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8 legs and green guts squished between the treads ....

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Aww! I was hoping for tentacles.

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8 legs and green guts squished between the treads ....
watch where you going bub!!

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This makes no sense. If they can't tell us yet then what is the point in coming out and saying they have something even?

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I agree completely. Now it has to be really big or there is going to be Martian egg on some faces.

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egg-zactly. At this point I am expecting something related to life on Mars, an something beyond just finding organic compounds in Martian soil, (organics have been found in meteors etc...so fining them on Mars to me wouldn't be that historic), anything short of that, to me anyway, will be a let down.

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The yolk's on us. I'm betting Curiosity and Opportunity collided.

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This makes no sense. If they can't tell us yet then what is the point in coming out and saying they have something even?

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I agree completely. Now it has to be really big or there is going to be Martian egg on some faces.

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egg-zactly. At this point I am expecting something related to life on Mars, an something beyond just finding organic compounds in Martian soil, (organics have been found in meteors etc...so fining them on Mars to me wouldn't be that historic), anything short of that, to me anyway, will be a let down.

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The yolk's on us. I'm betting Curiosity and Opportunity collided.

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First stoplight on Mars scheduled for launch in 2015

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One may recall
"Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life"

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phx20100803.html

So I guess it comes down to what folks think "organic" means. Organic compound, water, peroxide, whatever, it's not alive or dancing-with-the-gangnam-bieber-minecraft, so most people won't give a _________ (except the few .)

Jason W. Higley

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More water throwing:
"This is going to be a disappointment," said Chris McKay, a NASA space scientist at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "The press description of the

SAM results as 'earthshaking' is, in my view, an unfortunate exaggeration. We have not (yet) found anything in SAM that was not already known from previous missions: Phoenix and Viking."


http://www.space.com/18626-nasa-mars-rover-secret-discovery-speculation.html

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One may recall
"Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life"

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phx20100803.html

So I guess it comes down to what folks think "organic" means. Organic compound, water, peroxide, whatever, it's not alive or dancing-with-the-gangnam-bieber-minecraft, so most people won't give a _________ (except the few .)

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OK. Pure speculation here, so take it FWIW...
The experiment was with the SAM, so best case scenario, they discovered a microbe. More realistically, it is either basic organic molecules or methane. I'm thinking it is methane, and here's why... The SAM did it's first test and kept the partial sample for further testing. But it's now on the move.

I remember reading that in the past when they got potential methane in a sample, they decided to let the sample air out in the atmosphere and the methane disappeared. I'm thinking this is what they are doing right now. Seeing if the methane dissipates.

If it doesn't dissipate, then I believe they will announce the discovery of methane.

Had they discovered an organinc molecule, they wouldn't have moved the rover. They probably would've wanted to test the soil around the original sample.

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One may recall
"Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life"

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phx20100803.html

So I guess it comes down to what folks think "organic" means. Organic compound, water, peroxide, whatever, it's not alive or dancing-with-the-gangnam-bieber-minecraft, so most people won't give a _________ (except the few .)

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That announcement was prefaced by a big mysterious teaser, just like this. And, when the actual finding was released, it was an absolute nuclear explosion; a real game changer.
It's strange, how few people took notice then, and how few remember it now. 30 years of cynical dogma cast into ruins, and almost no one paid attention.

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Meh... A nuclear explosion and real game changer for what? That those compounds and materials exist there? It doesn't prove anything concrete, other than they're there. Just like this announcement, the press, and to a lesser extent NASA are doing nothing more than sensationalizing.

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One may recall
"Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life"

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phx20100803.html

So I guess it comes down to what folks think "organic" means. Organic compound, water, peroxide, whatever, it's not alive or dancing-with-the-gangnam-bieber-minecraft, so most people won't give a _________ (except the few .)

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That announcement was prefaced by a big mysterious teaser, just like this. And, when the actual finding was released, it was an absolute nuclear explosion; a real game changer.
It's strange, how few people took notice then, and how few remember it now. 30 years of cynical dogma cast into ruins, and almost no one paid attention.

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Meh... A nuclear explosion and real game changer for what? That those compounds and materials exist there? It doesn't prove anything concrete, other than they're there. Just like this announcement, the press, and to a lesser extent NASA are doing nothing more than sensationalizing.

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I think you're talking about something else.
I'm referring to the discovery of perchlorates in the Martian soil by Phoenix. These have the property of destroying organic materials when heated to temperatures far less than those used by the Viking experiments to prepare their samples. For over 36 years, the failure of the GCMS experiment to detect organics (after such heating of the samples) has been used to shut the book on the Viking discovery of biologic activity. No organics, no life, right? Whoops!... They destroyed the organics before they tested for them.

I call that a game-changing discovery. I wish the science from the Phoenix probe would be published in one place.

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