McLaughlin: Soggy Bottom Boy?

[neufer]

Martian Crater May Once Have Held Groundwater-Fed Lake 01.20.13

[b][color=#0000FF]Layered rocks on the floor of McLaughlin Crater This view of layered rocks on the floor of McLaughlin Crater shows sedimentary rocks that contain spectroscopic evidence for minerals formed through interaction with water. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona[/color][/b]

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Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<PASADENA, Calif. -- A NASA spacecraft is providing new evidence of a wet underground environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet's early evolution. The new information comes from researchers analyzing spectrometer data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looked down on the floor of McLaughlin Crater. The Martian crater is 57 miles (92 kilometers) in diameter and 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) deep. McLaughlin's depth apparently once allowed underground water, which otherwise would have stayed hidden, to flow into the crater's interior. Layered, flat rocks at the bottom of the crater contain carbonate and clay minerals that form in the presence of water. McLaughlin lacks large inflow channels, and small channels originating within the crater wall end near a level that could have marked the surface of a lake.

Together, these new observations suggest the formation of the carbonates and clay in a groundwater-fed lake within the closed basin of the crater. Some researchers propose the crater interior catching the water and the underground zone contributing the water could have been wet environments and potential habitats. The findings are published in Sunday's online edition of Nature Geoscience. "Taken together, the observations in McLaughlin Crater provide the best evidence for carbonate forming within a lake environment instead of being washed into a crater from outside," said Joseph Michalski, lead author of the paper, which has five co-authors. Michalski also is affiliated with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and London's Natural History Museum.

Michalski and his co-authors used the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to check for minerals such as carbonates, which are best preserved under non-acidic conditions. Launched in 2005, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its six instruments have provided more high-resolution data about the Red Planet than all other Mars orbiters combined. Data are made available for scientists worldwide to research, analyze and report their findings. "A number of studies using CRISM data have shown rocks exhumed from the subsurface by meteor impact were altered early in Martian history, most likely by hydrothermal fluids," Michalski said. "These fluids trapped in the subsurface could have periodically breached the surface in deep basins such as McLaughlin Crater, possibly carrying clues to subsurface habitability."

McLaughlin Crater sits at the low end of a regional slope several hundreds of miles, or kilometers, long on the western side of the Arabia Terra region of Mars. As on Earth, groundwater-fed lakes are expected to occur at low regional elevations. Therefore, this site would be a good candidate for such a process. "This new report and others are continuing to reveal a more complex Mars than previously appreciated, with at least some areas more likely to reveal signs of ancient life than others," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., provided and operates CRISM. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the orbiter.>>

[BDanielMayfield]

At first I thought, did John McLaughlin have an accident, and how is that astronomically related?

Nice news item neufer, and nice connection to a quirky movie and an excellent retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey”.

A man (not) of constant sorrow, Bruce

[neufer]

At first I thought, did John McLaughlin have an accident, and how is that astronomically related?

Nice news item neufer, and nice connection to a quirky movie and an excellent retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey”.

A man (not) of constant sorrow, Bruce

On a scale of 0 to 10—with 0 representing zero possibility and 10 representing metaphysical certitude
—what are the chances that the McLaughlin Crater once provided subsurface habitability

<<John McLaughlin (born March 29, 1927) is an American television personality and political commentator. McLaughlin earned two master's degrees (philosophy and English literature) from Boston College, and a Ph.D. (philosophy) from Columbia University. McLaughlin created, produces and hosts the long-running political commentary series The McLaughlin Group.>>

<<In the mathematical group theory, the McLaughlin group is a sporadic simple group of order 2⁷ · 3⁶ · 5³· 7 · 11 = 898,128,000, discovered by [Jack] McLaughlin in (1969) as an index 2 subgroup of a rank 3 permutation group acting on the McLaughlin graph with 275 vertices. It fixes a 2-2-3 triangle in the Leech lattice so is a subgroup of the Conway groups. Its Schur multiplier has order 3, and its outer automorphism group has order 2. The McLaughlin group has one conjugacy class of involution (element of order 2), whose centralizer is a maximal subgroup of type 2.A₈. This has a center of order 2; the quotient modulo the center is isomorphic to the alternating group A₈.

The McLaughlin group is the only sporadic group to admit irreducible representations of quaternionic type.
It has 2 such representations, one of dimension 3520 and one of dimension 4752.>>

Bye, bye.

[Beyond]

Art, you've been watching PBS waaay to long.

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Art, you've been watching PBS waaay to long.

Even the name of John McLaughlin is supposed
to conjure the dregs of the universe.

[Beyond]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Art, you've been watching PBS waaay to long.

Even the name of John McLaughlin is supposed
to conjure the dregs of the universe.

No wonder i quit watching the McLaughlin Group; with John McLaughlin moderating, a long time ago. I was tired of the 'dregs', and didn't even know it Ah, that PBS.

[bystander]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Even the name of John McLaughlin is supposed
to conjure the dregs of the universe.

I don't know, I've always liked John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra