Talk:Curiosity Rover analysis suggests chemically complex lake once graced Mars's Gale crater

This is your wheelhouse as I recall. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:30, 2 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes it is. Not too much to fix. I corrected a sentence about reactive and non reactive - it actually says "Close to the surface, there were plenty of oxidizing agents and rocks formed from large, dense grains, whereas the deeper layers had more reducing agents and were formed from finer material". Reducing agents are reactive too. Life generally thrives on a Redox pair - a reaction between a reducing and an oxidizing agent. Some life thrives in conditions rich in oxidants and some in conditions rich in and some on the interface between the two. Also I corrected "river" to "streams and rivers". I think this is the bit you are summarizing


 * "Curiosity's primary goal when it landed inside Gale Crater in 2012 was to determine whether Mars has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. In its first year, on the crater floor at "Yellowknife Bay," the rover found evidence of ancient freshwater river and lake environments with all the main chemical ingredients for life and a possible energy source for life. Curiosity has since driven to the base of Mount Sharp, a layered mountain inside the crater, and inspected rock layers that grow progressively younger as the rover gains elevation on lower Mount Sharp."


 * So - they are saying that Curiosity found evidence of a fresh water river and lake environoments in the floor of Gale crater. Now that it's higher up on Mount Sharp they can take a broader picture according to which the lake that filled the crater had reducing conditions on its floor and more oxidizing conditions higher up. But it would have been a huge lake, 154 km in diameter, and would have had many rivers and streams feeding it. E.g. here


 * "This illustration depicts a lake of water partially filling Mars' Gale Crater, receiving runoff from snow melting on the crater's northern rim. Evidence of ancient streams, deltas and lakes that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover mission has found in the patterns of sedimentary deposits in Gale Crater suggests the crater held a lake such as this more than three billion years ago, filling and drying in multiple cycles over tens of millions of years."


 * PIA19080-MarsRoverCuriosity-AncientGaleLake-Simulated-20141208.jpg


 * So I altered "putative river" to "rivers and streams".


 * I also added a phrase after "Phosphates, carbon, nitrogen, iron and sulfur" explaining that these are "some of the main elements needed for life". The top most abundant elements in life are . So together with the hydrogen and oxygen that's all the top six elements used by life plus iron which of course is also important for life. So that's just something the reader of the Science article would know, so thought I should add that as otherwise you might wonder why they mention those elements.


 * That's about it. The Science article is behind a paywall for me, but the other sources and its own summary summarize it reasonably well, also had a look at several other articles running the story to make sure I was understanding it right, though not suggesting you add any of the others I found as a source, because of this thing that we need to minimize the numbers of sources. Robertinventor (talk) 00:59, 3 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Also just to say, interesting story :). Robertinventor (talk) 01:04, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. Another reason I called you in is that you'd probably know about any Wikipedia articles that would make good in-text links, like  or perhaps something more specific that I wouldn't know about off the top of my head. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:17, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Note to reviewer
Per sources, the only part of the Science article I used was the abstract, not the part behind the "Full text" paywall. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:31, 3 June 2017 (UTC)