The Dirt On Mars, In Words And Pictures

An anonymous reader writes "The Spirit rover's first soil analysis reveals some puzzling features about Gusev crater. The region seems to contain the greenish silicate mineral, olivine, which usually is considered water-reactive and thus volcanic in origin. For olivine to be found in the soil may point to rock formation during a drier period in martian history, even with strong evidence for sampling in an ancient lakebed. A second puzzle is why the soil seems so crusty. After the rover arm pressed soil down, the top layer of dust hardly moved, a finding that suggests something may be binding the dust like some type of salt or thin cement." For even more and better Mars pictures, read on below.

mlyle writes "I've spent a few hours hacking together some software to deal with the Mars Exploration Rover imagery at JPL. The software puts together a webpage and RDF feed of new raw imagery as it is posted to the JPL site, along with technical information decoded about how the picture was taken. It also produces stereo anaglyphs and color images that NASA has not seen fit to convert and make publically available. Be sure to also check out the ultra high resolution image of the lander as viewed from Spirit."

Comments

Why surprise

[savagedome]

There are some puzzles and there are surprises
One unexpected finding was the Moessbauer spectrometer's detection of a mineral called olivine, which does not survive weathering well

It doesn't survive weathering well in Earth like conditions. Mars, on the other hand, has extreme and totally different climate conditions and it should not be a surprise that minerals exhibit different properties.

No mystery at all

[corebreech]

I mean, they're the ones who are always talking about the windstorms that plague the planet, yes?

And for how long have these windstorms been occurring? Millions and millions of years?

So it seems reasonable to conclude that the dust/soil on the planet is going to be fairly homogenous by now.

They talk about the rock abrasion tool and the various spectrometers and what not, but the tool I'd like to hear about is the shovel. The dried lakebeds on Mars are no doubt little different than the dried lakebeds on Earth. To get to anything really interesting, you need to dig.

Re:No mystery at all

[corebreech]

You're obviously an expert in all this. Why don't you phone up an offer your services ;-)

Nine times out of ten when a stupid science story makes its way to print, its the fault of the reporter. She either didn't understand the subject matter, or (and this is true about all subjects) she isn't a very good reporter.

At wild guess I'd say the scientists are surprised because it is surprising, maybe not to you , but to the experts who have extensivley studied data from previous mars missions presumably.

We already knew olivine existed on the surface of Mars based on the results from the orbiter, so again, it really isn't surprising we'd find olivine on the surface of Mars.

Sigh! why is that geeks think that because they can write a few lines of code that they're experts one everything

Simple. Programmers are forced to think. If you can't think clearly, then your code doesn't work.

Engineers (the type who build *real* things) have the same burden, however it isn't tested nearly as often as it is for programmers. A programmer gets daily, if not hourly or minute-by-minute feedback on the quality of his thought process.

Scientists on the other hand generally receive their feedback very, very slowly.

The net effect is that it takes longer for bad scientists to be washed out of the system than it does for bad programmers.

Ergo, I've come to be very skeptical of taking the word of a scientist based solely on his being called a scientist. And when I say scientist, I don't mean the engineers at NASA who got the rover to the surface of Mars. I'm talking about the guys who are responsible for figuring out which rock to visit, what tests to perform, which theory to try to prove or disprove.

It's easy to tell a good programmer from a bad programmer. But a good planetary scientist from a bad planetary scientist? How do you do that?

Airbag-trails

[l0wland]

"After the rover arm pressed soil down, the top layer of dust hardly moved, a finding that suggests something may be binding the dust like some type of salt or thin cement."

Interesting, as the marks of the airbags are clearly visible on all pics. Or am I missing the point of a rover-arm having less force than a bouncing-lander-in-an-airbag?

Re:Maestro update!

[VertigoAce]

First of all, unless you have overwhelming evidence of life on mars, you need to have evidence that life was possible. If you know that it was possible, then you might devise ways of checking if life did exist. This is assuming of course that water is essential.

Why search for ancient life in the first place? There's a chance that it would help explain the origin of life on earth. Future missions would be devoted to figuring out how life came to be. If both planets had life completely independently (no rocks with bacteria flying through space) it would tell us that it's very likely there is life elsewhere in the universe.

Size of the rocks

[They_Call_Me_Spanky]

I find it interesting all the rocks in the pictures look small enough for any human to pick up and throw. I don't see any large outcropping of boulders and such. Why isn't the variety of the rock sized greater?

Re:Mining

[MyBeeswax]

There was no plate tectonics on Mars so it is extremely unlikely that minerals got concentrated, and even if they did, there is no crustal movement to bring this stuff to the surface. I think that the mining prospects on Mars are bleak.

Re:Maestro update!

[TrueBuckeye]

Also, there is the grand philisophical question involved. Are we the reason for the universe? Did God create all of this just for us or are we just another form of life in a freak universe?

The existence of life outside of Earth is as huge a revelation to religion as the debunking of the Earth-centric model of the solar system. The spiritual ramifications are enormous, but not often talked about.

If there is life on Mars, then suddenly Darwinism takes a huge leap and Biblical creationism, at least the most common interpretations, takes a step back. Then if there is/was life on Mars, then why not on other planets, which have been found to be far more common than we thought. And if there is life all over the universe, then it isn't too far a leap to say that some of it has evolved into sentient life forms. And now we have to ask if other intelligent, self-aware creatures have a soul. Do they have an afterlife?

This goes on and on. Needless to say, more than scientists and geeks are interested in the findings of these missions.

Meteorite?

[scalis]

I read at one of the links that "Olivine is also found in many iron-nickel meteorites. Not just as small grains but as significantly sized crystals sometimes occupying over 50% of the meteorites volume."
I do not know anything about minerals really, but if the lander is exploring a crater, couldn't this come from the meteorite that created the crater in the first place?

Olivine beach

[kyoorius]

There is actually a green sand beach on the big island of Hawaii.
It is little known, and difficult to get to, but a long drive down
an unpaved road, and two or so mile hike will get you to it.

I once met an minerologist gathering samples there.
He told me the beach was green because of a large olivine vein
which was eroded over the years by the ocean waves.

pics: http://www.techfreakz.org/blacksand/