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Evidence of Glaciers on Mars?
cyclop writes "Nature reports that the Mars Express mission has photographed evidence of ancient glaciers on Mars. It seems glaciers have sculpted valleys on the red planet, much like on Earth." Reader macguys writes "Space.com is reporting that the Mars Rover Opportunity has received an unexpected and unexplained power boost of between 2 and 5 percent. The NASA Rover site is so far silent on the boost."
I was under the impression the "unexplained power boost" was due to the fact that the Martian day is longer at this time of year.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
Just trolling
So, what will be beable to gain from exploring mars? I mean, how will learning about this planet make life better for us beyond solving our curiosity?
/. but all this money could potentially feed the homeless, and perhaps put our public school kids on a better path to actually learning, or something.
I know space is popular on
What does all this mars business gain us? A cure for cancer?
well, at least the martians were kind enough to recharge its batteries for us...
The martians were trying to connect their iPods to the rover so they could get the latest U2 album.
Are we sure the valley's weren't carved out by giant faces flowing accross the surface of mars over the millenia?
... and in the DRM, bind them.
This was posted weeks ago...
Dust Devil Cleaning Services, the last remains of the vast martian civilization
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I read an article last night on CNN about the rovers that said they were getting energy boosts from the longer days on Mars now that Spring time is coming along. More time under the sun == more time for the solar panels to do their job. Makes sense to me.
Maybe the drive wheel that was stuck freed up and and lowered the load. Or, more likely, a lucky gusty of wind cleaned some of the dust off the solar cells.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
NASA announced that the rover's next destination will be the powerup that will give it rocket launchers.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Someone should start up a site that everyone can place predictions and bets on the day that Spirit and Opprotunity dies.
It should be like the site that let everyone bet when the next big version of Linux was coming.
It'd be good clean fun for geeks,
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!
Please see this very recent Slashdot article for more about the vast red plains.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
There is Jolt Cola on mars. This can only mean one thing. Martians are a bunch of jumped up caffiene druggies hiding out in their sophisticated cave strongholds and are currently planning to destroy the earth by sending their ancient glaciers here to be melted by global warming and thus submerging our free and democratic planet.
Why yes I have been listening to Donald Rumsfeld a lot lately, why do you ask?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Probably just Marvin messing with them.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Man, it's Friday, isn't it?
--- Ban humanity.
From the site:Seems that perhaps all those Slashdotters who always ask why wipers couldn't have been installed, or claim that dust was immediately going to kill power, can finally be silenced?
One aspect of a particularly long mission like the Mars Rovers is that it acts as a real-world test-bed for the new technologies. Maybe the dust buildup isn't nearly as big an issue as was originally thought, and maybe they've found a good compromise between power consumption and keeping the rover innards warm with the 'deep sleep' capacity. Still, the machinery will fail eventually - here's to hoping that however it does fail, it'll provide them with more information on how to improve things for future missions!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Looks like Richard C. Hoagland was right---again!
http://enterprisemission.com/
Geek Hillbilly
that (IMHO) that the supposed "martian canals" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal) could have been caused posibly due to these glaciers(?). But most likely they were made of CO2 just like the poles on mars are, still making the planet uninhabitable for humans. Which brings my question (although most likely completely wrong!) is if there was life on mars, could the species have used all their possible oxygen(assuming they brethed it of course), and having nothing to reproduce the oxygen, just kinda bounced off the planet? But if that happened, most likely they wouldnt take all the buildings with them, but hey thats why were exploring mars anyway.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
And someone at NASA gets the task of giving this poor kid the difficult message that he is not getting anything, because it was unrequested...
"Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view." - David Hilbert
maybe the ambient light on mars, in the proper spectrum is greater than expected. i.e. a higher number of lumens?
maybe the properties (refractivity/reflectivity?) of the dust have a quality that allows the light to pass through at a greater rate than expected? or is it possible for them to emit a non-visible spectrum which can be used by the solar cells?
maybe the little green men have a vacuum cleaner and were doing some housekeeping
Maybe they used Duracell(tm) , i.e. for once maybe something (batteries) are more efficient than initially thought
are they measuring things like this?...perhaps someone can enlighten us.
wiped the dust off the panels. Now they are waiting irritatedly for their 2 grebnaks.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Contents of most recent data transmission:
That's easy, that was November 2nd 2004.
...the bag of oranges one of the rovers recently purchased.
I'm not saying I don't like what the MERs have sent back, but some of the ESA stuff is pretty sweet looking
ESA's Mars Express
Glaciers before... No Glaciers now...
That means...
Mars was destroyed by global warming!!!
(Yeah it's tongue in cheek... but it's gotta make you think!)
Could anybody please explain why the big fuss about water/ice on Mars. If they discover some bacteria over there what use will it be? There's lots of bacteria here and nobody gets excited about it.
Finding inteligent beings would be a different story but I think everybody has ruled that out already.
Most males in the area I live in are more interested in beer than water anyway.
That is one surreal image. Any particular reason for thinking that?
BTW, whoever modded you down as "overrated" when you hadn't even been modded yet is a cunt of the highest order.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
could it be that a spaceship from the future came back to the past and gave the rover the energy boost required?????
That rover must be on the edge to discover something very important.
I think i watch too much startrek
God is real unless declared as int
Nah, Mom finally ran across the rover. She's a compulsive neat freak, so naturally she dusts it.
She's been trying to get it to come eat dinner and meet the family; she's a bit miffed that it won't respond...
But if it existed then it was a long time ago. Plenty of time for all the evidence to be hidden beneath the sand. Mars is not exactly known for its non-sand storm nature.
Even if there are fossils to be found the chances of finding them with 2 little carts pottering about are about zero. It would be like driving around your local city and claiming there never been dinosaurs because you didn't find any.
At the moment what everyone is doing is speculating. Worse the speculations are based on very small samples and compared to only 1 planet wich we don't really understand yet either.
I have lived long enough to have gone through several cycles of mars having and not having water. The only thing I know for certain is that nobody knows for certain.
Could an intelligent species have lived on mars and left? We only recently discovered that a small species of humans has existed very recently very close by. Frankly anyone who claims to know the answer to what lived or didn't live on mars in the past is insane. You can guess. You can estimate. But certain we can't be. More fun anyway.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I voted for Kerry. And then I voted against him. Decisions like this require flexibility, nuance, and a global test.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is not a new result. It has long been observed that some valley deposits on Mars resemble glacial morains. By far the best evidence for glaciation on Mars is at its north pole and it is well documented.
The increasing power levels of the Mars rovers is explained by the lengthening daylight hours in the Mars northern hemisphere spring. What is surprising is that the solar panels may be being cleaned by wind action.
an ill wind that blows no good
http://www.co2clean.com/snowform.htm Or, in other words, dP/dT=deltaS/deltaV
Project Steve
Very difficult to find-- I had to go to the Opportunity updates page and search for the first occurence of the word "power."
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
You only use 2% of your DNA
Glaciers carve rounded "U"-shaped valleys while rivers make pointed "V"-shaped valleys. You can distinguish the two in places like Yosemite and Denali which have valleys of both kinds in the past 15,000 years. The geologists were seeing this in the Mars photographs.
Why didnt they put dust wipers on the solar panels?
we will always have
bums, vagrants, and hobos
painted as homeless and pandered to as such
I know good people who have ended up homeless. Through no fault of their own. They have held jobs while being homeless.
It's easy to rip on them from your position of relative comfort. Yes, there are some who are bums, but others are not. The fact is, capitalism always leaves some people in the dust. Which is why it must be combined with an effective welfare state for it to be humane.
inflating the number of homeless only serves to support the agenda of those who would profit from those numbers...
or those who profit by proppagating the idea that all homeless are bums. Those who don't want to give up their ivory backscratchers to pay taxes to actually help other people.
Wait 'til it goes from "Look at what those dopes on Earth sent here" to "Let's start messing with them." Mark my words, it'll happen!
Ah..Ah..AaaaaCHOOOOOooooo! Damned Mars dust. Hey, I feel alert now!
Table-ized A.I.
I just thought that Mars still had full-service stations, thus proving their civilization is far more advanced than ours.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
OMG I see a giant worm!!!!
Welcome our martian window cleaning overlords!
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If I remember correctly, this exact same story came out in the August issue of National Geographic. That might have been their hunch and now they have confirmed it. Still interesting though.
NASA probably didn't even tip them. Cheap bastards.
I wonder why wipers couldn't have been installed to prevent the build-up of dust that will kill power?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
(Score:5, Insightful) ???
Can we please have a scientific, and not political discussion here? (Score:5, Insightful)?? How about off-topic. If you want to complain about the US election, take it over to the politics section and let the few of us that are left talk about the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Geez
Put identity in the browser.
I wonder why the rover doesnt have a self-cleaning system? Didnt anyone at NASA ever think about it???? If it's going to get dirty, and you need it clean to generate energy... why not build a cleaning system???? As it is, it's so pathetic that martians had compassion of us for not including a cleaning system. So much money into it and you cant include a cleaning system???
Isn't your post counterproductive? Oh look, someone just replied to it, compunding exactly what you didn't want to happen!
This is a different power increase from the gradual one reported on in the earlier press releases. The space.com article is dated November 4th, and refers to 2-5% power increase overnight. The best candidate for an explanation seems to be that Opportunity was targeted by a dust devil that blew almost all of the dust off of it - And the rover is now at 82% full power, a condition it hasn't experienced for months. Talk about luck!
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
I think it got hooked up to the Hydrocon in Alpha Labs by one of the workers.
C'mon, lets have a funny mod here!
I suspect they ran into a couple of heroin addicted aliens who charged them a dollar to clean the solar-cells.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
I just did it on a lark 'cause I'm bored to tears with studying right now.
If you have ever managed to merge together images on one of those wacky posters before, you know the trick.
All I did was select two of the 3D images they have all ready to go (at nasa.jpl.gov), sized them down with photoshop on a black background, played with the placement for a while until they were just right for me to merge in my brain while aabout eight inches away from my monitor.
It was freaking unreal. The silly red/green images don't work at all like the real thing. It's worth it to do the real thing. Use only the plain left and right images designed for this. 90% of the time I had no idea what I was really looking at when looking at the regular 2D lander photos.
Suddenly, it was all so obvious! I was standing on a hill, looking down across a giant valley, with mountains rising off in the distance. Breathtaking, stunning detain and perspective. It was SO MUCH MORE REAL, like really being there and looking out a window!
Nasa should find a way to make the true 3d experience more accessible to everyone, without the funky red/green glasses. Maybe with that "Viewmaster" viewer or something. They'd have a TON more money coming their way if they passed out viewmasters with 3D imagry to all of Congress.
No, because the off-topic parent is still rated 5, insightful. I would start an entire off-topic thread and waste all 50 of my karma just to shut the politicos up and move them over where they belong.
You and I, however, aren't talking politics, now, are we?
I know: Discussion of the moderation system will be modded off-topic.
Everything else is a free-for-all, especially politics.
Put identity in the browser.
Well, the terrain is similar, as is the air quality...
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch