Rovers on Mars

It's easy to expect too much. But I do expect them to find evidence of some sort of life there, living or dead. I love the thought of worms, whether real or not. Because if there were worms, who can guess what else there is evidence of?

maybe bluegills

I just re-read the article and the original published article in the journal astrobiology, and I don't see any reference to "worms" anywhere except in the title of the article, so it appears the "headliners" were trying to grab attention again (as is their job I suppose).

The article and research paper only proposes microbial mats and such, which would still be a thrilling discovery, but not nearly as shocking as actual multi-cellular life

I interpreted the possible "Ichnofosil-like trails" Ive inferred that this is a dubious claim .
Im sorry I made the comment about worms as it will seem to steer folks in a direction I cannot endorse without waaay more close and clear inspections.

What I did infer is that.IF THESE WERE WORM TRAILS, it would indicate that there would be equally complex life-forms

Understood. I didn't mean to imply that you perpetuated anything. It looks to me like the original article simply had an attention grabbing headline which exceeded the content of the original thesis.

None the less, I think the distinction between microbial life and multi-cellular life makes for good discussion.

And to clarify my own position as well, even though I think they may well find fossilized evidence of microbial life on Mars, I'm not convinced by a few fuzzy images of dust covered rocks. I think it's far too easy to imagine seeing what you want to see when you look at images like that. But I could be convinced if I saw enough images, and in more detail and hopefully with bare rock and not covered in dust

I'm prepared to wait until I am a hundred and ten to get to the truth of it, if necessary. No hurry.

Professor's BEAGLE, missing for 10 years, FOUND ON MARS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/lost_beagle_found_mars_nasa/

That there beagle has been missing for 12 years! He must have been living on worms . . . all the worms he could eat.

Everybody know that beagles prefers rabbits.

Helicopters on Mars?

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/23/7879311/nasa-mars-autonomous-helicopter-drone

Wow . . . who would have thought that JPL would produce a program like that? Cool stuff, EB . . .

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/09/glass-mars-nasa-alien-life_n_7543732.html
Research has shown that bits of plant life were preserved in impact glass on Earth -- sort of like how insects get trapped in amber -- as comets and asteroids struck our planet near what is now Argentina millions of years ago. This gave researchers the idea of looking for similar deposits on Mars.

"Billions of years ago, when microbial life may have littered the Red Planet, the occasional meteor impact could accidentally encase bits and pieces of this ancient biology in glassy packaging," Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who was not involved in the research, told The Huffington Post in an email. "So if you're going to look for life that's been gone for billions of years, this suggests that a promising way to do so is to simply find it lying around, conveniently bottled."

To figure out how to find the Martian glass deposits, Cannon and co-author Jack Mustard, a professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown, first conducted a simple experiment in their laboratory.

They mixed together powders containing compounds similar to those known to exist on Mars, and heated them in an oven to produce glass. Then they measured the spectra of light reflected by the resulting glass -- and looked for similar signals in the orbiter's imaging data.

“The researchers’ analysis suggests glass deposits are relatively common impact features on Mars,” Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a written statement. “These areas could be targets for future exploration as our robotic scientific explorers pave the way on the journey to Mars with humans in the 2030s.”

One glass-containing crater of particular interest is called Hargraves. It's located in a region that once contained warm vents, and was likely hospitable for life -- and it's being considered as a possible landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 rover.

The research was published online in the journal Geology on Jun 5, 2015.

How Synthetic Bacteria Could Take Us to Mars
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1409025-how-synthetic-bacteria-could-take-us-to-mars/

In 2010, Congress finally set the human exploration of Mars as one of NASA’s goals, giving the project essential financial backing. NASA has already began the construction of vast rockets that could take humans to the red planet. But getting there is only half the battle: for a Mars colony to exist, the planet needs to become hospitable to humans.

DARPA, the research wing of the Department of Defense, announced a major breakthrough in the Mars mission: They’re on track to create a synthetic organism that could terraform Mars’s surface, releasing certain types of gas into the atmosphere and making its climate closer to the one on Earth.

Mars’s atmosphere is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide, lacking the abundance of nitrogen and oxygen found on Earth. A crucial step in terraformation is the deployment of bacteria and photosynthetic organism to adjust Mars’s atmospheric composition.

That's in the realm of "not any time soon" in a timeline for having a noticeable impact.

One inch at a time, but they will eventually put a footprint or two on that place. Not that I will be around to celebrate.

With no other method (read industrial), it would take at least thousands of years, if not tens of thousands of years to significantly alter the atmosphere by that method alone.

Oh, that. I was not pushing that idea particularly. Just that even if they only stay a short time and leave, I believe somebody will eventually go.

A great, great regret for me is that I will not see it happen.

But it seems likely it will.

Mars will be colonized by people from Earth…and, if the past is any indication, there will be a day when a human’s name will be honored by the people living on that planet for leading the rebellion that ended colonial days there...for being the person who lead the planet to independence. Mars will almost certainly have its human heroes…and its interesting history.

Likewise, there will almost certainly come a day when we humans will know for sure that we are not alone in this universe…that there are others.

Yeah…I do regret that I will not see it happen.

Washington (CNN)NASA took a key step forward in the goal to land a person on Mars on Thursday, naming the first four astronauts to train for a commercial trip to Mars.

Robert Behnken, Sunita Williams, Eric Boe and Douglas Hurley will train to fly to space on commercial crew vehicles, NASA said.

"We are on a journey to Mars, and in order to meet our goals for sending American astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s we need to be able to focus both on deep space and the groundbreaking work being done on the International Space Station," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden.

are they 8 or 9 years old? I think itll be a further tim for commercial space exploration (unless the "commercial ventures of several countries team up)