Rovers on Mars

We might go there and reap what H G Wells' Martians reaped on Earth - Death by microbe -

Ha, wouldn't that be ironic

Given the low gravity and thin atmosphere on Mars, I wonder if it's possible to fly micro-drones up there.

Probably need much larger propellors on long stems to counter the low atmospheric density, but you might be able to keep one of these things flying for a long time with some solar cells. Maybe add a helium bladder to the body for buoyancy and cover it with solar cells.

These things are relatively cheap. Maybe they could send up a swarm of them or something and just program them to fly around at 100ft filming stuff.

The wouldn't be good at ground analysis or finding fossils or anything, but I bet the could monitor the **** out of the atmosphere and explore some cool places.

Oops, looks like they have already thought of using drones...
http://rt.com/usa/167124-nasa-send-quadcopter-drone-titan

Cool . . . Titan could be a resource for terra-forming Mars. This Wikipedia article explains that Titan has the only "fully formed" atmosphere on a naturally occurring satelitel I don't know what leads them sto say that it is "fully formed," but that no other satellite atmosphere is. The significance for Mars is the high nitrogen content, some of which might be siphoned off to improve the atmosphere of Mars.

I hadn't considered drones. Wonderful idea.

If there really is live biology on Mars, then it's probably going to govern everything we can do with Mars. We wouldn't be able to terraform without risking the native biosphere.

And we're probably going to have to be very careful not to carry any of our own microbes up there on any near future missions too. I suspect that active biology on Mars would be a game changer for almost all of our current plans and missions to Mars.

While i agree that finding native biota on Mars would be a game-changer, i also know that if any commercial enterprise ever gets there, they will not give a damn.

Year 1: NASA discovers microbial activity on Mars
Year 10: NASA announces that Mars microbes can cure cancer
Year 10.5: Big-Pharma companies send 15 manned missions to Mars to exploit (explore) the biology (and one of the missions accidentally brings an earth virus with them).
Year 11: All biology on Mars goes extinct. Big Pharma scratches their head.
Year 12: All manned missions are recalled and Big Phamra announces that Mars is now ready for terraforming.

I would revise that with the announcement that big pharma will go into the terraforming business.

Scenario #2:
Year 1: NASA discovers evidence of microbial life on Mars.
Then: 20 long years drag by before NASA decides to take a core sample to look where the life is most likely to be.
In the mean time: Creationists succeed in corrupting basic science education to the point where we don't know how to get to Mars any more and science and technology begin to fall apart and nobody knows how to repair it.
Finally: Science and Evolution deniers take over and nobody knows how to grow enough food to feed the planet any more and civilization degrades into a paroxysm of religious delusion resulting in a return to the dark ages.
Eventually: The Mars microbes evolve beyond us and study the dimwits left on earth, never knowing how close they came to being exterminated through corporate greed.

Mars rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Red Planet for more than 10 years, is suffering from memory problems, Nasa has said.

The six-wheeled vehicle - not to be confused with Curiosity, which launched in 2011 - keeps resetting unexpectedly.

The Opportunity team thinks an age-related fault affecting the flash memory used by the robot is to blame.

It believes it has found a way to hack the rover's software to disregard the faulty part.

Speaking to Discovery News, Nasa project manager John Callas outlined how his team intended to solve the issue.

'It forgets'
He explained how the rover, like a typical computer, has two key types of memory - volatile and non-volatile.

Non-volatile memory "remembers" its information even if it is powered down, making it ideal for long-term storage, similar to how a hard drive works on a PC
Volatile memory - comparable to a PC's random access memory, or RAM - is quicker to access but requires power, so when the machine turns off, any data stored within the volatile memory is lost
Image from Mars rover Opportunity
The rover can still operate with the memory fault, but Nasa is keen to fix the problem
The problem with Opportunity is that its non-volatile memory is suffering from a fault, probably related to the hardware's age.

It means that when the rover tries to save telemetry data to the flash memory it fails, and so it then writes it to the volatile memory instead. When the rover powers down, the information is then wiped.

"So now we're having these events we call 'amnesia,'," explained Mr Callas in Discovery News.

"Which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn't able to, so instead it uses the RAM... it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all [the data] is gone.

"So that's why we call it amnesia - it forgets what it has done."

Old rover
The problems are becoming more severe, Nasa says, with the memory issue causing the rover reset itself, and in some cases stop communicating with mission control altogether.

In an attempt to solve the problem, the Nasa team is attempting to "hack" the rover's software so that it ignores the faulty part of its flash memory, and instead writes, permanently, to the healthy hardware.

Image from Mars rover Opportunity
Opportunity has lasted on Mars far longer than Nasa ever anticipated
The process will take a couple of weeks, Mr Callas told Discovery News. However, he added that Opportunity is ageing and could be heading towards the end of its useful life.

"It's like you have an aging parent, that is otherwise in good health - maybe they go for a little jog every day, play tennis each day - but you never know, they could have a massive stroke right in the middle of the nigh," he said.

"So we're always cautious that something could happen."

Even if the rover fails now, it will have comfortably exceeded the initial goal of spending three months on the Red Planet.

Ten years after it first landed, Opportunity has covered 26 miles (41.8km) of the Mars surface, and sent back vital intelligence about the planet's biological make-up.

It is good to know and be aware that Mars atmosphere causes Alzheimer attacks to the rovers.

Rovers should be made with less aluminum.

I read an article which states that the rover has found fossils on Mars. But in the body of the story, caution is the word, not confirmation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/07/curiosity_fossils_mars/

The first thing I would do would be to brush the dust off that area to see what's actually on the rock itself. Impossible to tell from the current image.

Looks like a lot of the Ophiomorpha trace fossils in basal C. Its a beach front worm tube with "Y" ends and piled up sand grains fecal pellets (which as you say is all covered with junk on this foto)

It also could be fused sand deposits like fulgurites (lightning trcks).

We need to see some cleaned up close ups to give definitive answers on something as potentially important as this. This, if real, would mean weve already come waaay up the scale of animals and are in the area of annelids and beyond sponges and starfish etc.

We generally never see a lot of worms because they had few hard body parts (they had radula like teeth and some spicules that are almost microscopic) SO we see mostly tracks and trails and tubes of sand infilled with finer sediments.


Trcks and **** are all grouped as ICHNOFOSSILS, So we can start by looking up all kinds out there. I have a book on ichnofossils somewhere but I don't know what I did with it

However, because of their internal structures Worms are pretty advanced for the day

Does the rover have a brush on it?

He, That was on the "Platinum Options edition".
Seems like a brush outfit may be a useful tool

The possibility of actual fossils on Mars is thrilling, but first I would have to say that we need to hold ourselves to the same level of skepticism that we hold all the crackpots that say they see faces or propellers or statues or whatever, on Mars. We've seen time and time again that subjective imagery leads people so see what they want to see. And I would love to see fossils on Mars, so I am going to be very skeptical until the imagery is completely overwhelming.

That being said, I'm happy to speculate because the mere possibility is so exciting...

If those were indeed "worm" tracks, then it would be a shocking discovery. Not only are worms extremely advanced compared to "microbes" in general, but they are well beyond the "multicellular threshold" which Brian Cox (British astrophysicist) recently speculated would limit the probability of life occurring anywhere else in our galaxy. And multi-cellular organisms are not something which can be "seeded" from planet to planet like organics or microbes because multicellular life requires a supportive ecology in order to endure.

If fossils of multicellular life were to be discovered on Mars it would immediately imply the presence of a complete biosphere because worms can't exist in isolation, they have to have evolved and would be dependent on a complex environment. We would be anxious to know if the Mars organisms were built on DNA as earth organism are, or if they are formed from something entirely different. We would also be trying to figure out if Mars seeded Earth or visa versa, or if they were both seeded by asteroids with a common mix of organics (resulting in DNA on both worlds). In either case, the convergence of evolutionary processes on both worlds to produce "worms" in both places would be remarkable.

I'm already a believer (based on probability and demonstrated conditions) that Mars once had microbial life on it, and may still have microbial life under the surface. So I wouldn't have been too surprised to see fossilized microbial mats or stromatolite type structures, but multi-cellularity is definitely not something I expect (or expected) to see on Mars. If something like that were actually there, it would be breathtaking.