Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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?"
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.
"I need swat, tactical, the guys with the flashlights on their guns, those guys with the big shield thingies"
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.
"I need swat, tactical, the guys with the flashlights on their guns, those guys with the big shield thingies"
The question is, does it look like it can be made liveable? If yes, then it's Mars.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
"I need swat, tactical, the guys with the flashlights on their guns, those guys with the big shield thingies"
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.