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- BLACKSBURG,
Va. (U-WIRE)
- Water, the basis of life, was thought to only exist on
Earth until a
Virginia Tech professor proved otherwise.
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- Robert Bodnar,
professor of geochemistry, made the discovery
in a Martian meteorite
after beginning analysis in December.
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- "As far as we know, it was
the first water that
had been found in an extraterrestrial
sample," Bodnar said.
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- This discovery indicates liquid water was present when
the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago, he said.
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- "Life -- at
least the way we think of life -- requires
water to develop, evolve and
survive," he said. "The earth wasn't
unique in terms of a
place where life could develop."
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- The meteorite fell in Mohans,
Tex. March 22, 1998 in
view of seven boys who were playing basketball,
he said.
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- "The whole meteorite was about the size of a big
potato," Bodnar said.
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- NASA transported the meteorite to a clean room at the
Johnson Space Center in Houston less than 48 hours after the fall.
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- NASA scientist Mike
Zolensky began studying the meteorite.
He noticed that it contained
purple halite, or salt, crystals with fluid
bubbles inside them, which
he thought might contain water.
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- Because the meteorite fell in an arid area and was
recovered
immediately, there was almost no chance of water getting
inside it after
it reached Earth, Bodnar said.
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- "Locating the halite in
the Mohans meteorite was
serendipitous in a way," Bodnar said.
"It was very unique and
fortunate."
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- Bodnar, who attended graduate
school with Zolensky at
Pennsylvania State University, traveled to
Houston and returned to Tech's
Fluids Research Lab with a sample of the
halite.
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- To
determine whether the bubbles contained water, Bodnar
first cooled and
heated them under a microscope. The contents of the bubbles
froze and
melted at the temperatures expected for salt water.
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- Next, he used a Raman
Microprobe to compare the light
spectrum produced by a laser passing
through the sample to the spectrum
produced by saltwater. They produced
similar graphs.
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- The presence of water in other parts of the solar system
could
someday be important in space exploration because we may use the
moon
or asteroids as staging points for missions farther into space, Bodnar
said.
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- The
water they contain could be used to make fuel for
the missions or as
drinking water.
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- "In one or two or three hundred years, these things
will
occur," Bodnar said. "There will be exploration of other
parts of the solar system other than the Earth and moon."
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- Now that NASA knows
what types of meteorites are good
candidates for studies of fluid
inclusions, they have identified a second
meteorite that fell in
Morocco last year. Bodnar is currently analyzing
it.
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- "Our goal is to
find a meteorite that is large enough,
that contains enough of this
purple halite so that we can start doing some
very detailed chemical
analyses of the water," Bodnar said.
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- Bodnar is enjoying the
widespread attention his research
is receiving.
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- "You can go your whole
research career doing work
that is just important in your field,"
he said. "It's kind of
fun, actually, when you're doing research
and it starts generating interest
in the general public."
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- **
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- (C) 1999 The
Collegiate Times via U-WIRE
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