Water on Mars?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I just saw an AP story that caught my attention. The headline was “More Evidence Found for Water on Mars“. It seems that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken pictures showing alternating layers of light and dark toned rock. In those layers of rock they see a series of fractures surrounded by ‘halos’ of light toned rock. All that has researchers from the University of Arizona saying that they think “the ‘halos’ indicate areas where fluids, probably water, passed through the bedrock”.
There is, in my humble opinion, one little fly in this ointment. All this is based on photos taken from an orbiting spacecraft. They’re making all these assumptions based on thier interpretations of what different colors of rock mean.
All this is fine and dandy if they’re talking about terrestrial geology. There’s a lot of science, exploration and study to back up assumptions like that… on Earth. Mars is a whole other matter. There’s only just so much you can do based on looking at things. sure, you can do spectrograhic analysis to determine what things are made of but when it comes to determining the actual on-site chemistry and what all this stuff really is, nobody’s going to be able to do that until we can send a team of people to look around, take samples and do the kind of exploration that an unmanned robot is not going to be capable of.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
