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Weird Geological Features Spied On Mars
astroengine writes "The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera carried by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted a strange geological feature that, for now, defies an obvious explanation. Found at the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, small pits with raised edges appear to hug a long ridge. So far, mission scientists have ruled out impact craters and wind as formation processes, but have pegged the most likely cause to be glacial in nature."
Well, I'd like for it to be burrows or casings...
I'm not saying it's aliens, but that "ridge" was clearly a space craft docking terminal used by ancient aliens and their flying saucers.
Given that the blurb on the HiRISE page say "but for now this is a mystery," I'm not seeing any evidence of scientists being scared of saying they don't know. In fact, making a high profile general public article highlighting stuff you don't understand seems like the exact opposite of the scientists being scared to point out what you don't know.
Those are acne scars from when Mars was much younger, you insensitive clods!
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yea, I mean, seriously 4.4 billion years old? It could just as easily be 4.5 or 4.3 billion years old.
Instead of "I don't know" they can just throw massive error bars on the figure. For example, the earth may be 4.5 billion years old +- 20 billion years. (Thats right, it may not be created until the future...)
No tectonics. The planet's core is supposed to be frozen, because it it so much smaller than Earth.
All rites reversed 2010
The earth is 4,500,000,027 years old.
They told my it was 4.5 billion years old when I took high school geology back in 1986.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe. Ice could melt, even evaporate due to the low vapour pressure and leave a void behind. Viola, sinkhole without groundwater.
All rites reversed 2010
Try looking at the image slide show on the very page linked in the summary. One of the craters on Mars has tectonic activity where one side of the fault has been uplifted while the other side went down. The fault goes right through the crater showing the activity happened after the impact created the crater.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
They look more like solifluctations, or possibly something related to palsas or pingos.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Zoom in more at the end of the trail and you'll see remains of a thumper.
Archive.org to the rescue. Maybe the 9-June-2003 issue of Marsbugs (#23), page 5, "Martian Spiders"?: http://web.archive.org/web/20080725114636/http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/volume10old.html
Man, just realized how long ago Spirit and Opportunity were.
If you figure each put was made by a chunk of ice, which laid on the surface to trap blown debris, then subliminated away, you'd get something like that. The one to the right with ones inside of on pit would have been made by a ice boulder fracturing apart then its parts sublimating away.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Andreas_Fault_Aerial_View.gif
"Yea, I mean, seriously 4.4 billion years old? It could just as easily be 4.5 or 4.3 billion years old."
Precise Dating is everything.
Some tourists in the Chicago Museum of Natural History are marveling at the dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, "Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?"
The guard replies, "They are 70 million, four years, and six months old."
"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist. "How do you know their age so precisely?"
The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were 70 million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago."
He knows everything about Mars. And if he doesn't know, he'll make it up!
http://www.enterprisemission.com/
Agreed the recent trend is to pay a specific public representative to tell us what they are not ;p
However, We don't know, or "Don't think its that" is a perfectly valid answer =)
Is it really that hard to put a scale on images? It kind of helps and typically makes the science more interesting.
There are quite similar to the depressions in Moreux Crater (image PSP_010695_2225 ; 42 degrees N / 44.6 degrees E). They might be Kettle Holes, formed when a retreating ice sheet or glacial flood leaves behind huge chunks of debris rich ice that later melts (or sublimates) creating distinctive hollows in glacial sediment.
Moreux Crater Kettle Holes