Let’s “face” it: The Cydonia Face is not pareidolia" it takes a look at all the different images that have been taken of the face, and comes to the conclusion that it's "unquestionably artificial."

There were a couple of exciting announcement from NASA on the space exploration front this past week that are certainly worth noting.

In the first, NASA has announced plans to set up a polar moon base which they hope to permanently staff by 2024. While I certainly think they could pull it off sooner if they wanted to, and I have my doubts that this program will survive the next 18 years through however many administrations there might be in that time, I think this is a major step toward colonization of other planets and moons. Which, I believe, we must undertake in my lifetime if we hope to survive as a species. As we stand, all of our proverbial eggs are in one basket, and that basket's not in the best of shape at this point, not to even mention the possibility of a catastrophic natural event, meteor impact, nuclear warfare, etc.

Secondly, NASA announced that they've found evidence of water flowing on Mars. While I've seen people presenting evidence that they've found on NASA photographs of this for years, it's very exciting to see NASA jumping on board on the idea that there might be liquid water occasionally flowing on Mars. I think as we explore more in the universe we're going to find that there are more similarities on "alien" worlds than we expect. We're also going to find that there are many strange things we've never thought of, in all likelihood. However, if there's confirmed water on Mars, it certainly opens up the possibilities for not only life, but manned exploration and, eventually, permanent habitation.