As you can tell I've run out of jokes to do with the word 'rover'. My favourite was in reference to Jimi Hendrix, which dates me more than anything else.
In the mean time, it seems Spirit has landed on top of an ancient lava flow that has obliterated possible signs of previous land formations. Short of an archaeological trip up there ourselves, we won't find much to do with water, according to this report.
For those of you who want a more interesting overview on Mars Exploration as it stands, there is this very nice article over at Wired Magazine. What's interesting about this article is that it seems unless we gte up close and personal with the images we're seeing we'll never really know what we're looking at through the scanners.Spirit landed in the 95-mile- wide Gusev crater on Jan. 3 and rolled though pockmarks and around boulders, collecting dust, drilling into rock and taking spectrometer measurements. "Gusev crater is a place that we believe surely must have had liquid water on it at some point," said principal science investigator Steven Squyres.
"When you see a hole in the ground with a major riverbed flowing into it, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out there was water in it at some time."
To their great disappointment, Spirit has found little evidence of that water, instead finding that a thick layer of basalt and other volcanic rock flowed over much of the crater, burying the most juicy evidence. It is not clear where the lava would have flowed from.
"We landed with hopes that we might be able to identify water-laying sediments. Instead the rocks we found were all layers of basalt," said Squyres. "There are little craters all over the place. Lavas have covered this region of Gusev crater and then they have been all busted up by impacts."
Van Flandern's main beef is with overzealous photo interpreters. "Amateur astronomers are amateurs at image processing as well," he says. Many of these photos suffer from over-magnification, which gives pixels a rectilinear - and hence artificial - appearance. Other folks go so far as to digitally fold and mirror the NASA images, creating Rorschach blots that inevitably invite pareidolia. "That really drives us professionals up the wall," complains Van Flandern. "Most of our submissions are just 'faces' in clouds." Any time you interpret curious shapes, whether of sedimentary rock or ancient hominid bones, you confront the same faces-in-clouds problem: Is it there or am I imagining it?
The difference with Martian anomalies is that hundreds of millions of people can directly point their Web browsers at the same cloud. "Because hard visual evidence is available and readily verifiable in NASA and JPL's own official science data, everyone can then make up their own mind as to its merit," writes Joseph Skipper on MarsAnomalyResearch.com, perhaps the best one-stop shop for Martian enigmas. "No one's interpretation of the visual evidence should be considered established fact."
- Art Neuro
1 comment:
"it seems unless we gte up close and personal with the images we're seeing we'll never really know what we're looking at through the scanners"
Exactly. Put this X-reference with our previous discussion about sending robots. Our probes are good. No doubt about it... but we still need geologists (areologists?) to get down in the dirt & do it. One good field scientist + one fairly basic lab would yeild more than 10 robots. Especially if our field scientist has a jeep.
db
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