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Mars Rover Ready for Risky Descent into Crater
Riding with Robots writes "After months of scoping out the terrain, the robotic geologist Opportunity is ready to drive down into Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains of Mars. Mission managers acknowledge the hardy rover may never come back out, but say they think the potential for discovery is worth it. 'The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days. The scientific allure is the chance to examine and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments. As the rover travels farther down the slope, it will be able to examine increasingly older rocks in the exposed walls of the crater. '"
I think it will survive it. Obviously that sucker was built Tonka tough lol. It's funny though cuz every time it's about to do just about anything, the scientists say "well this might be the last thing it ever does" just because it's way past the 90 days. It's kinda like how people every year say "yep, those AS400's are on their way out any day now" and then there I was, still sitting in front of an ugly green screen for one of my classes (I changed degree fields after that) I think the rover will be there long enough to bump into an astronaut's foot lol. Unless of course it gets attacked my martian crater monkeys. Those things are vicious.
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The MERS mission has been an incrediable sucessess that one doesn't hear much about, unless you read slashdot. A 90 day mission that has lasted 3 years and shows no signs of stopping as funding has been approved to at least september and so long as they are showing results, I doubt that is going to change. Most of the costs is in launching and building the damn things. From that stand point, looks like they've gotten their money worth out of them.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movie s/opportunity/VictoriaDigitalStory.mov
JPL produced Video of Project Manager John Callas discussing the entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_crater if there is water ice underneath MArs' surface or even temporarily exposed ice, this is the spot. what ever created the crater whether a deorbited moon, asteroid or comet likely left water behind after the impact. so even if the rover doesnt come out again it will be well wortth the sacrifice.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Looks like Boeing engineers (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/ 27/1723251/ sidenote, can someone point out the syntax to do this properly?) could learn a lot from NASA.
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I wonder how many probes like this we could've launched with the gigantic money wasted^H^H^H^H^H^H, er, I mean spent on the space shuttles and all the launch support. With some mass production techniques, maybe 1,000? More?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"the chance to examine and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments."
Oh jeez... investigating and exploring the depths of ancient, wet environments?... This sounds like some kind of MILF joke gone wrong... *cringes*
If it's taken us this long to reach a hopefully significant leap in the exploration of Mars, how long do you guys think it would take for a man to be able to set foot on Mars to actually get some first person perspective on the planet itself?
I ask, because I've seen a lot of planning going on in terms of living on Mars, but I can't help wonder, "Why all this planning and scheming, when we haven't even had concrete, indisputable evidence that Mars can sustain life, much less had someone actually get there?"
'The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days.'
;)
So, it's a pre-DRM rover, then? It certainly wasn't built by HP's printer division.
You know, sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in the details of these rover missions, but I am always pretty humbled when I think of this remote controlled do-dad, once pieced together by earth-bound scientists, sitting on some planet 50 (or so) million miles away and still responding to our every command. Just to think that thing is out there, on mars, right now.
:)
Reading story after story about the various space exploration projects and we can get a little desensitized to the pure 'awesomeness' of the kinds of things our space exploration agencies are doing. So a moment to just consider this achievement is warrented I think.
How great would it be to have a go at driving that thing?
How many of these probes could we have launched if we spent money making a cheap launch system instead of ICBMs?
Or.. how many Mars rovers could we make if we spent the national health care budget on making them?
As cool as the Mars rovers are, they had enough trouble getting money for a 90 day project, let alone a freakin' armada. To the people who control the bucks, this is just boring geek stuff. At least the shuttle gives them some national heroes to say they support.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Old martian crater,
Love her or hate her,
Waited for someone to come.
Before it's all over,
Rover comes over,
And crawls right into her bum.
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Having already got more that their money's worth, why the concern with its survivability? Surely the purpose of sending this explorer is to gather info. It has already gathered 10x the info that was planned for. Being conservative and tooling around on the flats is not as likely to give as much information as exploring the crater.... even if this is a one-way trip.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
With my rover!
But where does this confidence come from that they know that all of these formations are caused by water?
We use our experience on Earth to form a hypothesis about similar features on another planet.
Every week that goes by, our probes and telescopes bring more unexpected observations. Our theories of the universe are constantly changing. Objects that we thought were completely different increasingly appear to have similar characteristics.
We form a hypothesis but we can't support or deny it until we observe evidence. If the evidence supports then it looks like we knew it all along. If the evidence denies then it raises more questions.
As far as I can tell, nobody's ever even observed an impact occur on any planet.
We have observed minor impacts on the Moon and a major one on Jupiter.
At some point in time, their speculation hardened into consensus without ever thinking to validate it. Many of the craters we observe in the universe have highly unusual features that don't appear to strictly correlate with physical impacts.
Consensus is built with mathematical models. Probes and telescopes are used to validate our hyptheses. Again, if observational evidence does support a hypothesis then more questions are raised and new ones are formed. As for not correlating with physical impacts (I'm not entirely sure what you are referencing here) there are craters formed by volcanoes and probably some caused by exploding meteors (meteorites).
My point is that the overall predictive track record and the large number of unsubstantiated consensuses within astrophysics today do not support the notion that we should be able to accurately predict our findings on Mars at this point in time.
We have hypotheses. Yes we want water to be found on Mars and it shouldn't be unexpected. There is an incredible amount of water in the universe and it would be foolish to only expect to find it on Earth or the moons of Jupiter.
Mars was a molten ball of magma that eventually began to cool. Why would anyone not expect that sometime between being a molten ball of magma and its current state as a presumably cold, dead world that there wasn't flowing water on it?
Physical impacts have been seen on the planets. For example in 1994 there was a
comet that hit Jupiter. A little closer to home, the moon is regularly hit by objects. So yes there is a reasonable basis for thinking that planets get hit by hard objects.
I submit that the mars meteorite would probably be a better line of argument to use for your hypothesis.
After months of scoping out the terrain my hardy rover is ready to drive down the Victoria crater and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments
My rover will most probably not operate more than 12 times longer than its originally intended though...
These have been amazing pieces of hardware. There has been a lot of buzz around opportunity, but last I heard both were still functional. What is the other one doing? That way if opportunity gets lost or malfunctions in the crater at least one will be left to roam the surface.
The talus slopes that it has to traverse to get back out are covered with the little hematite 'blueberries.' Its wheels will just slip and slide. It's like driving on ball bearings. You can check in but you can't check out.
You can see daily images and weekly updates about both rovers on the excellent official site. If you'll forgive the plug, you can also keep up with all the planetary probes on my (non-commerical) site: ridingwithrobots.org.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
We need rovers working off of RTGs! No more of this pansy solar panels that dictate that Spirit had to spend months in one spot facing toward the Sun just so it could generate enough power and internal heat just to stay alive! Even then they can only spend part of the time working and data broadcasts are limited when the power is low.
The RTG powered Cassini probe is doing a bang up job orbiting Saturn, and future Martian robots should, too. Enough mamby-pamby exploration with under powered exploration units. With nuclear power sources in these rovers, we could have gotten ten times the science in during the same amount of time.
The Mars Science Laboratory is slated for launch in 2009.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
Mars Rover Beginning to Hate Mars.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
They were demonstrating the new one at the JPL open house last month. In addition, it will be much bigger (SUV-sized vs. ATV-sized).
will it check out that featureless black spot we found recently? I sure as heck would like to know what's in there.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
But they have something in common with you. Now they have also yelled "Hey, guys, watch this!"
OK smart guy, let's work this out from an engineering point of view - after all, the engineers have to build the things.
You: I want to build a Mars probe, looking for things we don't understand and don't expect.
Engineer: What kind of sensor platform do you want? Visible light? UV? IR? Radio? Gravitational waves? Do you want to pick stuff up and look at it or just wander around? Take some measurements perhaps? Of what, pray tell?
You: I dunno, there's just.... just stuff out there that we don't understand.... I want to learn about it. But no preconceived notions - well, wait, maybe something about electric fields, but no other preconceived notions.
Engineer: Maybe come back when you're sober, eh? (Goes back to reading Digg).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Really Old Vehicle Extremely Resilient.
They ask their questions as if they already know the answers ...
Currently: "Is there water on Mars? Hell yeah, and we're going to find it! Then, we'll know that our current theories are correct. We are in fact masters of the universe, just as we thought!"
Rather than: "Is there water on Mars? Well, these geological formations could be the result of this, this and this. Let's keep an open mind on the possibilities, including even the strangest possibilities, and load up sensors to test every single one of them, focusing heavily on using sensors that can differentiate between the possibilities. Then, when we see the data, we can create differing interpretations and compare these interpretations on the basis of the data."
There's a very big difference. NASA has become results-oriented and uncertainty (a necessary tool for maintaining objectivity) has become a casualty. Uncertainty doesn't make for good PR releases, you know? It's important to look real busy and have answers! If something didn't go as you planned, then God forbid, don't mention that because then people might think that you don't know what you're doing and they might stop funding you. Rather than bravely reasserting the role of cautious scientist with the public, apprehensive about making speculations that might turn out to later be untrue, NASA and the astrophysicists in general have decided that it's more important to act like a story-teller, where speculation runs rampant and frequently turns out to be untrue, where every mission is pre-scripted and integrated into a pre-planned history for future generations of how we learned what the universe was. Thing is -- the universe won't be learned that way. That's fiction. It's silly. There will clearly be surprises. At this rate, though, we won't notice them. Our belief that we know the end of the story will inevitably blind us to the truth.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
The landed weight is 348 kg. It's mission is not to "explore strange new worlds and go boldly where no man has gone before..." it is:
Very limited, very specific. Hopefully one of the first Mars landers, not the last. It took some five years (IIRC) to go from that paragraph to the actual spacecraft. During that time there were innumerable meetings / arguments / pointed emails about what scientific packages would fly on the landers. Some of those decisions were likely pretty prosaic - It might simply have been that they actually had some or all of the technology in a package that could be built and tested in the time frame and budget allotted.
You somehow manage to find some deep, dark defects in the soul of NASA in a pretty mundane engineering exercise.
You should get out more often.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Oh well, I guess this does for Victoria's Secret...
And come back safely - NASA needs you.
I have a hypothetical situation: What if everything NASA is seeing is the result of electrical activity instead of water, and NASA sends people to Mars in search of water, life and national prestige, only to have them subjected to intense transient electrical storms in various forms? What if these people then died due to persistent equipment failures?
Wow. You are really really fixated on electricity. Electricity and water have totally different signatures. I would be interested to hear a rational explanation of how electricity could have effects on the Martian landscape that would have the same effects as water. Please be specific, clear, and scientific and be sure to explain how electricity causes craters as well please.
You also seem fixated on using the "OMG! People will die if you do not examine my pet theories!" gambit. You should drop it as it makes you look like a zealot.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
due to the massive difficulty in obtaining *any* data from mars, we cannot prove or disprove *every*single*possibility*, we can only proceed to prove or disprove the theories we think are most likely. the ultimate aim is to put people there, so lets figure out if we can do that before we start theorising about the fundamental concepts of the universe.
FallenSword, a free MMO you can play at work!
You may be right that unmanned exploration makes more sense -- but I don't find the human-life risk factor compelling.
Come on, who can name a single astronaut since they ended Apollo?
Easy: Mark Shuttleworth!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
They had two working one in 1970s. One went 11 km and the other 37 km. Opportunity just passed the first one. Lunar driving was remote control because the time-dleay feedback was about two seconds. Mars is 40 to 90 minutes.
You walked into that one.
hmm... my money is on the rover will fail due to not enough solar radiation. The batteries will die.
> Opportunity is ready to drive down into Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains of Mars.
> Mission managers acknowledge the hardy rover may never come back out, but say they think
> the potential for discovery is worth it .
Ok. Who the hell hired Peter Griffen to work in the control room?!?!?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Let's pretend, for instance, that NASA decides to send people to Mars' South Pole in order to investigate the apparent geyser activity there, and possibly to extract water from the ice. I've seen some pretty startling Mars Orbital Camera images from the South Pole that could be interpreted to be showing proton beams that are so powerful that they are excavating material from beneath the ice, throwing it up into the air, and then that material falls back onto the ice. NASA has decided to believe that these geysers have tectonic and/or chemical causes, but you can make a pretty logical argument based upon the images that these geysers are the result of proton beams from the Sun. Any beam of charged particles that's strong enough to gouge out material would surely be a hazard to humans.
5 25southpolar.htm
Look very closely at the right-hand image on the following page, and it is quite clear that NASA has unknowingly captured these geysers in action, whatever the cause:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070
Nobody really knows what these things are. But to think that they might send people there, that there could be a possibility that these people might be exposed to intense beams of charged particles, and that your argument for *not* considering it as a possibility has something to do with not being able to prove that God doesn't exist, is pretty reckless. It's not as if this data point exists by itself. There is evidence all over Mars that indicates electrical activity that is being ignored in favor of evidence for water.
Remember now, you still have no idea what EU Theory really states. You are operating with confidence on a complete lack of information and you've drawn all of your conclusions on the basis of observing other people's reactions to EU Theory. Let's be extremely clear: EU Theory is not anywhere in the same ballpark as creationism or any religion whatsoever. It's based upon laboratory plasma physics, where we find that plasmas are electrical in nature. They have electrical resistance and we use Maxwell's Equations to model them. The only thing keeping space plasmas from being electrical as well are the astrophysicists themselves.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
All it took to keep it running was wind blowing the panels clean? Who builds an 800 million dollar robot that doesn't have a brush to wipe the solar panels down?
I've heard they investigated that possibility but concluded it was not worth the cost. For one, there was no way to test them on real dust to make sure they don't make the problem worse. Second, Many other parts were also limited to 90 days, and in fact somes wheels, joints, and grinding teeth *are* worn out. They just happened to be able to work around these so far (or live without some, such as Spirit's grinders). There are a lot of work-arounds in place already. A lot of the credit goes to the workaround experts.
Table-ized A.I.
By the way, when the rover descends into Victoria crater, those things that look like sand dunes at the bottom will not be sand dunes at all. They will be glassified sand ... rock ... more technically called fulgarites.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I have no mod points, but you've convinced me to check out the EU theory in greater depth (and to wait and see if those formations are glassified).
as it is, i have no need or desire to believe or disbelieve your EU theory, the onus is on you to promote your theory until it gains mass acceptance. the fact that it has not leads me to believe the nasa guys have the right idea. i am not an geologist and really have no idea what makes lumps of rock on mars, but i am pretty sure that if nasa is spending billions of dollars on it, they might just believe they are onto the right track, whether that eventually proves correct or not is irrelevant. nasa can only support a limited number of experiments, to simply state they should prove or disprove *ALL* theories is a nonsense, it is simply not possible to do so.
on a completely unrelated note, i looked at the image you referenced and cant actually see any "geysers". i can see some squarish rocks and maybe some hilly things, but like i said, i'm not a geologist. can you provide conclusive proof to disprove all other theories (including the current tectonic theory, FSM, and my own personal theory that this is all a warped creatures personal experiment and prove your "electron beams from space sharks with frikken lasers!" theory?
i am curious, surely all this electricity must be harmfull to those robots? oddly, i would have thought a big metal object sticking up from the ground would become effectively the same as a lightning conductor here on earth?
oh, and before you post some more of your pretty pictures.......
yeah, i saw some pretty impressive images of a face on mars, so does that provide conclusive proof that there are little green men on mars trying to make contact? see, the funny thing is, any picture *could* be interpreted to prove anything, given the right theory.
FallenSword, a free MMO you can play at work!
I think I will feel very humbled if it turns out to be sand. I'd have to reconsider my beliefs, to be honest.
But I'm quite certain that it *will* be hard.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
It's unfortunately a common example for people to use here on Slashdot, and bringing it up leads people to believe that EU Theory isn't real science. I wanted to make sure that you realized that EU Theory is based upon laboratory plasma physics. In fact, the mainstream astrophysicists are the ones asserting that the laboratory plasma results do not scale or apply to the bigger universe -- which, under any other circumstances, people would recognize as being completely absurd. Their entire theory of magnetic reconnection, which presumably explains how the Sun's corona can be 100x hotter than its surface (!), is redundant of *real* laboratory plasma physics. They refuse to accept double layers on the Sun, however, because double layers are the result of electrical current. This battle has been raging for many years now. The guy (Hannes Alfven) who created magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the math used to model plasmas in space as having frozen-in-place magnetic fields and as being ideal conductors, denounced his own prior convictions regarding these fluid modeling concepts as "pseudo-pedagogical" (his words) during his Nobel Physics Prize for inventing that field in 1970. Not many astrophysicists are even aware of that because his warnings were completely ignored.
Quite a bit of evidence has already been provided to the public. Very few people are paying attention. NASA and the astrophysicists have a nasty habit of not promoting results which they do not understand. They did this for the Deep Impact mission, which should have been the point where they realized that comets are electrical in nature. They keep on pointing to the streams of OH they see coming off of the comets as evidence of water even though they cannot see water on the comet's surface, and even though OH can quite easily be generated by combining the solar wind's protons with oxygen released from cometary silicates through electric machining. There is a long history of data regarding Venus that indicates that it is a *new* planet, still cooling off from its recent birth. We've seen both radioactive and heat signatures that suggest as much. The story of the extinction of the woolly mammoth is a very fascinating in-depth study of how mainstream science glosses over enigmatic findings. One Russian scientist has discovered that radioactive decay rates correlate with phases of the Moon, Sun and stars. His research was never followed up on. Halton Arp has discovered a correlation between quasars and the axes of nearby spiral galaxies, and his stats *have* been reproduced. He's also imaged high redshift quasars in *front* of low-redshift spiral galaxies and attached to low-redshift spiral galaxies. But his reward was that he lost his telescope time and had to move to Europe to continue his work. The very fact that the Sun's solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets is highly enigmatic for the standard solar model. What mechanical force induces a sustained acceleration of charged particles over millions of miles? We see jets all over the universe now that span light years in length. That is far longer than the lifetime of a photon, so these are undeniably jets of *matter*. The only way to keep a jet of matter together in space is if it's a spinning vortex, and the *only* way that you can do this is with an electrical plasma. Plasma physicists -- namely Anthony Perratt -- can generate the spiral galaxy morphology with nothing more than electrical plasmas. No dark matter is required. It is the natural evolution of two adjacent Birkeland Currents. Mainstream astrophysicists have to resort to collisions to induce spiral galaxies, and by their own accounts, collisions should be *extremely* rare. Don Scott's book, "The Electric Sky", is a stunni
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.
...
The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.
If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.
These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater
Endurance Crater "Dune" Field
One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.
There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:
Argyre Planitia
Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.
Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.
As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I *love* the fact that astrophysical predictions are classified on Slashdot as "Troll". That's pretty interesting. It's a sign of the times that predictions no longer mean anything to mainstream astrophysical enthusiasts.
...
Anyways, I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.
The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.
If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.
These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater
Endurance Crater "Dune" Field
One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.
There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:
Argyre Planitia
Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.
Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.
As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.
...
The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.
If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.
These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater
Endurance Crater "Dune" Field
One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.
There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:
Argyre Planitia
Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.
Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.
As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.