From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, some exciting news of the “picture is worth a thousand words” variety – NASA Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface
Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream’s flow.
“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”
The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. Earlier imaging of the region from Mars orbit allows for additional interpretation of the gravel-bearing conglomerate. The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds.
The rounded shape of some stones in the conglomerate indicates long-distance transport from above the rim, where a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years.
The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called “Hottah” and “Link,” with the telephoto capability of Curiosity’s mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Project’s rover, touched down.
“Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it’s really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The gravels in conglomerates at both outcrops range in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball. Some are angular, but many are rounded.
“The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn’t be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow,” said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.
The science team may use Curiosity to learn the elemental composition of the material, which holds the conglomerate together, revealing more characteristics of the wet environment that formed these deposits. The stones in the conglomerate provide a sampling from above the crater rim, so the team may also examine several of them to learn about broader regional geology.
The slope of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater remains the rover’s main destination. Clay and sulfate minerals detected there from orbit can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.
“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” said Grotzinger. “It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We’re still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”
During the two-year prime mission of the Mars Science Laboratory,esearchers will use Curiosity’s 10 instruments to investigate whether areas in Gale Crater have ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, built Curiosity and manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
For more about Curiosity, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .
You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .
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If Curiosity finds some gold in that old stream bed, you know there will be a manned mission to Mars…gold fever and “go fever” are two strong forces for accelerating exploration, combined they’ll be irresistible.
Here is a somewhat wider view of the image above:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4719
NASA says:
Still seems to me, based on the foregoing discussion, that the more definitive question is: what else (besides water) could have produced the conglomerate?
/Mr Lynn
Thanks for your responses. From what I see, and I could be wrong, the atmospheric pressure of Mars will not allow CO2 to become a liquid. That answers my question.
I’m not saying NASA faked these pictures. But I still find it hard to believe that water caused this ancient river. The only thing I can think of is if this really are water sculpted rocks then it would have to be early in the planet’s formation. I do think NASA has fallen into the trap of many scientists today in that they start with the answer they want and then try to match the facts to make it true.
alexwade says:
September 28, 2012 at 5:31 pm
The bigger trap is in thinking that ours is a static universe. A little familiarity with Earth’s geology would quickly dispel that faulty notion.
But the biggest trap is rejection of empirical evidence in favor of dogma, or bogus beliefs.
Gunga Din says:
September 28, 2012 at 12:04 pm
> (Maybe the next “Curiosity” should include a microscope instead of catnip?8-)
From http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/mars-science-laboratory.pdf :
Gunga, I would think that Curiosity must have *some* degree of microphotographic capabilities. Heck, I can take pics of a bug with my cheap little camera that just about show the hairs on a fly’s legs etc. Closeup pics are not a high tech thing nowadays.
The “dust as fluid” concept seems to hold water though (no pun intended!). Hundreds of millions of years of fine wind/dust erosion might be hard to distinguish from millions of years of water erosion.
– MJM
Kev-in-Uk says:
September 28, 2012 at 11:31 am
We also have to ask how long that conglomerate has been exposed! While Mars is more active than the Moon, thin air, lack of water, and lack of tectonic processes could must leave a lot of things exposed for many millions of years.
I am rather impressed that wherever we drop in we don’t have have to go far to find signs of water on Mars. Perhaps the next mission should aim for a shallow sea and look for stromatolite fossils.
Ric Werme says:
September 28, 2012 at 6:45 pm
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Thanks.
I wonder if they’ll try to turn the pebble over to see what the underside looks like?
The Earth picture was of a streambed so, obviously the effect of flowing water. Are there similar looking pictures from, say, Egypt or another desert area showing the effect of wind and dust?
I’m not being suspicious (as I’ve been of CAGW ever since AlGore joined the chorus), just skeptical.
‘Stream beds’ in my part of Texas (north central) take on the appearance of miniature ‘Grand Canyons’ where the water/stream bed is 20 feet or so below ground level and with the water (at low flow rates) flowing in/through its etched-out limestone bed … so it would follow that the stream bed on Mars exists in a land area more like what we have in the more northern states as where the Wisconsin Glacier ’tilled’ the soil and gravel exists?
.
Stephen Rasey says:
September 28, 2012 at 1:43 pm
CO2 cannot exist at any temperature below 5 atm
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/co2_phase_diagram.gif
So if mars had an environment that could allow for liquid CO2, a thicker atmosphere than Earth is likely to have had at least since the Cretaceous, then I think it likely that liquid water would be likely. Theoretically, it is possible to have liquid CO2 and no liquid water, But it must be in high pressure > 5 atm, high CO2 concentration and between -56 and 0 deg C.
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I think you meant “liquid CO2 cannot exist at any temperature below 5 atm”.
We’ve only been able to observe Mars weather for a short period of time. We don’t know what Mars past climate was like. If only “Curiosity” could only find a tree ring ……………
Looks like a sedimentary deposit. Here’s a question for a geologist: would sedimentary rocks formed in 1/3 Earth gravity have less density than on Earth? How about igneous?
I don’t think anyone who has noticed my comments on WUWT would mistake me for an expert on much of anything. From what little think I know there are a lot of dust storms on Mars. Wouldn’t it have been filled in with dust if this was an ancient streambed formed by flowing water?
Just asking questions as they occur to me.
Another typo.
“From what little think I know there are a lot of dust storms on Mars.”
Should be:
“From what little I think I know there are a lot of dust storms on Mars.”
(Maybe I am an expert on making typos?)
To: Bill Parsons
“How about igneous?”.
Bill, that was my first thought, perhaps an ash flow deposit/ ignimbrite/ agglomerate, possibly slumping off a crater wall to soften the particle edges.
The rock looks cemented- on another (more familiar!) planet its usually water based solutions moving through the unconsolidated rock that introduce the cement.
Fascinating, wish they could bring it back.
| Curious says:
| September 28, 2012 at 6:36 am
| I’m not sure this has merit, but have been reading in a few places that NASA has photo-shopped
| some of the photos of Gale Crater. What do you think? Possibility or hoax?
| http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=2015&category=Science
The images are composed from multiple smaller images, taken from different angles and lighting conditions. A computer program stitches them together to attempt a coherent whole. This can involve, stretching, rotating, shearing, and tries to pin any shifts based on identifiable common features in neighboring photos. Sometimes it goes wrong. If people tell them at NASA, they will try to manually correct the errors.
Thanks for your explanation, andyd. That makes total sense.
“At this size, scientists know the rounding occurred in water transport in a stream”
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but milled hydrothermal breccias in volcanic terrains frequently produce rounded cobble and much larger size rounded fragments, and there are volcanoes on Mars which also produce hydrothermal breccias. No surface water is necassary to produce rounded fragments in volanic hydrothermal breccias.
There is no doubt that water, or rather brine (water with a high concentration of salt) is present below ground on the Red Planet. Neither is there any doubt that crude oil is also present on the planet, remember this is the next common fluid on Earth. For evidence take a look at: http://www.oilonmars.blogspot.no/
The question is really when, or how often does the water come up to the surface and ‘daylight’ on Mars? There is evidence of stream flow of water many places of Mars. However, because water is not stable in Mars’ atmosphere it will evaporate very fast on exposure. Therefore, any stream of brine that survives for many days will have to be of great volume and will probably be triggered by tectonic or some underground movement of molten rock (an underground eruption of some kind).
When end where these events happened are the main questions. Another main question is if they can happen again (or is Mars now a ‘dead planet’)?
thingadonta says:
September 28, 2012 at 11:28 pm
Of course, but a hydrothermal fluid transport is still a ‘stream’, is it not? And likely, it would have to be dense fluid transport to allow the amount of rounding over such small distance and time frame too (unless the constituent pebbles are really soft!).
My curiosity still centres around the matrix ‘cement’ and the eroding processes.
many many questions to be answered to get a realistic analysis – and IMHO certainly NASA is overly biased to release the rather simplistic press release that it has!
MartinH wrote, “Neither is there any doubt that crude oil is also present on the planet,” ??? OK, *not* a geologist here… but I’d always thought oil was based on old dead bodies and trees that lay around for a few million years and decomposed?
😕
MJM
G. Karst says:
September 28, 2012 at 10:50 am
“I’m pretty sure I see embedded bits of sea shells in the Earth gravel. Would not moist gravel on Earth contain thriving colonies of bacteria, amoebas, and other life forms. ”
Conglomerates are normally not marine but terrestial sediments and for fossilisation one needs preferably anaerobic conditions and those conditions don’t exist in fast flowing streams that create pebbly conglomerates.
@Gunga Din 8:07 pm.
Thanks, Gunga. Yes, I did mean “liquid”, but leaving off tha word, even in context, was a blunder worth pointing out. l’ll be more careful in the future.
It should have been “CO2 cannot exist as a liquid at any temperature if the pressure is below 5 atm.”
D. Patterson says:
“Planning and engineering studies for a real manned mission to Mars began with Wehrner Von Braun’s Mars Project at various stages in 1946, 1948, 1952, 1956, other intervening years, and 1969. The 1969 planning set a date in 1987 for the landing on Mars, but it too was cancelled like all preceding plans due to the lack of political support. Those of us lobbying Congress and the White House for funding in 1971 barely succeeded in securing funding for the development of the Space Shuttle (STS). We were unable to save the funding for the final Apollo Lunar missions, much less find any bipartisan support for a Martian flight programme.
Later manned missions to Mars suffered similar fates with the lack of political will and support in Congress.”
Yes, I was aware of Von Braun’s push for Mars, perhaps even the 1989 Integrated Space Plan was an evolved development,…and you are correct in noting that the political will has not been there to make action meet with space plan schedules to date. However time moves on and much of the essential technology to make it happen as laid out in the 1989 ISP are now extant or coming online in the near future. So it will happen with or without US/NASA leadership, as Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indian, etc., space capabilities continue apace. That 1989 ISP is generic in the sense that many of the steps are essential prerequisite technical developments that need to be in place sequentially as the trasition from a terrestrial to a solar human species proceeds, so time really doesn’t matter in the longer term of planetary evolution, nor individual nations, everything will get done!
Friends:
I again write to thank all who have tried to give me an answer to my question as to whether the fluid may have been a flowing fluidised bed of particulates and not water. I especially appreciate the comments from John Marshall, Mike Bromley the Kurd, and Hector Pascal.
I have learned from all of you. Thankyou.
I found the comments of Hector Pascal especially helpful to me. In his post September 28, 2012 at 5:12 am at he says to me:
and he explains why. Later, at September 28, 2012 at 7:41 am, he expands on that and says
Now that is a really scientific answer. Hector, I not only accept that, I applaud it.
So, it seems that the NASA statements about indications from gross morphology of the pebble are probably somewhat exaggerated.
However, the discussion in the thread has shown that the determination of the cementation processes of the conglomerate may provide a definitive indication of whether the conglomerate was – or was not – formed by exposure to liquid water. Not being a geologist, I am probably not aware of all the possible reasons for formation of the observed cement. Hence, I look forward to reading further discussions of that in the thread.
Again, sincere thanks to you all. I have learned, and learning is why I enjoy frequenting WUWT.
Richard
Martin Hovland: How truly fascinating! Many thanks for that link to the oil on Mars site. If true, it turns absolutely everything upside down. I have long suspected that “fossil fuels” is just yet another falsehood. We have known about Methane lakes on Titan for a while, and if there is oil on Mars…