Curiosity images strange metallic-looking object on Mars

http://www.universetoday.com/99750/another-weird-shiny-thing-on-mars-2/

by anigbrowl • 13 years ago

203 147 13 years ago

bpc9• 13 years ago

So that's where R2D2 ended up.

It looks almost like molten metal poured into a sand cavity, and then with the sand blown away. I guess you wouldn't get oxidation or similar activity on Mars (?), so it remains nice and shiny. I wonder how far the shape goes down, and what could have caused it?

jholman• 13 years ago

> I guess you wouldn't get oxidation or similar activity on Mars

Mars is principally deeply covered in iron III oxide. That's why it's red.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

I'm hoping that we can just drive the rover over to take a closer look before very long. I can't guess whether this is the result of past erosion or the result of a past meteorite impact, or even some offthrow of the Curiosity landing that just appears to be embedded in the rock but really isn't. In any case, this seems like it will be educational.

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

Usually I prefer not to speculate on this sort of thing, because if we just wait we'll have a ton more information soon. However, I wonder if it could be a fulgerite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite

panacea• 13 years ago

Interesting theory. I had to check, and yes, Mars does have dry lightning (in dust storms).

If not that, I wonder if it's something produced volcanically like onyx.

stock_toaster• 13 years ago

I was thinking an ore vein that was harder than the material around it, and said outer material had been weathered away faster to expose it.

Either that or a door handle! :P

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

Mars likely had more lightning when it was wetter, as well. Also, some Mars rocks and regolith have extremely high concentrations of Iron, so lightning induced in situ sintering of a little hunk of fulguritic Iron isn't out of the question.

The cool thing is that Curiosity is so crammed full of equipment for studying mineralogy and chemical composition that we'll likely be able to solve the riddle pretty quick.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I find these things fun, of course some folks want to find alien technology, but I remind people that we've lost roughly 2/3rds of all the probes and ships that we've sent to Mars [1]. Since there isn't a lot of stuff covering them up, eventually we may find a bit of antenna from the Mars Observer sticking up where the spacecraft attempted to fly through the planet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Past_missio...

writtles• 13 years ago

Seriously? You're implying that this is an antenna from an Earth spacecraft?

Bjartr• 13 years ago

Well, it's a more reasonable explanation than aliens at least.

mistercow6• 13 years ago

That seems extremely unlikely. If a few dozen planes crashed on Earth (on land), how likely do you reckon you'd be to ever run across significant debris from any of them just by randomly driving around?

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

Here is a map of mars landings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_landing#Image_map_of_Mars_...

They are separated by hundreds/thousands of miles.

abcd_f• 13 years ago

If Earth were devoid of vegetation and instead uniformly rocky, running into a sliver of a downed plane might've been far more probable. Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that doesn't look like a rock.

snowwrestler4• 13 years ago

It's probably still a lot more likely than stumbling across a crashed alien spacecraft.

mixedbit• 13 years ago

More likely this may be human created with Photoshop.

lilsunnybee• 13 years ago

That should be easy for nasa to invalidate this finding then.

ComputerGuru2• 13 years ago

Those images are straight from NASA's website. Unless you're suggesting there's a photoshop troll on NASA's Curiosity team?

Here's the link to the full-res photo from NASA: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0173MR092... and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00173/mcam/0173...

crusso11• 13 years ago

Why those things?

My first thought is that it's a vein of metal that is exposed.

svachalek2• 13 years ago

Agreed. Curiosity is exploring an area known (or at least apparently) to have had quite a bit of water activity in the past. It seems quite likely that a river or glacier would have peeled off all the softer stone around the metal and left something like this behind.

hdivider3• 13 years ago

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I'd say the most important number to think about when looking at rover images is the scale.

"the little protuberance is probably about 0.5 cm tall, or even smaller."

Five mm is obviously tiny. Keep this in mind before making up hypotheses as to what the thing is. =) We have to wait until better data is available.

What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology. Of course, such hypotheses have to work extremely hard before they should be accepted. Our standards of evidence for stuff like this must always remain as high as possible, given the emotions and mass misunderstandings involved. But the very fact that we've come this far and still cannot rule out the existence of life on Mars is quite remarkable.

GuiA• 13 years ago

One of my dearest wishes is that humanity will find solid evidence for other lifeforms in the universe (whether it is through remains or actual contact).

This moment, if/when it happens, will be so mindblowing on so many levels and affect us deeply as a society/species/etc. that I just WANT to see it.

bjoe_lewis• 13 years ago

So you just want to see all religions on earth, dead.

kevinbluer• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more...this would be amazing.

stevewilhelm• 13 years ago

I suspect finding evidence of other lifeforms in the universe, even highly intelligent lifeforms, would briefly be novel, but would have very little long-term effect on most people's daily lives.

mark_integerdsv4• 13 years ago

I share this with you... Kind of.

Personally, I'd not be that mind-blown, more like vindicated for years of conjecture and lively debate.

baddox• 13 years ago

How is it any way remarkable that we haven't yet ruled out the possibility of life on Mars, given what you correctly said about the high standard of proof?

mistercow6• 13 years ago

> What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology.

You can never completely rule out that possibility, regardless of how much evidence you collect, but it's a matter of semantics at that point. Immediately and without collecting anymore data, we can dismiss the hypothesis that this is non-human technology as unworthy of our attention. It's not merely that the hypothesis has an immense burden of evidence to heft, but that it's a waste of time to even consider it.

Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition.

hdivider3• 13 years ago

"Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition."

I agree, and I hope I didn't give the impression that this is what we should be doing. This thing is still just an observation - it's not evidence of anything yet. My point was this: we know of things that would effectively rule out the 'life as we know it on Mars' hypothesis (e.g. absolutely no evidence of any water, liquid or otherwise), but we're not seeing them.

It's true that we keep trying to dream up new ways of allowing the possibility of life on Mars to counter existing hurdles (e.g. hypothetical microbial life buried underground to shield from radiation), but if there were some solid evidence that would allow us to say 'yeah, there was almost certainly never any life on Mars, and neither is there any life on it today,' we would accept that filter.

We could then put Mars in the same category as the Moon when it comes to the life hypothesis. This is not the case - so I'd say a search for evidence of life on Mars (past or even present) is justified.

mistercow6• 13 years ago

There's a [dead] reply taking me to task on my use of the word "superstition" because apparently Wikipedia thinks that superstitions have to be beliefs in the supernatural. Like all semantic arguments, this is boring and dumb, but in point of fact, the first definition in every dictionary I can find supports my usage.

Here's Random House:

a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

bigiain• 13 years ago

Well, at 5mm it's clearly an antenna in the 112GHz band, from which we can conclude that 1) there'll be other alien antennas in line-of-site of this one, and 2) Martians clearly run very high bandwidth wifi networks.

brianchu• 13 years ago

Not to nitpick, but the fact that we can't rule out that possibility is nothing special.

You cannot rule out the possibility that when you drop a ball it won't fall to the ground. Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes. Only inductive reasoning operates that way.

hdivider3• 13 years ago

"Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes."

Precisely, and so 'rule out' shouldn't be taken to imply an absolute ruling out of things. =)

Perhaps I should've said effectively ruled out. Life on the Moon has been 'effectively' ruled out (lack of liquid water, no atmosphere, full exposure to radiation and impactors, etc.) - but many years ago it wasn't extremely unreasonable to suppose that life might exist there. Now we know better - we'd have to reach for very convoluted scenarios to argue for the existence of life on the Moon. The same is not true for Mars (although it's not a picnic, obviously), which I would say is remarkable - there aren't many celestial bodies that have passed that test.

ComputerGuru2• 13 years ago

Does anyone know NASA's policy on further observation of crowd-sourced findings?

BTW, you absolutely have to love the tack NASA has taken with making images virtually immediately available for the public to consume and research. Imagine if the Curiosity photo archives were only made available months after the fact - it'd be too late to do anything based off of community findings!

Way to go team!

motters• 13 years ago

Heh. I don't really consume images. I just view them.

vectorpush• 13 years ago

The human brain is a remarkable pattern recognition machine with a keen penchant for extracting meaning from noise.

This, of course, will turn out to be nothing more than an unremarkable optical illusion; an urban legend is born.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

That doesn't seem likely, since there's images from a second camera of a stereo pair. The suggestion that it's a fulgerite or offthrow of the landing seem the likliest explanations to me.

confluence• 13 years ago

This is called Pareidolia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).

> Pareidolia ... is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

When you're driving in a snow storm (sometimes unavoidable) one of the hardest things is to maintain a feeling of heading and not to respond to every impulse when your brain thinks it has made meaning out of the falling snow just ahead of the car. And even harder to realize when it actually has picked up something of significance.

I got caught in snow storms several times and what surprised me was how much physical effort it takes to do this for any length of time.

interconnector• 13 years ago

If the object really is 0.5 cm tall, it could be similar to this calcium vein in a rock which is comparable in size: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=5017

cincinnatus• 13 years ago

Yep, it has a distinctly 'mineral vein' appearance to it.

edwinkite2• 13 years ago

The landing created an extensive debris field [1]. For example, the descent stage energetically disassembled on impact with 100+ kg of unused propellant still on board, as planned [2]. Bits of plastic and metal are strewn across a 30km-long strip. Curiosity has imaged several of these pieces already [3]. On the other hand, some 'bright material' that was thought to be spacecraft fragments turned out to be soil material. These fragments are important: they're a science hazard. A big goal for the mission is to find Martian organic matter, so the project is keen to avoid accidentally ingesting Earth plastic into the exquisitely precise onboard laboratory, SAM [4].

[1] http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA15696.jpg (debris from the last few minutes of flight),

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/2800.pdf (debris from interplanetary cruise and atmospheric entry).

[2] http://www.spaceflight101.com/msl-descent-stage-impact-analy... (crash movie).

[3] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16230.ht...

[4] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11214-012-9879-z (free full text)

alxndr• 13 years ago

[3] is a 404 page.

Love the phrase "energetically disassembled".

edwinkite2• 13 years ago

[3] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16230.ht...

mrslx• 13 years ago

Its a UFO from Venus

twelvechairs• 13 years ago

Surely there is a very reasonable possibility of a crashed asteroid/comet... at least much more so than some of the other wild speculation (non-human intelligent life, etc.)

jasongaya• 13 years ago

Good info... i want to say thanks for share with us...

lists• 13 years ago

I'll go straight out and say it: if there is intelligence elsewhere in the universe, we have no guarantees to say that that form of cognition would in anyway resemble our own since the only models we have presume terran conditions.

TelmoMenezes2• 13 years ago

Mathematics appears to be universal.

TelmoMenezes2• 13 years ago

"Images"? Really? What is happening to language? It took a photo! Imagine someone saying: "I went to Paris and imaged the Eiffel Tower".

DanBC• 13 years ago

Photographs are formed by light through a lens falling onto film (or a sensor).

NASA has images like that. They also have images formed after extensive post-processing, or merges of several images, or from frequencies other than light, or computer rendered from map data, or etc etc.

dwb• 13 years ago

I can easily imagine someone saying that. What is happening to language? Only the same thing that has happened to it for thousands of years. Language changes and evolves – inevitably, constantly, and in my opinion, beautifully.

mieubrisse• 13 years ago

Just as you used "photo" synonymously with "photograph", "image" is coming - as another commmenter pointed out - to become synonymous with a photo because languages evolve. I don't understand the irritation.

devopstom• 13 years ago

"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one", he said.

skc• 13 years ago

Kind of looks like a drill bit to me

sev• 13 years ago

Perspective switch: "It's an alien weird shiny object much larger than us, and it's mobile! It has arms and lets Hmm...we won't shoot it down, let's wait and see what it does next. I think it's looking at us directly now! On the side it reads, 'C U R I O S I T Y'"

waterlesscloud2• 13 years ago

As a reminder, if a human explorer had seen this, we'd already know much, much more about it. They'd naturally take a few steps over for a closer look as soon as they saw it.

Robots are a poor substitute for humans when it comes to planetary exploration.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Well, exactly because humans are not replaceable.

Nobody cares that Curiosity is not going back to earth. For an astronaut, that's different

Not to mention all the instruments in Curiosity (which not necessarily a manned mission to Mars with the intention of coming back would have)

crusso11• 13 years ago

Well, exactly because humans are not replaceable.

I think we could all agree to send Paris Hilton to Mars.

robertskmiles• 13 years ago

A human explorer probably wouldn't have seen it though; it's really tiny. The reason this was seen at all is that the high resolution images are being looked over by a large number of people on Earth. NASA themselves didn't even spot it.

(High resolution imagery + many many human eyes) > Human eyes

Never mind that Curiosity has now been operating for 6 months without food, water, or sleep, and is expected to continue doing so for years.

waterlesscloud2• 13 years ago

It's shiny, the odds are very high that a human would indeed have seen it. For one thing, a human's eyes are constantly processing the world as they move through it. Curiosity's eyes are not.

What Curiosity has done in 6 months could have been done in a couple of weeks by a human, sleep time included. Robots are vastly inferior to humans for this work, and will remain so for some time to come.

avodonosov• 13 years ago

Resembles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster

Curiosity images strange metallic-looking object on Mars

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