Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover

It has the potential to be huge. You never know what's just under the surface until you look. The NatGeo special, "Ten Years On Mars"[1] made a point to include how when a bad tire on Spirit dug a trench in the soft crust, an unexpected surprise revealed itself.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/ten-y...

Edit: Add pertinent link:

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/accidental_tourist_bad_wheel...

scrumper2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links. Maybe quite a lucky skid then.

ck2• 13 years ago

You'd think they would start to put a plow or til on these rovers.

clubhi• 13 years ago

Or a digging laser. Dig out a small area with a laser and wait for the other side to cave in. We have digging lasers, right???

forktheif• 13 years ago

Pretty big.

I've often wondered why they don't send a dragline digger to Mars, so they can dig a decent trench. When Spirit's wheel broke and they started dragging it along, digging a little trench, they made a nice discovery and that was with something not designed to dig at all.

If they could get a few feet down, who knows what they could find?!

bad_alloc• 13 years ago

They sent Phoenix, which had a scoop and dug down a few centimeters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_probe

The_Double• 13 years ago

It may have been big, but curiosity has a scoop to scoop up dirt, a drill, and a laser that can vaporize rock to look inside of them. It's not like the rovers can only look at the surface.

hahainternet• 13 years ago

The Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far.

It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a drill without contaminating the environment and with such a wide temperature variation?

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

The original Viking landers had scoops capable of penetrating a few cm down:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/vl1_11d12...

abruzzi• 13 years ago

I'm probably crazy, but I've been staring at the two images for five minutes and can't see anything in one that isn't in the other, unless it is obscured by the annoying "view related gallery"button.

EDIT: Ok, half the time I load the page, the page works and I see the rock, but the other half of the time, the image is shifted down, the top half of the display box is black, and the "rock" is off screen...

Zhenya• 13 years ago

Same thing happened to me. I stared and then reloaded page. Something is wonky with their gallery.

sisk• 13 years ago

You're not crazy.

Psst. Discovery folks. You've got yourself a race condition. You're calculating a `margin-top` to center an image vertically irrespective of whether that image has loaded. You either need to explicitly set the width and height as attributes on the image (good for preventing reflow anyway) or hold off on calculating your dimensions until after the image has loaded. You could even just wait for window load (instead of DOMContentLoaded).

EDIT: Here's an untested, hacky fix. Not an ideal solution but concise and without having to change anything. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c40e8baf679aad65cb2c

runn1ng2• 13 years ago

CSS has race conditions?

computerbob• 13 years ago

Link to the image directly. I also had problems with the gallery.

http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/dnews-files-2014-01-myste...

bfe• 13 years ago

You're not crazy, they've discovered a Schrödinger's rock. With a ridiculously high Planck's constant, and conscious observation working backward in time through an imager and interplanetary transmitter to collapse the wave function. So, pretty big news.

[Edited to add umlaut.]

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

Wouldn't Schrödinger's rock with a high Planck's constant be a stick?

niix• 13 years ago

I think it's Martians trolling us.

smoyer• 13 years ago

When I look at both pictures, it seems as though the shape of the rock was there before it appeared ... almost as though it oozed up out of the surface.

(Note: I know this isn't at all likely or even possible and just think it's an interesting trick of the eye)

jumbled• 13 years ago

I thought a similar thing, imagining mud getting squeezed up between two rocks.

bloddyfool• 13 years ago

It just fell from the top of the mountain or whatever that rock is on? There seems to be a slope...

ryanmcbride• 13 years ago

The locals are upset at our occupation and are throwing rocks at us. Pretty obvious really.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

Just wait 'til we start rolling our buses through there.

(Sorry, I don't usually make such Reddit-esque comments on here, but I couldn't resist)

codingtheone• 13 years ago

I think that's the unsaid part of the story, everyone secretly believes that some intelligent being placed that rock as a peace token (otherwise this kind of news won't make headlines)

aeon10• 13 years ago

Couldnt it have been wind? or is the whether on mars really calm.

ksmiley• 13 years ago

Mars does have wind. In fact, dust storms have been known to last for weeks and encompass nearly the entire planet.

However, I don't think the wind is a likely culprit. If the wind was strong enough to knock over a rock, it would also be strong enough to blow a lot of dust around. That would be very noticeable to anyone watching the rover's feed, and would surely have been mentioned in the article.

cjensen• 13 years ago

The atmosphere is very thin, so even a fast wind doesn't push much.

m3mnoch• 13 years ago

probably not since all the other rocks (many an order of magnitude smaller) are still in their same places.

joshdick• 13 years ago

Could the rock have been blown there by the wind?

cl8ton• 13 years ago

They mentioned meteorite impact ejecta as a possibility. Doesn't the rover have seismic sensors they could reference?

3rd3• 13 years ago

Here are the raw images of sol 3540: http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity_p3540_text... Sol 3528:

etanazir• 13 years ago

NASA is just scratching the surface.

mrfusion• 13 years ago

Would it be crazy to suggest it might not be a rock? They're always looking for life on Mars, could this be some kind of animal?

joeframbach• 13 years ago

I find it interesting that there is no better word to describe "tiddlywinking", and that this obscure game has become part of our vocabulary for this very rare circumstance.

mogrim• 13 years ago

Hardly an obscure game, or an obscure word. At least not in the UK.

lovemenot3• 13 years ago

Perhaps the reigning champion could come forward to consult on surface hardness, body shape, concentrated mass, trajectory and wrist-action. Personally I cannot see that rock being tiddlywinked at all. Though I love the theory for coining a new verb.

return0• 13 years ago

Some angry locals missed the target

mr-roboto• 13 years ago

If you had watched Apollo 18 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772240/) you would know what that rock is.

mattezell• 13 years ago

"“So my best guess for this rock … is that it’s something that was nearby,” said Squyres. “I must stress that I’m guessing now, but I think it happened when the rover did a turn in place a meter or two from where this rock now lies.”

Opportunity’s front right steering actuator has stopped working, so Squyres identified that as the possible culprit behind the whole mystery."

Reading a lot of speculation, but this seems pretty plausible - without the need for anything crazy like aliens, subterranean oozing or a rock falling from space and just so happening to land in front of the rover... But, Hey! Perhaps it is martian-cow dung afterall!

BigTuna• 13 years ago

It's worth noting for the record that the photos were not taken from the same vantage point. The parallax seems to indicate that the camera position was higher in elevation in the second photo. Just something to keep in mind when examining the photos closely for very small differences.

kowdermeister• 13 years ago

This is a warning. The first.

jerf2• 13 years ago

I have to admit I laughed at this:

"Only two options have so far been identified as the rock’s source: 1) The rover either “flipped” the object as it maneuvered or, 2) it landed there, right in front of the rover, after a nearby meteorite impact event."

So, you know, our leading theories are that either the rover did it somehow, or, approximately 8-10 orders of magnitude less likely, we just witnessed a meteor strike. Really, nothing in between those two?

krapp3• 13 years ago

What else could it be?

BrandonMarc• 13 years ago

Earthquake. Oops, crap, no, um ... Mars-quake.

Tiktaalik• 13 years ago

Aliens trolling us

jerf2• 13 years ago

"Rover did it somehow", even at a remove or two, isn't exactly an unsatisfactory explanation....

ProAm• 13 years ago

Photoshop

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Calvin and Hobbes?

Honestly its not like we have many real options. The rover flipped it or it fell there sound good too me. The area is pretty open there so it didn't crack off another rock, let alone the shape precludes that.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I'm still pulling for either Marvin the Martian, or some kind of Martian Troll throwing stones from across the plain.

craigching• 13 years ago

You're close to what I was imagining. I was thinking it's martians having a good time at our expense! "Watch the silly earthlings study this rock I'll put in their picture, lol!"

sixothree• 13 years ago

Is it possible the rover carried this rock inadvertently and deposited it accidentally.

nivla• 13 years ago

Really, nothing in between those two?

Well the first thing that came to my mind when reading the title was the phenomena of moving rocks in Nevada [1]. It could be similar but unlike them this doesn't seem to leave any trails.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stone

Steko• 13 years ago

Let's go with false flag operation designed to get Mars rover in the news this week. Finally a real scandal for Obama.

noselasd• 13 years ago

That's how scientists work, they figure out the possibilities, and work with the evidence from there. It's not done by guessing what's more probable, and you don't eliminate a possibility immediately just because it's less likely.

emmelaich• 13 years ago

The objection is to the thought that you can eliminate the impossible. Because to do that you'd need a lot more data and a much better imagination.

semerda3• 13 years ago

Pic 1 shows an indentation where the jelly sits in Pic 2. What if the light is hitting the rock on a different angle creating this effect of a raised surface.. maybe?

Udo• 13 years ago

The likelihood of the rover being responsible is really something only the guys actually controlling it could estimate.

I wouldn't discard weather as the cause, and I'd consider weather long before meteorites. While the martian atmosphere is very thin, it packs a good punch speed-wise. Maybe in edge cases that could be enough to pick up small rocks and have them rain down somewhere else (similar phenomena exist on Earth).

Another hypothesis would be that the rock was ejected by a gas vent. I have no idea about the temperature conditions at the rover site, but a gaseous plume could carry solid material with it if the release was forceful enough - showering the surrounding area with rocky material.

But all things being equal, I'd bet on the rover.

semerda3• 13 years ago

Didn't this jelly doughnut appear a few days later? I thought that mars has an active environment i.e. dust storms and an atmosphere. So stuff is bound to move?

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Do you see rocks the size of a donut blowing around on Earth as well? No. Sure we have more gravity, but also a thicker atmosphere. I don't think they blow around on Mars either.

semerda3• 13 years ago

How about the rocks that move in the death valley the size of 10 x donuts. Also vertical swirling column of air could move it. And we know those exist on Mars since those were responsible for cleaning Spirit's solar panels (rover).

bitwize• 13 years ago

A wild ROCK appears!

OPPORTUNITY used TAKE SAMPLE.

It's super effective!

nkvl• 13 years ago

Clearer images:

no rock http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/3528/1P441385599EF...

rock http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/3540/1P442453196EF...

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

Looking at the images, there appears to be a disturbed region above and to the left of the mystery rock, suggesting it (or something) might have impacted the ground there.

The question I've got is whether there's any sort of local slope down which the rock could have fallen on its own. That's hardly clear from the photos.

Gonzih• 13 years ago

Article is very close to some tabloid IMHO. Not much actual theories, but a lot of bold statements like "Alien Robots That Left Their Mark on Mars" without much explanation.

Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover

Related Stories