NASA will be boradcasting live on NASA.com TV Monday.

[Owner]

NASA to reveal 'Mars mystery solved'

We shall see what it is. Exciting time.

Thanks!

Kamil L

[Fixious]

Chris Hadfield spoiled things on Twitter and said it was about the whole methane gas mystery. I believe the panel will be mostly geologists, so I'm guessing it's something about Mars still having some kind of volcanic activity or something.

[Owner]

No shit someone always has to leak something. Well we shall it the rest on Monday.

Thanks!

Kamil L

[Owner]

Hmm hope that is the news for Monday.

[perrinoia]

nasa.gov?

[AnniDv6]

Flowing extremely salty water on the surface.

[SGT ROCK]

Kinda disappointing... I saw pics of those flows a loooong time ago, perhaps years. The before and after pics then obviously showed some kind of liquid flow. I was thinking they finally had some proof of life out there.. :/ Still to have confirmed it finally is pretty nifty I guess. So it's much more possible they may find something eventually though.

[Erowid]

Finding life would be amazing and until then I could care less. Mars is a dead planet. I don't know what all the fuss about terraforming it is about. Its soil is loaded with calcium perchlorate which is highly toxic and it has no electromagnetic field to stop UV. Any chance we have of successfully terraforming it is far beyond our capability.

[AnniDv6]

Scientists think it's likely a mostly dead planet now. They don't actually know for sure. They also think that there were oceans or at least rivers on Mars at some point so even if we found fossils from way back when and there's no current life that could still be really interesting.

From
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/scien ... .html?_r=0

Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps. There have been fleeting hints of recent liquid water, like fresh-looking gullies, but none have proved convincing.

In 2011, Dr. McEwen and colleagues discovered in photographs from the orbiter dark streaks descending along slopes of craters, canyons and mountains. The streaks lengthened during summer, faded as temperatures cooled, then reappeared the next year.

They named the streaks recurring slope lineae, or R.S.L.s, and many thousands of them have now been spotted. “It’s really surprisingly extensive,” Dr. McEwen said.

Scientists suspected that water played a critical role in the phenomenon, perhaps similar to the way concrete darkens when wet and returns to its original color when dry.

But that was just an educated guess.

Lujendra Ojha, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, turned to an instrument on the orbiter that identifies types of molecules by which colors of light they absorb. But this instrument, a spectrometer, is not as sharp as the camera, making it hard to zoom in on readings from the narrow streaks, a few yards across at most.

“We had to come up with new techniques and novel ways to do analysis of the chemical signature,” said Mr. Ojha, the lead author of the Nature Geoscience article.

The researchers were able to identify the telltale sign of a hydrated salt at four locations. In addition, the signs of the salt disappeared when the streaks faded. “It’s very definitive there is some sort of liquid water,” Mr. Ojha said.

If you're holding out for them to find something of actual interest you might be frustrated to find out how underfunded and slow the future planned missions to determine these sorts of things are.

Even though recurring slope lineae appear to be some of the most intriguing features on Mars, NASA has no plans to get a close-up look anytime soon.

They are treated as special regions that NASA’s current robotic explorers are barred from because the rovers were not thoroughly sterilized, and NASA worries that they might be carrying microbial hitchhikers from Earth that could contaminate Mars.

Of the spacecraft NASA has sent to Mars, only the two Viking landers in 1976 were baked to temperatures hot enough to kill Earth microbes. NASA’s next Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2020, will be no cleaner. Sterilizing spacecraft, which requires electronics and systems that can withstand the heat of baking, adds to the cost and complicates the design.

In selecting the landing site for the 2020 rover, the space agency is ruling out places that might be habitable, including those with recurring slope lineae.

That prohibition may continue even though two candidate streaks have been identified on the mountain in Gale Crater that NASA’s Curiosity rover is now exploring, a mile or two from its planned path.

NASA and the Curiosity team could decide to approach the streaks without driving onto them, or to simply observe from a distance. The rover is still probably a couple of years away.

You would think by now surely we would have a large push to at least send people to the moon with HD cameras and also set up a sort of staging base for future missions further than the moon, but in reality actual people haven't gone far from the very beginning of space since the early 70s? The ISS is only 250~ miles up which is right next to the earth barely in orbit. Instead we throw endless amounts of money into the military industrial complex

The last I heard NASA is expecting to have manned missions to MARS sometime in the 2030's and the private sector is saying anywhere from 2025+ so there's that.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... itudes.jpg

[perrinoia]

Mars one was a scam. It was a pyramid scheme to raise money with no actual intent to ever launch a rocket.