Last night's Midnight Moment on the Cam FM Facebook page sparked a fair amount of conversation and interest. More than one person contacted me directly (as I put up the Midnight Moment posts) to ask whether it was true. Some people thought it was a joke and others thought it might be a true or false feature. (On reflection I think I could have improved the caption to make it clearer and to give a link to some evidence!)
Seeing as it led to so much excited conversation, I thought I'd bring the discussion here and share it with you! As you may have read or heard, NASA have finally managed to land a craft on the surface of Mars. The rover, named Curiosity, landed a few months ago after a 6 month journey to the red planet dans has been taking pictures and beaming them back to Earth as well as conducting some sophisticated geological experiments using the onboard laboratory.
One of the aims of this mission to Mars is to determine whether there was once life on Mars, something which has been the topic of conversation for decades. I can only guess that people have had an instinctive sense that there was once life on Mars as the word "Martian" is in common usage to describe a living creature - we don't suggest that there was ever such a being as a "Mercurian"!
This month Curiosity has travelled to a new point in a valley where she began to drill into the Martian soil. At a certain depth she extracted a rock on which she conducted a series of tests. The most important of these tests determined that the water once flowed on the surface of Mars (the minerals in the rock gave that one away somehow!).
NASA scientists have taken these discoveries a step further and have stated that they can now confirm with confidence that there was once life on Mars!
At the moment they are only able to speculate on the sophistication of such life, but it's certainly an enthralling development and one which I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more of over the next decade or so... Who'd have thought the 2010s would be the Martian decade, eh?!
What do you think the 2050s will have in store for us?
Seeing as it led to so much excited conversation, I thought I'd bring the discussion here and share it with you! As you may have read or heard, NASA have finally managed to land a craft on the surface of Mars. The rover, named Curiosity, landed a few months ago after a 6 month journey to the red planet dans has been taking pictures and beaming them back to Earth as well as conducting some sophisticated geological experiments using the onboard laboratory.
One of the aims of this mission to Mars is to determine whether there was once life on Mars, something which has been the topic of conversation for decades. I can only guess that people have had an instinctive sense that there was once life on Mars as the word "Martian" is in common usage to describe a living creature - we don't suggest that there was ever such a being as a "Mercurian"!
This month Curiosity has travelled to a new point in a valley where she began to drill into the Martian soil. At a certain depth she extracted a rock on which she conducted a series of tests. The most important of these tests determined that the water once flowed on the surface of Mars (the minerals in the rock gave that one away somehow!).
NASA scientists have taken these discoveries a step further and have stated that they can now confirm with confidence that there was once life on Mars!
At the moment they are only able to speculate on the sophistication of such life, but it's certainly an enthralling development and one which I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more of over the next decade or so... Who'd have thought the 2010s would be the Martian decade, eh?!
What do you think the 2050s will have in store for us?