NEWEST ROVER TO LAND ON MARS 8/6/2012

sedimentray rocks can be made up of clasts of stuff like basalt . So it may be hard to tell withouit first getting a picture of the goober

Rats...now I wish I taken that Geology course so I would be able to tell if those layers are meaningful.
In the Permian Basin of West Texas, you can tell that it was water which created sights (and sites) like that. You pick out one that looks like an island left behind by the drought, hike up, kick a little dust out the way and find little bitty seashells everywhere.

So, are those stripes not water created?

Joe(I took Chemistry I instead)Nation

there are so many water sourced sed features that its difficult top comment without sopending hours poring over the pix and the data.
The "blueberries" that ros posted over at the other thread that Edgar started is efinately a series of concretions that, to me, appear like fluid encrustings over some nucleus. Probably evaporating water.
THEN, over top that are what we call "imbrications: where the layers o the blueberries look like theyve actually been deposited atop each other, either by running water or wind.

I found this interesting.

Maybe it was a combo of both wind and water

Interesting, but I can't comment, because I'm no scientist, but it makes sense.

well, finally some indesputable evidence. Today JPL reported that Curiosity had taken shots of some, what appear to b cut banks with piles of stones that are ROUNDED. SO, that means water in streams had occured there for sufficient time to round the rock shards into stream pebbles.

We used to have "flume tanks" for undergrad labs for kids to do long term experiments of how long it would take rocks to be rounded and smoothed by rushing water. Then the kids would ll do the roundness measurements at specific intervals and some flume tanks would contain "tools" (tools are just bits of sand and mud whch can act as an abrasive). The oitcomes would be statistical studies of stream models and back calculating the streams energy budget.

See whether these guys can do better than some undergrad sedimentology lab

I got this from ALJAZEERA!!.

Ha And they got it from NASA.

I don't know about everybody else, but I was already convinced that there was water on Mars. So I suppose it's nice to have even more confirming evidence of that, but what I'm waiting for (and have been for some time now) is evidence of "life", not water.

I want that rover to pick up some sand/soil samples from various sedimentary layers and send back some high def photo's so we can start looking for micro fossils

Its kinda conspicuous at the poles, right ?

I would also like to know why so much Methane is being produced in cycles in the martian atmosphere.

NASA's Curiosity Finds Water Once Flowed On Mars
by Nell Greenfieldboyce
NPR Morning Edition

September 28, 2012

NASA's newest Mars rover, Curiosity, has snapped photos of rocky outcroppings that jut out from the alien soil, and scientists say they look like the remnants of an ancient stream bed where water once flowed on the surface of the red planet.

The exposed rocks look like broken slabs of concrete sidewalk, about four inches thick, and are made of rounded bits of gravel in a sandy matrix. The rock has eroded a little bit, and some of the smooth pebbles — about the size of M&M candies — have fallen down into a little pile.

Scientists looked at all this and came to this conclusion: "This is a rock that was formed in the presence of water," says John Grotzinger, project scientist for the mission at the California Institute of Technology.

And not just any water, but a flowing stream.

Scientists have believed for a long time that Mars once had liquid water on its surface. Orbiting spacecraft can see canyons that must have been carved by water. In fact, researchers deliberately picked Curiosity's landing site because it looked like a place where a canyon stream had spilled water onto a plain — and now it looks like they were right.

Before, we never really saw a rock on Mars where we could tell whether it was wind or water that was doing the transport. And now we have a clear sign of flowing water on Mars and we can get estimates of the size of the flow and so on. It's really fascinating.

- Peter Doran, University of Illinois, Chicago

Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who is working on this mission, says the rounded pebbles and cemented sandstones look like what you would find if you were "walking up a stream in your favorite little canyon somewhere. These are all telling us that there was water really flowing across the surface there, and probably pretty deep water — ankle-deep, knee-deep water — like you'd have in an occasional desert flood on the Earth, in the Southwest, for example."

Other researchers agree that this is convincing evidence of flowing water. Peter Doran, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, says the rounded grains in that rock are big enough that they couldn't have been carried and smoothed by the wind.

"Before, we never really saw a rock on Mars where we could tell whether it was wind or water that was doing the transport," Doran says. "And now we have a clear sign of flowing water on Mars and we can get estimates of the size of the flow and so on. It's really fascinating."

Other Mars rovers have seen some evidence of water, but nothing like this. Andrew Knoll, a planetary sciences professor at Harvard University, says earlier rovers saw things that could be associated with groundwater that might occasionally bubble up — not the kind of flowing surface water that made these newly discovered rocks.

"Something happened on Mars that simply doesn't happen today," Knoll says. "And that is, there was water flowing at high rates over the Martian surface. That's really what they've found."

Water is important, of course, because it's needed for life. And Curiosity's main mission is to search for evidence that Mars was once capable of supporting life. Its mission is expected to last about two years.

PHOTOS

http://www.npr.org/sections/space/

Polarice isnt necessariky any evidence of "flowing water" on the main of the planet. Here weve found what had never been seen before, clear evidence of a stream bed that once contained water, flowing water for some goodly lengths of time to establish an actual stratigraphic sequence of layers if these rounded rocks.

Theyer taking small steps based upon a clear methodology (anyway, therovers mission is alays detereminee by what theyve found recently. Im not sure that a stream bed will preserve any tissue from proto lifeforms or even any more adanced forms. SO digging around for fossils could be a waste of mission time, whereas deteremining that water in streams did exist will give a methodology for later rovers to use with more advanced gizmos (like settling tubes or centrifugs to separate out what may be life forms from sediment). I dont think that this rover os equipped to do anything more detailed than microscopy and chemical analyses.

I see that one of their tools is a "Hand lens imager", which allows the team on the ground to inspect the rocks and soil close up as we do in the field with a little dingus like a magnifying glass.Itws called a MAHLI (Mars aperture hand lens imager)

Heres a comparison set of photos of conglomeratic rock on earth and the same kind of deposit on Mars. How long did this streeam persist? who knows but a cereful inspection of all the pebbles from within the conglomerate can show how far they moved

Will the scientists be able to figure out when there was water on mars?

thry may have to do a sediment trick to see , either by "youngest age rounded rock" or alpha tracking to see when the sediments were last in the sunlight.
on earth, we age water by C13/C14 because it generally moves in the upper aquifers. (down deep though we use other radiobuclides because C14 isnt much good past 50K years)