Making Tracks on Mars

An anonymous reader writes "In a remarkable series of orbital pictures, the Mars Global Surveyor's cameras have imaged the tracks of the Spirit rover on the surface. Individual debris pieces including the backshell and lander are visible with remarkable clarity using an innovative roll of the satellite."

Comments

It's pretty amazing when you think about it.

[Sheetrock]

Mars always seemed just out of reach when I first took interest in astrology. The planet most like our own in the solar system, it's the logical next step for our move off this planet as we begin to explore and colonize space and it's quite encouraging to see that this is a possibility -- although hopefully more success will be had with landing manned spacecraft on its surface.

I suppose another thing I've always hoped to see was signs of life in the universe. Although we've discovered a number of potentially lifebearing worlds, I find it quite interesting that none actually seem to bear life. One starts to wonder if alternative scientifically accepted theories, such as intelligent design, might be at play in the larger picture when we fail to discover one other world with the same characteristics as our own bearing life.

Indeed, it seems almost as if the universe might be made for us alone (a sobering thought if ever there was one.) Things like irreducible complexity in bacterial flagelli or the inability to intentionally design life from scratch while claiming that a roll of the dice made all this seems absurd. Perhaps it's time to present alternative theories to our budding scientists to permit the forward-thinking ones to discard the baggage of examining the past so that progress on space travel can be most efficiently made.