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

Interesting stuff

[Eric S Rayrnond]

It's interesting to see the tools on the Rover finally being used to examine the soil. Apparently, it's using microscopes and 2 spectromoters to analyse the dust - the machine equivalent of giving it a good poke around to see what it's made of. Naturally, these tools generate *a lot* of information, up to 100 megabits in one session. It may not seem like much to us, but they don't exactly have broadband on Mars, so it's a lot of data, and it's an impressive achievement.

The existence of olivine is particularly surprising, because it doesn't survive weathering. This may be because the soil is made up of fine volcanic particles, or because the olivine was actually from underneath the soil.

As for the strange "stickiness" of the dust, they think that it may be because of sulfate and chloride salts that come from volcanic activity, dust storms, or even evaporated water. It's tantalizing data, and I hope they continue to get interesting results like this.

Not only does this prove...

[edxwelch]

that there once was life on Mars, but also that they enjoyed malted milk drinks... no wait, that was *Olivine*...

This is ANOTHER hoax.

[karmaflux]

We all know the truth. NASA has done this stuff to us before and one day they'll learn.

Meanwhile, it's clear that these pictures were made with certain software that the government doesn't want you to know about.


Note: Joke.