I had to look up Gilbert Levin. On wikipedia, a reproduced letter to the editor voiced a serious opinion that the Nobel committee should give due consideration to Levin.

"Lichen Brides Of Mars!"

I'm getting the eye-glasses fogging giggles...

My goodness, I don't think I've seen this much hand-wringing since Oppy got stuck in Purgatory. Much ado about nothing, IMO. This isn't the first instance of flawed science being picked up by the mass media, nor will it be the last. Just as the good science from Mars briefly appears then falls off the radar, so too shall this pass. Remember cold fusion?

Brian

Are you including New Scientist as part of the mass media? I think
they have a greater responsibility as an intermediary between the
science journals and the general news organizations. I know they
regularly have articles covering speculative theories, but this 'water
in Endurance' thing is on a level with supermarket tabloids -- very
disappointing.

Not to beat a dead horse, but this image from sol 175 shows Opportunity's wheel tread marks which have crossed an apparent "puddle".


I don't think Opportunity had reached Burns Cliff whent his image was taken, but it was inside Endurance crater. As such, it might be considered a sufficient test similar to the one Levin proposed:

"Levin proposes a simple test that would prove the presence of liquid if similar features are found: use the rover's drill on the surface of the flat area. If it is ice, or any solid material, the drill will leave unmistakable markings, but if it is liquid there should be no trace of the drill's activity."

Nice find, Gray. Yeah, I guess it's not like these smooth areas are anything new...



Edit: This is at Karatepe, I believe (where we first entered Endurance). Look closely at the right of the first image and notice the series of RAT holes!

Now someone just needs to make the tread marks blue.

"notice the series of RAT holes"

Those aren't RAT holes. Those holes are the locations of plugs that the rover pulled out to drain the surface water that NASA obviously wants to hide.

Emily has a fantastic writeup about this on The Planetary Society Weblog. Very helpful link to send to people who ask about this or post to other forum where the topic comes up.

The Bad Astronomer gives worthy credit to Emily for her PS Blog entry about this... and we get a nod of the head too...

Emily, with the help of a few others who habituate the wonderful forum Unmanned Spaceflight, quickly and easily debunks this claim.

Courtesy of one member in particular - this thread was beginning to go a bit 'fringe'. That member is getting a private message and a few posts that made no sense without his contribution have been culled also. Meanwhile - I think the thread should continue as a place to continue to pool (pun intended) other evidence that counters the tabloid sensationalism we've seen.

A good place to start - the verbose mini-TES coverage of this place - including one survey from the Endurance West pan position that mapped temperatures of Burns cliff to be about 6 deg C.

Doug

Very good, Emily.

Also, on the bottom of this old page there is a good picture of Opportunity around that time (sol 250):

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000441/

Well, Emily's summary was pretty much spot on, and the bad astronomy follow up was a worthy contribution. It should be fun to read the paper, when it comes out. If nothing else, this topic seems to have awakened the forum.

Yeah -- disgust often motivates people...

-the other Doug

OK, so it is not water, but if tread marks persist it must be a teeming gooey mass of probably biological origin...

New Scientist "clarifies" its story.

I go on vacation for a week and return to find that we've all been sucked into some bizarre time warp. Wasn't this discussed, and dismissed, when the images came down two years ago?

This time around though, it was a relief to see how people here were able to quickly and thoroughly dismantle this poorly researched, press-greedy work. Thankfully, these efforts were heard, leading directly to...

Levin retracting his claims! I think the efforts here have shown the power of the amateur community in a big way. The rover team did not need to respond publicly on this issue, the facts have spoken for themselves. Congratulations to everyone here for a job well done.

At the moment, I believe New Scientist is retracting the story, not Levin and Lyddy.

From the article:
"I want to retract the claim in the paper that the smooth area we discussed was 'standing liquid water'," Levin acknowledged on Tuesday. "I am sorry that we made such a large mistake."

You're right, slinted. I didn't read down far enough.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...00P2437L7M1.JPG

Now this puddle is more of a mystery to me - near bottom of picture

I really wonder why Oppy never poked a stick in that one...

Hey, maybe you should submit a "paper" to IEEE.

Hi Denmike
I'll be brave and make some guesses about the depression is the lower part of your picture
firstly it looks like dust but why the neat shape well even slight depressions can look like a sharp edged hole when filled with fine dust so maybe that's all it is.
An alternative but less likely reason for the neatly defined "hole" could be a that a piece of rock was sitting on the surface in that place and has since eroded away (I did say less likely) either way I still think it's dust.
Sorry if I've just given you a muddle instead of a puddle.
Roy

Here is a low res. x-eye stereo

Dont be sorry, Reckless. I think it is a dustbowl too.. but could have been nice with a quick dip !

Duuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

But it was blue! Blue I say!

Actually, the retraction was quite magnanimous, even if unavoidable. And if Levin and Lyddy had followed normal peer review, which usually involves two or three anonymous reviewers mediated by an editor, the slam, which might have even been harsher, wouldn't have been public. Indeed, the criticisms in this thread and elsewhere on this claim are far less harsh than some reviewers' comments I've seen on other far less controversial work.

What an astonishing few days! As certain as we were of this, I'm shocked that Levin retracted so quickly - I had been thinking he might dig in and claim other examples on level ground, for example.

There's still a big question looming here: Levin knew this was inside Endurance crater, but didn't check the slope?!

Given New Scientist's swift action on this, my opinion of them has recovered somewhat.

The thing I can't figure out is how he was allowed to present this at all. Doesn't the IEEE even do a "sniff" test on these things? It didn't take me even one minute to start smelling a rat when I was reading it. Something that sensational you would think they'd ask someone.

How did he think the water got there. Rain? Ground seep? You know what they say, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." For that much water to spend anytime on the surface, there would've had to have been a lot of "smoke". Cloud to percipitate from. Run-off erosion. Water bourn mineral deposits. The place would be littered with evidence of recent water activity.

The other side of this is the insult to the MER team. To make such a claim is to imply complete incompitance on the part of the people running the mission. That they would command the pancam to take a multispectural image of the ground right in front of the rover and not see a puddle of water -- that is insulting.

Got this in my email this afternoon:

That's nothing. Here's what Maggie said to me:

Dear,
Thank you so much for your message. I have just gotten back from
vacation and have been working with the reporter to find out what
happened with the story. The researchers have retracted their claim, and
I am writing a blog explaining what happened (copy pasted below). We
will have the story and blog updated shortly.
Thanks so much for writing in - I really am grateful for your letting us
know about this.
Best,
Maggie

Hey, at least she used "Dear" with you and not simply "Hello." No doubt New Scientist's form letter robot would insert "Hi" in the next salutation.

Good to see that there are lots of honestly red faces over this...integrity still lives at New Scientist, it seems, and this should be positive in the long-term...they won't do this so casually again.

Too bad, though...really wanted me one of them Lichen Brides (thanks for laughing, Ed! )

I have to admit that I almost burst out laughing upon finding out about this.

For that reason, in a way, I'm grateful to the authors, and to New Scientist. It's been a lousy week, and I really needed something to cheer me up.

What a credit to this "amateur" community.

I do not poo poo the idea of brief moments of "wet" ground in low altitude locations... would really love a rover at the bottom of the Hellas basin. Given all the detections of salts in the surface, can envision places where dampness may exist briefly.....

But I really CANNOT understand how any one could make such claim and not look at the larger context imaging. Slope a dope....

As for Gilbert Levin.... I do applaud him for sticking to his guns regarding his LABEL RELEASE data from Viking. Occam still weighs heavily against the results being proof of metabolic activity.... but it has not been outright disproven....

And we should not be afraid in science to say.... "results were inconclusive". That is how a scientific experiment works. I saw all too many PR releases during and after Viking that proclailmed Viking found NO
evidence of life. Mars is dead. PERIOD.

Time, more exploration, more experiments, will tell.....

Lets just keep a sceptical mind, but open mind, and keep exploring ..... Mars is not Earth...

What a great community this is....amateurs and professionals, and this forum just ROCKS!!!!!

Craig

It does indeed, BP, it does indeed...

Generally, uncertainty in experimental results means that we haven't asked the right questions, or our methods to answer said questions were not applicable. Therefore, such results serve as constraints (i.e., this didn't work as we thought it would--why?), and thereby lead to improved questions and more refined approaches to answering them.

Viking really landed in the blind in so many, many ways, and the labelled release experiment assumed an inorganically non-reactive surface. The only way to interpret the results is , and search for alternative explanations as well as flaws (not errors; this was done as I said completely in the blind) in the experiment's approach, which is precisely what the larger scientific community has done. The fact of the matter is that there was no conclusive evidence one way or another, so the experiment's scope was too broad to identify specific nuts and bolts of the observed process. This is instructive and valuable, but it also means that no conclusions whatsoever can be derived from the data.

That's a familiar refrain...

"And if Levin and Lyddy had followed normal peer review"....

The real problem is they hadn't followed norms of competent scientific research.

I'm sure the New Scientist web site was swamped with messages (I know I sent one...) that must have made all the alarm bells go off.

Too bad the editors didn't have the COMMON SENSE to ask themselves "why is this momentous discovery being made by an engineer working far away from the Rover science team?" "Why is this being discovered only years after the images were taken?". Frankly, all this points towards a hoax, as it surely was, not even Levin could have missed the incline of the area in question.

- This reflects extremely badly on the New Scientist editors.