Perseverance rover shows up Curiosity with discovery of Martian water park Never mind the trickling stream that NASA's Curiosity rover spotted on Mars near Mount Sharp, young upstart Perseverance has found proof of water that flowed faster and at greater depths than previous evidence indicated. Rather than the downhill streams photographed by Curiosity earlier this year, researchers at NASA's Jet …
"Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at JPL"
Is that odd phrasing or something I don't understand about US acedemia? Surely it should read "Dr Libby Ives, a researcher at JPL". Doesn't "postdoctoral" mean she's earned her doctorate and is entitle to use the title "Doctor"?
It seem like describing myself, aged 60 as "John Brown, a postteenage commetardt on El Reg articles".
Anyway, that aside, good article and great science :-)
They are a very common thing in academia in the US. I'm on the mailing list for the math department newsletter from the university where I went to graduate school, and they always profile the students getting their Phd's, including their post graduation employment, if known. Post doctoral researcher/fellowship is probably the single most common job description.
The problem with this constantly growing structure we call human knowledge is that it takes longer and longer to get out to the edge and do something new. That's even without the ridiculous de-emphasis on study skills and critical thinking in primary and secondary. In mathematics, this is particularly problematic because we don't change our minds. :D
When I was in grad school in the early 90's, the German mathematicians had already moved the dissertation to the post-doc period. I can only assume this has accelerated.
Doesn't "postdoctoral" mean she's earned her doctorate and is entitle to use the title "Doctor"?
Postdoctoral researcher, or postdoc for short, is a job. Usually the person doing that job has a PhD but there are exceptions, I know someone whose thesis defence kept getting delayed and he ended up doing a postdoc while waiting to be allowed to complete his PhD.
Yup that was me in my first postdoc. I left 3 weeks after submitting my thesis. My examiners might, just have received their temporarily bound copies* by then. It was 2 months before I received their conclusions (no changes, no viva needed). I missed the May graduation so graduated in Absentia the following December.
> proof of water that flowed faster and at greater depths than previous evidence indicated
...
> little doubt there was a powerful stream in the area,
I see lots of this sort of wording that once upon a time there was *water* on moon/planet whatever, based on effectively "look, a flowing substance carved shapes in rock over billions of years".
As a space numpty but achieving minor adequacy in science A levels and some sort of BSc, I never seem to see anyone questioning whether it was anything other than *liquid* H<sub>2</sub>O. IMO over a billion-year geological solar-system time-scales, in space(!) etc, all bets are off! Planetary topology caused exclusively by liquid H<sub>2</sub>O actually seems to be the most unlikely thing out of anything to me.
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Lots of stuff indicates Mars once had a much thicker atmosphere and likely much more water. It would have been warmer but not exactly tropical. What happened on Mars was the core cooled completely so stuck in place. Our magnetic field is strong because our core is liquid and rotates at a different rate. The lack of a strong magnetic field means the solar wind is able to knock gasses out of it into space ionising them. So over time Mars lost much of it’s atmosphere and water.
Modelling suggests that much of the material which would have built a bigger Earth 2 Mars is in the asteroid belt. Jupiter started to move in to become a Hot Jupiter we see so many of in other systems. That might well have knocked the rocky planets out of orbit. It is thought the formation of Saturn pulled Jupiter back but not before it perturbed a lot of material which would otherwise have been accreted onto Mars.
So the lack of live Martians is Jupiter’s fault. But we can thank Saturn for being here at all.
"The lack of a strong magnetic field means the solar wind is able to knock gasses out of it into space ionising them. "
That's actually an unsupported hypothesis, and there is evidence to suggest that having a magnetic field actual speeds up atmosphere loss.
"IMO over a billion-year geological solar-system time-scales, in space(!) etc, all bets are off! "
A lot of time doesn't necessarily mean lots of things could have happened. Mars's orbit around the sun has stayed pretty much the same over that time and the sun's output similarly, so you can rule out a lot of things. If you start with the hypothesis that you are looking at erosion by some sort of liquid, there aren't many liquids that could have formed and stayed stable enough for long enough in those conditions. Things like liquid methane for example require conditions just wouldn't have occurred on mars. Water is a very likely candidate, we know it exists elsewhere in the solar system and its stable over time.
Given that no-one seriously believes there was ever technological civilisation on Mars and there's no evidence of manufactured artefacts, archaeologists are unlikely to be particularly interested. If we find evidence of life, paleontologists would certainly like to take a look though.
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So we know quite well how to fsck Earth, let's find another target. In the meantime, let's spend an amazing amount of money on JSWT, Hubble and all types of muck leading to little else than pretty pictures feeding astronomers and astrologists alike...
The US is, hands down, the largest spender on space programs either in terms of totals or as a proportion of GDP. Currently, NASA's exploration efforts amount to about 0.3% of the federal budget, dwarfed by federal programs for the elderly, hungry, sick, and homeless. Saying "let's spend an amazing amount of money" on space when only tiny sums go to space programs therefore indicates one hasn't actually looked at government budgets or, worse, is being disingenuous.
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