THE DAY THE NASA INTENDS TO ANNOUNCE

THAT THERE IS A LIFE ON MARS 2

CREATED 12-28-2000

3. THERE ARE TRACES OF LIFE IN THE MARTIAN ROCK

This brings us back to the University of California presentation held during San Francisco meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

David Mitchell, a research physicist at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory who, with his colleagues, compiled the map of Martian ionosphere (click the image on right for full story) from MGS spacecraft data, stated that the crustal magnetic fields are a major factor limiting erosion of the atmosphere by the solar winds in some, mostly southern regions. Data show that where localized surface magnetic fields are strong, the ionosphere reaches to a higher altitude (red areas), indicating that the solar wind is being kept at bay.

Mars crustal magnetic fields themselves are a mystery in that that they are nearly as strong at the surface as the Earth's magnetic field is, a few tenths of a Gauss, and that they are arrayed in east-west bands of alternating polarity, extending for over 1.000 kilometers north to south across the planet's surface. Also, it was said that scientists still do not know what materials produce this strong fields, or why they occurs in alternating bands.

That Allan Hills (ALH84001) meteorite that landed in Antarctica about 13,000 years ago, the same one that caused a stir in 1996 by providing the first potential evidence of bacteria-like life on Mars, contains magnetic compound called magnetite, which is common on our planet, was announced in the December issue of the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and relayed by the NASA NEWS page linked to the adjacent image.

The report on the four-year long investigation, that was written by a group of scientists led by Kathie Thomas-Keprta of Lockheed Martin at Johnson Space Center, states that the magnetites from the meteorite are basically indistinguishable from certain biologically produced magnetites on Earth. On Earth magnetites are grown atom by atom inside the magnetotactic bacteria strain MV-1 (image above). Coauthor Kirschvink, stated that an entire industry devoted to making small magnetic particles for magnetic tapes and computer disk drives has tried and failed for the past 50 years to find a way to make similar particles.

In other words, we know of no other mechanism to make them, either on Earth or Mars.

Jet another coauthor, Everett Gibson of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said that the very strong remnant magnetism detected recently by the MGS in some of the rocks in the crust of Mars clearly indicate that early on, about 3,9 billion years ago, Mars had a strong magnetic field, and that about that time these magnetites were formed. Formerly indicated sedimentary rocks, which the researchers interpreted to be the product of ancient lakes that once dotted Mars's surface, could have provided a habitat for bacteria.

So far nobody explicitly claims that this could explain the observed strong, localized surface magnetic fields.

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Map of Martian ionosphere is a courtesy of David Mitchell, UC Berkeley.

Image of MV-1bacteria is a courtesy of Dr. Dennis Bazylinski of Iowa State University.

file: mars2.htm