Rovers on Mars

I bet this story will feed the gungas among us for a long time.

I downloaded the two pix into a 3D "Stereo photo reader " program. You can see that there are a few stones that originate at the bottom left side of the photo with the "new rock". It appears that this hunk cme out of an area just at the edge of the picture and about 10 or so teeny stones are trending from the bottom left toward the top right.
Im guessing that its a wind artifact.
It seems counterintuitive but,something called Hjolstrum's Law states that things can be moved more easily by wind or water in a fashion that is (after a direct proportionality of size to velocity) to one of inverse relationship at the smaller size. In other words, it often takes more wind energy to move a small particle than a large particle.

The "devils Racetrack" is a sort of analogy

OR, it may just be a crumpled piece of wrapping paper from some stage hands lunch (wherever this film is being faked)

I just felt a need to supply the place of Bewildered, who has not been with us for a while.

Isn't there some sort of min-max size variances based on the velocity of the wind?

The atmosphere is very thin on Mars, so even a hell of a wind doesn't blow very much.

I was thinking more in terms of sandstorms I experienced in Morocco in the late fifties while stationed there for one year. They blew strong, high, and for what seemed like many minutes. Everything in our hut was covered with it. You could see those suckers coming from miles away.

I see that JPL hs 3 theories right now
1wind
2a piece of rock was stuck on the rover wheels and jut recently dropped off(this enjoys the most fvor because the rock is actually flipped over.
3The rock was blasted there as ejecta from a recent meteorite impact

There is a size v velocity v density of media (water, wind, wind in high latitudes etc) that Is included in the sediment transfer equation (hjolstrums Law)

Thank you. Never studied physics, but thought there's a formula for it.

January 23, 2014

New findings from rock samples collected and examined by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity have confirmed an ancient wet environment that was milder and older than the acidic and oxidizing conditions told by rocks the rover examined previously.

In the Jan. 24 edition of the journal Science, Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, writes in detail about the discoveries made by the rover and how these discoveries have shaped our knowledge of the planet. According to Arvidson and others on the team, the latest evidence from Opportunity is landmark.

"These rocks are older than any we examined earlier in the mission, and they reveal more favorable conditions for microbial life than any evidence previously examined by investigations with Opportunity," said Arvidson.

While the Opportunity team celebrates the rover's 10th anniversary on Mars, they also look forward to what discoveries lie ahead and how a better understanding of Mars will help advance plans for human missions to the planet in the 2030s.

Opportunity's original mission was to last only three months. On the day of its 10th anniversary on the Red Planet, Opportunity is examining the rim of the Endeavour Crater. It has driven 24 miles (38.7 kilometers) from where it landed on Jan. 24, 2004. The site is about halfway around the planet from NASA's latest Mars rover, Curiosity.

To find rocks for examination, the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., steered Opportunity in a loop, scanning the ground for promising rocks in an area of Endeavour's rim called Matijevic Hill. The search was guided by a mineral-mapping instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which did not arrive at Mars until 2006, long after Opportunity's mission was expected to end.

Beginning in 2010, the mapping instrument, called the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, detected evidence on Matijevic Hill of a clay mineral known as iron-rich smectite. The Opportunity team set a goal to examine this mineral in its natural context -- where it is found, how it is situated with respect to other minerals and the area's geological layers -- a valuable method for gathering more information about this ancient environment. Researchers believe the wet conditions that produced the iron-rich smectite preceded the formation of the Endeavor Crater about 4 billion years ago.

"The more we explore Mars, the more interesting it becomes. These latest findings present yet another kind of gift that just happens to coincide with Opportunity's 10th anniversary on Mars," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "We're finding more places where Mars reveals a warmer and wetter planet in its history. This gives us greater incentive to continue seeking evidence of past life on Mars."

Opportunity has not experienced much change in health in the past year, and the vehicle remains a capable research partner for the team of scientists and engineers who plot each day's activities to be carried out on Mars.

"We're looking at the legacy of Opportunity's first decade this week, but there's more good stuff ahead," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., the mission's principal investigator. "We are examining a rock right in front of the rover that is unlike anything we've seen before. Mars keeps surprising us, just like in the very first week of the mission."

JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, which worked for six years, and their successor, Curiosity, also contributed valuable information about the diverse watery environments of ancient Mars, from hot springs to flowing streams. NASA's Mars orbiters Odyssey and MRO study the whole planet and assist the rovers.

"Over the past decade, Mars rovers have made the Red Planet our workplace, our neighborhood," said John Callas, manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project, which built and operates Opportunity. "The longevity and the distances driven are remarkable. But even more important are the discoveries that are made and the generation that has been inspired."

Special products for the 10th anniversary of the twin rovers' landings, including a gallery of selected images, are available online at: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer10/ . For more information about Spirit and Opportunity, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

Mr Squyres said scientists believe the rock, named "Pinnacle Island," got there when the aging rover did a pirouette turn in the dusty Martian soil and knocked loose a chunk of bedrock that rolled a short distance downhill.
"We think that in the process of that wheel moving across the ground, we kind of flicked it, kind of tiddly winked it out of the ground and it moved to the location where we see it," Mr Squyres said.
Still, scientists have not found the divet the rock would have left behind. They think it is hidden beneath one of the rover's solar arrays.
The Opportunity team plans to manuever the robotic vehicle around a bit more to see if they can find the spot from which the rock emerged.
As to why it is such an unusual color, Mr Squyres said it may be that humans are witnessing a surface that has not been exposed in a very, very long time.
"It appears that it may have flipped itself upside down," he said.
"If that is the case, what we are seeing is we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn't seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."
Already, an analysis of the rock with the Opportunity's spectrometer has shown a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before," he told reporters.
The rock has a lot of sulphur, along with very high concentrations of manganese and magnesium.
"We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery," he said.

And now astrobiologist Dr. Rhawn Joseph claims in a lawsuit that there's more to this mineral than meets the eye.

He is suing NASA and its administrator, Charles Bolden, in an effort to compel the space agency to take a closer look at the rock. The petition, which was filed Monday in California, calls for NASA to "closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism."

But NASA identified the object as a rock -- an odd rock that was somehow flicked into view, possibly by the rover itself -- but a rock nonetheless.

"We have looked at it with our microscope. It is clearly a rock," principal rover investigator Dr. Steve Squyres said during an event marking the 10th anniversary of Opportunity's landing on Mars. "It appears that it may have flipped itself upside down."

Joseph asserts that the object resembles a "mushroom-like fungus" similar to an apothecium. He also contends that rather than mysteriously appearing in the photo, the rock was present in a "before" photo released by NASA. He posted on Cosmology.com a magnified version of the photo to show that the object is partially visible.

How does that support his argument? Joseph provides an explanation in the suit:

[S]pores were exposed to moisture due to changing weathering conditions on Mars. Over the next 12 days these spores grew and developed into the structure depicted... The evidence is consistent with biological activity and suggests that life on Mars may have been discovered. However, in the absence of moisture, biological specimens such as Apothecium will dry out, turn brittle and break apart and this appears to be the condition of the structure as depicted.
NASA spokesman Allard Beutel told The Huffington Post that agency scientists are continuing to analyze the rock. "Finding evidence of life on worlds other than Earth is obviously an important goal for NASA," Beutel said. "But it has to be definitive evidence."

Meanwhile, Joseph waits for those high-resolution photos of the mysterious object.

"The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre," he writes in the petition.

Does this guy think it's some type of mushroom?

I think so.

Edgar...have you seen this story about a new crater on Mars?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/space-rock-hits-mars_n_4736043.html?utm_hp_ref=science

I hadn't seen that. It would have been great if we had a rover near enough to investigate.

The hunt for liquid water reaching the surface of today's Mars has yet to yield a drop, but evidence is building that water may lurk just beneath the surface in a handful of locations.



The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition
The latest signs come from 13 areas along Mars' southern mid-latitudes, where observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have revealed chemical signatures on the surface that intensify during the warm season and fade when winter returns.

These signatures line up with images that MRO's HiRISE camera has captured of dark streaks on slopes in the same areas. The streaks gradually move down from outcrops of bedrock and retreat with the waxing and waning of the warm season.

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In 2011, scientists announced the discovery of 19 confirmed or likely sites where the dark streaks appeared, with another 20 candidate sites in need of additional observations.

Previously, scientists had discovered surface features that initially looked as if they could have been formed by recent releases of water flowing downslope. But others noted that the features – essentially dry sediment flows – could just as easily have formed from mini landslides, perhaps triggered by the flash-thawing of carbon-dioxide ice into a gas, which then burst through the surface and triggered the slide. Or wind-driven sediment could have accumulated near the top of the slopes, finally sliding downhill after so much silt and dust built up that it no longer could resist gravity's tug.

Not so for these dark streaks, suggests Lujendra Ojha, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and the lead author of the paper reporting the new results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Normally when you come up with something new in science, there's always a controversy" as researchers test the validity of the observations as well as assertions of what they mean, he says. With the discovery of the dark streaks, "no one has come out with a hypothesis that can explain these features without water. It's a very hard thing to explain without water."

Indeed, in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Icarus, Mr. Ojha and colleagues say these dark streaks represent "a unique phenomenon on Mars," unlike other recent flow features at other latitudes with water-free causes.

Even so, evidence that water is involved remains circumstantial. Most of the streaks detected so far appear in southern mid-latitudes on steep slopes that face Mars' equator. Others have appeared on steep slopes along the equator itself. Over several seasons, researchers have observed the pattern of the streaks growing when it's warm and retreating when it's cold. The streaks are oriented downhill, and they are darker than surrounding surfaces.

This prompted Ojha and colleagues to hunt for the smoking gun – the chemical fingerprint of water itself in these features. For this task, they turned to MRO's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).

Unlike the HiRISE camera, which can cover a patch of Mars about 10 inches across with each of the camera's more than 1 billion pixels, CRISM can cover about 60 feet per pixel. The individual dark streaks range from 1.6 to 16 feet across, making them difficult for CRISM to pick out individually.

Fortunately, the streaks tend to be bunched together, often merging where their flows end at the bottom of the slopes. This gave CRISM features large enough to yield meaningful measurements.

The hunt for direct evidence of water came up short, Ojha acknowledges. Instead, CRISM identified iron-bearing minerals in the streaks. The spectral signatures of these minerals intensified and weakened compared with their wider surroundings as their locations warmed and cooled with the seasons.

This intensification could result from water sluicing finer-grain silts away from heavier, coarser mineral grains, exposing more of these grains to CRISM. Water dampening the surface also would intensify the signatures of these minerals. Or water flowing downslope could increase the abundance of the iron-bearing minerals.

Without direct evidence of water, however, the researchers also acknowledge other processes that could be at work. Wind, rather than water, could drive finer sediments from the larger grains, for instance.

If water is present just below the surface to flow downslope, it could well be brine that includes ferric sulfates – a salt that serves as antifreeze, Ojha says. Ferric sulfates allow water to remain liquid at temperatures as low as minus 90 degrees F. Once on the surface, however, the water would evaporate very quickly.

Indeed, Ojha suggests, one reason the team failed to find water in these streaks could be the time of day during which MRO observes the southern mid-latitudes. MRO passes overhead at about 3 p.m. each day Mars time. Assuming water begins to make its appearance in the morning, by late afternoon most if not all of it would have evaporated, leaving just the darkened streaks.

CRISM is able to detect the water if it's there, Ojha says. It may take a mission designed to make two orbits of Mars each day, however, to catch water on the surface.

February 14, 2014

Researchers have determined the now-infamous Martian rock resembling a jelly doughnut, dubbed Pinnacle Island, is a piece of a larger rock broken and moved by the wheel of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in early January.

Only about 1.5 inches wide (4 centimeters), the white-rimmed, red-centered rock caused a stir last month when it appeared in an image the rover took Jan. 8 at a location where it was not present four days earlier.

More recent images show the original piece of rock struck by the rover's wheel, slightly uphill from where Pinnacle Island came to rest.

"Once we moved Opportunity a short distance, after inspecting Pinnacle Island, we could see directly uphill an overturned rock that has the same unusual appearance," said Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. "We drove over it. We can see the track. That's where Pinnacle Island came from."

Examination of Pinnacle Island revealed high levels of elements such as manganese and sulfur, suggesting these water-soluble ingredients were concentrated in the rock by the action of water. "This may have happened just beneath the surface relatively recently," Arvidson said, "or it may have happened deeper below ground longer ago and then, by serendipity, erosion stripped away material above it and made it accessible to our wheels."

Now that the rover is finished inspecting this rock, the team plans to drive Opportunity south and uphill to investigate exposed rock layers on the slope.

Opportunity is approaching a boulder-studded ridge informally named the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment, in honor of engineers Jack Beverlin and Bill McClure. Beverlin and McClure were the first recipients of the NASA Medal of Exceptional Bravery for their actions on Feb. 14, 1969, to save NASA's second successful Mars mission, Mariner 6, when the launch vehicle began to crumple on the launch pad from loss of pressure.

I wonder if this guy...

...will now retract his lawsuit. Or if he'll just skulk off somewhere and hide.

Likely he will just find some other wild theory to latch on to.

Or he'll join A2K and latch onto us