New Mars Forums

Heres]http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/02/09/03_R1400762sub.gif]Here's a good view of the small dark depression (its not really all that gloomy!) between the "hole-in-one" crater and the big crater. This little crater doesnt show up in [http://www.marsunearthed.com/Opportunit … Region.htm]the usually referenced MOC image. Its clearly visible in the orbital picture, and you can see it in [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/1P1312 … 1.JPG.html]images showing the bright far wall of the big crater.

Speaking of which, the crater wall almost looks like its lit up by the sunrise -the sunlight having not yet lit up the soil in front of the lander. Note the different level of brightness of the far wall is much different in these pictures, for instance compare [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 94L4M1.JPG]the L4 image to [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 94R4M1.JPG]the R4 image

At first i assumed that the brightness of the wall is due to the filters affecting the apparent brightness due to mineral composition, however, these two images use the same filter #4, one from the Left camera and the other from the Right camera. Both images were taken at the same time, so aside from parallax affects, they should look the same but thats not what we see here... are the filters the same on the left and right cameras ???

yeah, that bright white "bleached thigh bone" or whatever it is sitting on the dirt a few yards from where the rover drove past, hmmm, yes, yet another sttrange anomaly ignored and not explained by the rover team. heres [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/2N1308 … 1.JPG.html]a couple more pictures of it. these images were taken on sol 50, [http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/stereo … 2340-N.jpg]heres the 3D anaglyph. I'd have to assume its some peice of the lander that broke off during the bouncing and rolling process -is the direction that the rover is going, the same direction that the rover and all its EDL parts came in from in from? it seems so...

if youll remember from the [http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/rover-i … ge-12.html]lander and bouncemark location image that the parachute landed in a direction about 90 degrees to the left of the path of the rover. the backshell landed on the rim of Bonneville, where the rover is now travelling to as can bee seen [http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/rover-i … ge-11.html]in the rover history graph
given that the lander and heatshield separated and diverged enough to touch down in about a 40 degree arc that the rover is now traversing across the center of, its likely that the "bleached bone" is a securing fastener or something that was ejected during the heatshield or parachute separation process and fell through the air to land here. there's likely to be a few more parts in our path if were lucky...

I'm not a space engineer, but i suspect that [http://www.space.com/businesstechnology … 218-1.html]Radioisotopic Thermal Generators might provide a better energy per weight ratio than solar panels for the baloon. They usually get electricity by heating dissimilar metals with the heat from the decaying plutonium, and since this process isn't that efficient, all that waste heat could be used to help increase the buoyancy of the gas in the ballon. but maybe its just not enough heat to make a dent in how big the baloon would have to be to carry the weight...

there are all sorts of spherules on earth. one great example is the [http://www.utahphotowild.com/small/pages/small4.htm]Moki marbles (which are hematite-rich, even!)

but regardless of the that, these BBs really freak me out too!

I cant figure out why they havent tried to RAT into any of the Blueberry muffins yet to see if there is layering inside the BBs (which shoudl reveal whether theyre concretions or tectites)... geez, the rover could have suffered a fatal error condition in the time theyve spent getting around to finally doing this crucial science... hopefully we wont have to wait much longer...

But it really make my day how we're actually getting pictures back from mars like these that really freak us the hell out! Viking, Pathfinder, Spirit...all those pretty pictures are boring compared to what were getting here at Meridiani. I almost wish Opportunity had landed on the surrounding pan-flat and boring plains and had to make a traverse to get to this bedrock to build up to this kind of excitement, i'm expecting it will be a boring trip until we reach the big crater, although these ball berings are probably littered all over the plains as well...

I like [http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 53M2M1.JPG]pea soup number 2 because you can see near the lower left there is a "socket" left from where one of the BBs fell out (who knows how long ago...). My impression is that these BBs arent moving relative to the "bedrock" they are in, they are just falling out as the bedrock dissolves around them...

I think the dark spot is a vesicle, lots of the spherules show these spots, like little death-stars, if it were a tectite, then there i slikely to be trapped gas that escapes as the spherule cools, leaving a pock mark from the bubbles escaping as it cools. according to what another geologist said, concretions shoudl have no vessicles. Therefore the spherules argue to be tectites on this grounds, but i still think (hope at leat) that theyre concretions...

it coudl be prety cheap for something really basic youd think, theres some proposal for a big expensive [http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/balloons.html]Mars Balloon, one idea is to have a payload that can be directed to drop and ascend multiple times over its mission, dropping weather stations, seismometers (if they land a few they could image the core of mars if it has quakes) and other experiements, extending its mission for as long as possible by slowly dropping off this weight until it has no buoyancy gas left and ends up as a final destination station. youd have to be careful with the winds banging it into land features, it would be quite an adventure.

yeah, i hope they visit the 1st bouncemark for one of the rovers, even more so, i hope they visit the backshell impact site of spirit, its on the edge of the crater theyre going to "benneville" there should be some fresh deep stuff revealed there...

too bad the 4th airbag (beagle2) didnt make it, well have to see if they figure out what went wrong and if their airbag scheme was at fault or not (i wonder why Malin hasnt snapped a picture of the beagle2 landing site with the MGS MOC yet like theyve done for both of the MERs, it would help quite a bit in the process, I hope its not some stupid beaurocracy thing (NASA cant spend their money on "EUs problem" or something like that)...

golly gee whiz, thatsa [http://www.marsunearthed.com/Spirit/Spi … lyph47.htm]one of the most beautiful exposures Spirit has taken yet!
The layering on tis boulder doesnt seem to be sedimentary in nature, more like fracturing from the meteor impact (my guess anyway).

Thats a great site, incredibly well-made images, i hadnt seen it before. I'd been using [http://www.lyle.org/mars/]http://www.lyle.org/mars/ to view all the automated anaglyphs and color reconstructions. the lyle.org has nice thumbnails but it isnt laid out quite as easy to use and they dont crop off the distracting overlap on their anaglyphs. thanks!

there's a facinating little pinnacle sticking up out of the soil near the bottom of [http://www.marsunearthed.com/Opportunit … y23_3D.htm]Opportunity's anaglyph 23 casting its own shadow that would be difficult to discern without anaglyphic perspective

- Regarding the "torn chunk of airbag lying on the surface" if its the "claw" thing in the color opportunity panorama (which happens to be the image i used for my member avatar at left here) my thoughts were it was peice of shrapnel from one of the pyrotechnics that released the rover from the lander. it looks like whats left after a firecracker explodes but by chance doesnt obliterate its paper casing but just splits it into a big peice of shrapnel. i hadnt considered it to be part of the airbag, it doesnt look like it has any frayed edges, just cleanly ripped edges. and it looks more like paper than a fabric...

that snew to me, I had thought the only real work being done on a solar sail, was by the Planetary Society. The ~100 foot diameter test prototype "Cosmos 1" is set to launch as soon as the cheap converted russian surplus missile is ready to go... [http://planetary.org/solarsail/index2.html]http://planetary.org/solarsail/index2.html

czech it out --> [http://www.solarsail.org/]http://www.solarsail.org/

You won't see water pooling in the trenches for other reasons:

- water pooling requires a water table. the water table on Mars has got to be pretty low by now. Note that Spirit is not in the lowest part of its environment as evidenced by the rolling bumps and ridges all around it, if there were a water table there would be ponding in the lowest parts. Maybe in the past that scenario was true, but now, any ponds have dried up, leaving the water table lower than the lowest land feature.

- If the water is a brine, then it should still migrate underground  over millions of years to the lowest point of equilibrium, so we shouldnt expect to see an equal distribution of liquid water below any part of the frozen surface ice crust. the flowing brine would create pressure and still well-up in the lowest part regardless of any ice cover insulating it. perhaps this sceario was true in the past there should be discernable evidence of it visible from orbit.

- The water is most likely to be bound up as a very very thick brine, more like very salty moisture that doesnt flow around freely but just sticks to the soil particles, just barely enough water to salty mineral ratio to keep it from evapoating, sublimating or flowing, otherwise it would have been long-gone by now, and maybe thats what happened, there used to be lots of water with disolved mineral salts and it evaporated away until it reached a thick enough solution to not be taken away by these mechanisms, since it is insulated from light and wind by cover of a "desert pavement" of pebbles and dry cohesive crusts. The thick brine sticks the soil particles, holding them togehter and giving the observed muddy quality, a state which perhaps might last indefinately if its not disturbed too much, until the rover's wheel disturbed it and exposes it to sunlight and wind, then we'd expect this mud to soon dry out more and detach from the rover's wheel, unless it dries and hold together as a cake, but it still wont get a good grip oon the aluminum wheel, it should fall off soon even on its own, if not by driving it off by roling the wheel.

- conversely, i'm not sure if there is any liquid water below the surface, it may all be ice, where would heat come from? theres not much geothermal activity (that we know of). i think mars is likely to be freezing below ground level, i'd expect the warmest moisture to be at and just below the surface where the heat of the sun warms and frees it from its frozen state. it might freeze every night and the amount of moisture in the soils is small enough that this doesnt cause any permafrost-like freeze/thaw features to form as would be expected in such a case.  there would still be a net loss of moisture to the air in this scenario, progressively dessicating the top layers of soil.

- perhaps the brine is enough to keep the moisture un-frozen even all the way below ground and there is a sort of brine-table with higher concentrations of water further down below still waiting to be discovered. if its big enough, there shight be some mark of this visible from orbit, slumping or susidence perhaps as it slowly loses volume over the eons.

[http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ … 00R0M1.JPG]http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery....0M1.JPG

The bedrock is sulfur-rich. 2 "official" theories remain about the spherules: tectites or concretions.
What do these scenarios mean for life?

- [Ash/Tectites] The bedrock may be sulfur-rich volcanic ash, in which case the spherules are likely created by meteor impacts (as tectites) and are dispered either while the ash layers are growing, or the spherules may be much newer than the layers and merely have punched down benath the soft surface. The bedrock may have been heated by the meteor impacts and subsurface ice might have even melted to wet and cement the layers into the apparently soft matrix we see today.
Life as we expect it has little chance in this scenario since its not wet or warm very long.

- [Dust/Concretions] The bedrock is built up of of dust layers and has been percolated by geothermal (sulfur-rich) moisture, the spherules are nucleations from disolved minerals (concretions).
Life as we know it has a good chance since its wet a fairly long time and a good niche energy source exists (heat differentials and sulfur).

- [Hybrid environment of above] The bedrock is alternating proportions of ash and dust (might help explain the termite galleries and erosional difference in the layering), and both geothermal heating and crater impacts have percolated water around. Either tectites or concretions exist (they should look somewhat different from each other if they are created differently, and we dont see this). The sulfur could come from both processes.
Life would seem to have a similar chance as above.

What else... any budding exobiogeologists out there?

Yow, it can be hard to see until it pops out at you loud and clear, that really is weird... check it out in 3D -->
[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/stereo … 3774-P.jpg]http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/stereo … 3774-P.jpg
[http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/stereo … 4487-P.jpg]http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/stereo … 4487-P.jpg
if you cant find the "W" consult: [http://www.freewebs.com/atomoid/theW.jpg]http://www.freewebs.com/atomoid/theW.jpg

i first felt this might be some perceptual artifact of a curved part of the bedrock layers (warped layers like occur in terrestrial folded rocks, but that begs the question: tectonic folding on Mars?? Mars doesnt show much history of this and even if so, could the embedded spherules survive this process? but i digress, anyway...)

But it really does look like its pasted on top of the main layer sequence beneath it, especially in the middle of the "W", im baffled...
need a closer look... not just that feature, but also the severely eroded rock just below it.

ACTUALLY, I have a more concise theory on this, but dont spread this or theyll implant a computer chip in my brain, and even you might end up lost or at least with some "missing time"... You know the Enquirer says they found all these skulls on Mars, it was on the front page! skulls all over the place! its true! the "W" written here must be the real reason behind george "W" bush's initiative to go to mars, because I now know, through secret sources in teh russian government, that in 2032 the chinese military creates a time machine and goes back into the past to kidnap george w bush and transpotrs him to mars billions of yaers ago, a time when earth and mars were similar and the harmonic convergences of their contigency-streams can be coalesced into a quantum similarity and thus divergence form an anti-earth was diverted. After transporting GW Bush to mars they reconstructed an anti-bush or shall we say pseudo-bush, from the quantum entanglement of the mars-earth paradigm, this unified dichotomy resulted in a reality that superimposes ours, thus the chinese government controlls Bush in this future Earth to do their own bidding. Needles to say, this non-linear event confuses the whole time continuum (and thats why the remote viewers cant see it), and upon learning of this (via a narrow beam transmission to the present day white house via a chinese defector from the future using the same secret technolgy), the bush administration decides we need to go to mars before 2032 inorder to recover george bush's skull and reconstruct his correct dna resonance and thus have some chance of restoring our universe and timeline. its no coincidence! thats why nasa is keeping the skulls and this "W" a secret! George W Bush, after being beamed to mars billions of years ago, survived just long enough to write his moniker on the rock outcropping you see before you today. His skull lies elsewhere known only to the Enquirer and those who read it. I suggest you buy your copy today! dont delay! enquiring minds NEED to know!! <B>

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