Press hubbub over all things Martian last week set the scientific community hankering for a little piece of the Red Planet pie. Statements and news releases were quickly sent out by media-savvy researchers who know that timing is everything.
Just hours after NASA’s “Spirit” probe bounced onto Mars’ surface on Jan. 3, scientists at the France-based Theodore Monod Consortium announced they had finally determined that a pair of meteorites they found in southern Morocco almost two years ago are actually Martian meteorites.
Only 30 of the strange stones — believed to have originated on Mars itself because of their composition and formation — have been discovered since 1831.
Russia managed to use the Mars mission to denounce the war in Iraq.
“If the United States had spent the money they used for the war in Iraq on this project, a human expedition to Mars could be taking place five years from now,” Vasily Moroz, director of Russia’s Space Research Institute, told Interfax news agency after spectacular color images began arriving from the Mars probe on Monday.
On a less serious note, members of the California-based Planetary Society also announced Monday that the 3-inch sundial they had affixed atop the spacecraft with the help of a grant from the Lego toy company was functioning just fine.
“Do you know what time it is on Mars?” the group asked, adding that the “Marsdial” will be monitored by students in a dozen countries.
Over at the University of Michigan, researchers had their own revelations, announcing Tuesday they had discovered Martian “dust devils and dust storms” could be detected remotely by their electromagnetic radiation signature.
Duke University scientists heralded the news mid-week that they had recreated the harsh Martian environment on a one-by-50-meter plot in the Mojave Desert. After analyzing some near-indestructible algae they found growing on quartz pebbles, the team concluded that similar spooky flora might have grown on Mars.
“If Mars had something alive 2 billion years ago, when it is believed to have been slightly wetter, this might have been where that something lived,” explained research director William Schlesinger.
Geologists at Indiana University also plumbed the mysteries of Mars from afar, according to the Associated Press Wednesday. The group is studying life-forms found in South African gold mines three miles underground, hoping to determine if life could survive below the Martian surface — with a $5 million grant from NASA.
“It’s just so important for people to realize what’s happening on Mars,” project leader Lisa Pratt observed. “It really could be the place where we find out we’re not alone.”
Recreating the Martian environment on Earth is a favorite device of inventive researchers.
NASA itself maintains a half-acre Martian “rock pile” test site in the Arizona desert to test space suits and vehicles, describing their experiments as “extremely helpful in defining and developing engineering design insight … in support of future human planetary surface exploration.”
University of Alabama scientists also discovered a new species of “extremophile” bacteria that live without oxygen in the alkaline waters of California’s Mono Lake, prompting them to speculate that extremophiles could also exist on Mars.
“By studying microorganisms found in Earth’s extreme places, like Mono Lake, we can better understand how life might exist on Mars,” NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover told reporters in July.
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