NASA Shares Curiosity's New Mars Photos (nasa.gov)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "Curiosity is making us giddy by showing us some of the most amazing vistas we have ever seen on Mars," reports NASA. On the web site for their Mars Science Lab, they're sharing mission updates, but also all the raw photos as they're transmitted back by their Curiosity rover, which is travelling up a Martian mountain. "The plan so far has been to drive about 1/3 mile, stop to drill and drive again sampling the layers of the mountain as Curiosity makes her way up."
Curiosity is trying to determine whether Mars ever had environments capable of supporting simple life forms. NASA points out that it took Curiosity four years to reach its current location, joking about one wall of layered sandstone, "Wait, is this the Utah or Mars?"

Comments

The Utah?

[dtmos]

Wait, is this the Utah or Mars?

It could be the Mars, I suppose. . . .

Re:The Utah?

[Rei]

Sort of like how people say "The Ukraine" ;)

I love how thin and fragile looking those layers are, you rarely see such delicate shapes on Earth. Mars has the advantages of low gravity and winds that exert only tiny forces. No rain, snow or floods either. There's stronger thermal cycling, but that's apparently not a problem for them.

I also love the white hydrothermal deposits that fill in the cracks; it reminds me of my land here (Iceland) - though my land is basaltic, not sedimentary. Too bad it all looks so amorphous and bland; would be neat to find deposits of large single-crystal calcite, pretty chalcedony (maybe with botryoidal surface patterns), opal, zeolites, etc. Hydrothermal systems can make neat minerals, but I see no evidence unfortunately that it's done so there.

Re:The Utah?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The question is, does it look like it can be made liveable? If yes, then it's Mars.

Re:The Utah?

[BigT]

Martians don't ring your doorbell at dinner time.

Re:The Utah?

[hey!]

I *is* an alien landscape, after all.

These images remind me quite a bit of the Atacama Desert, large parts of which receive almost no rain. The resemblance is almost uncanny, right down to the color. There are two very subtle differences though. Some of the sand slopes on Mars are unusually steep, they almost climb up the rock faces; that suggests there's a steep static critical angle of repose, but of course that depends on the material. I think if you are a sci-fi writer you might be tempted to make detritus slopes on a low-gravity world all steep; that would't be the case because avalanches tend to go on longer so the median slope wouldn't be that different. But some slopes could get very steep.

The second and more obvious difference is how on Mars erosion scars are all horizontal, wind-cut features; the Atacama gets very little rain, but the movement of water down slopes leaves very obvious traces behind in the loose material.

The utter lack of vegetation on Mars is also striking, although I've been in parts of the Atacama where it hadn't rained in five years (which is not unusual). That landscape appeared to be just as lifeless as one sees in the Mars photos, except for a narrow strip of a few hundred yards near the ocean where a few cacti survived off morning sea mists. The Atacama got rain a months after I was there, and a friend sent me a picture of the "moonscape" afterward: literally every inch of it was covered in wildflowers as far as the eye could see. She reported that the fragrance was so overwhelming it'd make you retch. A vast cloud of tiny pollinating insects hovered over the carpet of flowers.

The thing is, when I was there you could take a handful of that sand and without a very close grain-by-grain examination under a magnifying glass you'd swear it was completely sterile. In fact it would be chock full of extremophile life, adapted to a life cycle of a week or two of furious growth and reproduction followed by years of dormancy.

By the way Mars has been very visible in the evening sky for the past few months. If you have clear evening you should go out and look for it in the twilight, before the stars come out. It's easy to identify by its striking red color.

Re:The Utah?

[Oswald McWeany]

Sort of like how people say "The Ukraine" ;)

There is actually a reason why Ukraine is called "The Ukraine" by some. In Russian "Ukraine" means borderland. Russians referred to the territory as "The Borderland".

It's actually incorrect (and culturally insensitive) to refer to Ukraine as "The Ukraine" now- doing so implies that Ukraine is not a proper country but a region belonging to Russia. Once Ukraine gained its independence then the word "the" was dropped.

Re:Still rolling

[Rei]

You want your next iPod to cost $2,47 billion dollars and powered by plutonium?

Re:Still rolling

[Rei]

BTW, Curiosity has only been out there for four years. I think you're confusing it with Opportunity (which yes, indeed, is still actively roving Mars, 12 years going!). Spirit and Opportunity combined cost $820M (although the program has gone so long that their science extension costs have been adding up, another ~$120M or so).

The cost difference between the MER and MSL projects is one reason why I have trouble getting fully onboard with MSL, and why I'm rather disappointed that Mars 2020 got chosen (there goes another $2,1B - tack on another half billion after the inevitable price hikes). We could have sent a sub to Titan and/or a sample return mission to Enceladus for that price. We could have sent a blimp to spend months in the skies of Venus with a multiuse phase-change/bellow balloon lander to sample all across the surface for that price. We could have sent a mission to the core of a protoplanet (16 Psyche) *and* to a Jupiter trojan *and* to another large KBO (say, Eris) for that kind of money. We could have done a mini-Cassini for Uranus or Neptune for that kind of money. I just cannot get myself to believe that the science return on Mars 2020 is going to approach any of those things. Some of the "instruments", like MHS, sound more like NASA they put a "Request For Lame Excuses To Have Such A Large Payload Capacity" rather than a RFP. :P I just don't get this Mars obsession.

Re:Underwhelmed :(

[Rei]

And nobody less prestigious than Lord Kelvin insisted that heavier than air flying machines are impossible and anyone society who wasted their time funding research into them, he would never be part of. Also said that radio had no practical use. And that X-rays were a hoax. And that all useful discoveries had been made in physics.

And he's hardly the only "respectable" person to go off proclaiming things like that.

Look, I'm not onboard with NASA's obsession with Mars in particular. But I do believe that all open fields of investigation that can teach us new, unexpected things and help answer the big questions questions like "How does the universe work?" and "How did we get here?" and "What is our fate?" are worthy of investigation - even if the payoff may not be for generations. I don't believe that the purpose of society is to stagnate into "Are we maximizing our subsidize to the poor?" or "Are we minimizing our taxes on the rich?" and insisting that all funding for basic scientific inquiry get put off until such never-achievable goals are met.

Conspiracy, fake landing, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

How come they (NASA) are constantly reminding people that what they see is NOT Utah?

Re:West Texas

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You may be even more surprised once you realize that parts of West Texas look like Mars with a color filter over the lens.

Re:Underwhelmed :(

[Rei]

Perhaps more appropriate:

I fail to see how this is making the taxpayers lives better

"What is the use of a new-born infant?" - - Benjamin Franklin, responding to the question what the use of a balloon was.

Re:bot-vs-man fight [Re:Still rolling]

[Rei]

The surface of Venus is 800 degrees Fahrenheit. A balloon would have its electronics fried

There seems to be some confusion here. Note that there were two things mentioned: balloon *and* lander. Venus's atmosphere has a strong temperature gradient, like ours - it just continues downward to the extremes. Long-term flight in Venus's atmosphere is quite reasonable (and there are a number of missions that have proposed this) at the more temperate altitudes. There are even locations on Venus that are temperate by human standards (let alone Machine standards), and are a proposed location for a human colony (which actually has quite a bit going for it vs. a Mars colony). I take it you're not familiar with Landis's work?

Back to the near term: there have been some proposals for long-term surface missions to Venus, but it's exceedingly challenging. Most surface missions are focused on the short-term (and indeed, all surface missions thusfar have been short-term). However, missions so far have only been on a one-way trip: land and then simply rely on thermal inertia to stay cool as long as you can (the maximum achievable for a reasonable mass probe is a few hours, as a general rule). However, a craft that can return to higher altitudes (samples in tow) can cool, recharge its batteries, and make any number of subsequent descents. There are three main approaches for this.

One is a phase-change balloon, wherein you have a material that can change between solid and gas filling up all or part of the envelope. As the balloon rises, the temperature drops and condenses out the material, reducing lift, and vice versa (pressure works somewhat counter to this, but not to the degree that temperature drives it). This has been tested on Earth with the ALICE project. If you want to stay down, you can collect the liquid in a pressure vessel, and release it back into the envelope when you want to descend. It's effective, but challenging on Venus, because you need an envelope that remains flexible yet intact at surface temperatures. PBO is one investigated substance; there's also various metal and carbon composite envelopes under investigation.

The second possibility is a bellows balloon. This is a metal "balloon" shaped like an accordion, that has an electric winch on the inside. When they want to descend, they reel in the winch to reduce the volume. When they want to ascend, they unreel the winch to increase the volume. A prototype has been built and validated at Venus surface conditions.

A third possibility is just to borrow a page from submarines - a rigid spherical envelope. This may sound absurdly massive, but because Venus's surface pressure is so high, you actually don't need a very large envelope. Changing lift is thus a matter of pumping air in or out of the envelope. This approach however is more limited in the maximum altitude achievable versus the others.

It's important to stress that all of these things have already had a great deal of work on them, and there are literally about two dozen mission designs out there in various stages, half a dozen or so actively in the process of trying to get their missions funded at present.