Mars Photos (Will update as the newest ones come in)

[diamondstar]

Mars looks like an abandon beach. Pretty boring and disappointing looking. I want to see Saturn.

 

[LaughOutLoud]

^ WTF did you expect? A welcoming parade?

 

[cockbrain]

Which is which? I'm guessing based on size from top to bottom Earth, Venus, Jupiter

My guess is, from the bottom: Earth, Jupiter and then Venus. Earth is the brightest object in the solar system after the Sun. And Earth being the largest of the rocky planets and much closer to Mars than Jupiter, it would appear larger in Mars' sky. Just a guess though.

 

[DigitalFudge]

Wow


Truly a cousin of Earth

 

[Spiff]

I'm always amazed to be able to look at ourselves from so far away. It reveals so much that we don't realize just from our own backyards.

 

[LaughOutLoud]

LEGO® CUUSOO | Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover

 

[cgymike]

Wow


Truly a cousin of Earth

Artist rendition on that one - you can tell by the shadow fade compared to the ribs on the machine...

 

[DigitalFudge]

4 Updates from Mars | PCWorld

Curiosity Gets a 'Brain Transplant'
This weekend the Mars rover has been getting what NASA calls a “brain transplant,” a new version of flight software that’s better suited for working on the surface of Mars, such as driving and using Curiosity’s powerful robotic arm and drill. It will also give the rover better image processing ability so it can avoid obstacles while driving as well as go on longer drives.

The software upgrade began the evening of August 10 and should be complete on August 13.

It’s a pretty big deal considering the remote update is happening from 350 million miles away and if something goes wrong it could mean the last contact anyone has with Curiosity.

"It has to work," Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at JPL, told Computerworld. "You don't' want to be known as the guy doing the last activity on the rover before you lose contact."

Where the Sky Crane Descent Stage Crashed
Some of the first images Curiosity captured included a strange cloud that set the blogosphere abuzz about what it might be.

Dust cloud from the carrier's crash (Source: NASA)
"We believe we've caught what is the descent stage impact on the Martian surface," Steve Sell, NASA's deputy operations lead for Curiosity's Mars landing, told reporters Friday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)in Pasadena, California, reports Space.com.

Now, with the high-res images in hand, geologists are looking closely at the crash site that exposes underlying materials as well as an upper layer made up of rock fragments embedded within finer substances.

 

[DigitalFudge]

The Mars Curiosity rover tweets Britney

Godney, has extended her reign as Queen of Pop to Mars



Intergalactic Pop superstar. Hew the fuck else?

 

[BFizzle]

[/IMG]

 

[cgymike]

Amazing latest pictures just in.

from someone on the internet with far too much time on their hands.

The whole project could be described that way. Well they gave that dude at dreamworks a static project and..not bad.

 

[looseliam]

[full-sized] [source]

 

[jasoncrew03]

The rover being all alone on Mars makes me think of Wall-e...

And I don't want to hear shit about how many GIFs I posted, he was on that planet all alone for hundreds of years!

 

[DigitalFudge]

Curiosity discovers pyramid shaped rock on Mars

n its mad dash across the Martian plains to reach the base of Aeolis Mons, NASA's Curiosity rover is taking a breather to reach out and touch something.
The targeted rock, shaped like a pyramid and standing 25 centimetres tall, will be the first thing Curiosity makes physical contact with using any of its onboard geology tools.
The team has named the rock "Jake Matijevic" after a mission engineer who passed away on 20 August, and who was the lead engineer for all previous NASA Mars rovers.
As of 19 September, the rock sits just 2.5 metres in front of the rover, which means it'll soon be close enough to touch with the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS).


This device, seen above at centre mounted on the rover's arm, will sit against the rock face and use radioactive curium to bombard its target with energetic alpha particles and X-rays. This will induce each element in the rock to emit its own characteristic X-rays, which APXS can detect.
The team also plans to probe the rock remotely with the rover's ChemCam instrument, which will zap it with a laser and measure the spectra of the resulting vapour.
The benefit of closeness is better resolution. ChemCam can tell from a distance if the rock is mainly silicon, for instance, while APXS can determine the precise abundance of silicon down to 100 parts per million.
"We want to get compositional information on things that we can't see with our eyes," project scientist John Grotzinger said in a news conference today.
He thinks Jake Matijevic might be a piece of basalt kicked into Gale Crater by a separate meteorite impact.
"These rocks are what we saw with Viking and Pathfinder, [and] all over the place at Spirit's landing site," Grotzinger said. He added that they don't expect to find anything surprising in the first measurements of the rock. In fact, they hope not.
"We wanted a rock type that looks familiar, that looks like we've done something like this before," he says. The exercise will help them calibrate APXS by comparing its finely detailed view with the broader picture
ChemCam delivers.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/09/mars-rover-curiosity-to-make-a.html


*waits for the Ancient Aliens helping out the Egyptians with their pyramids conspiracists*

 

[JOHN B]

Tell NASA to stop!!...I have it on good word, that if you pull it out of the ground, the planet will DEFLATE! Don't do it!.. :0

 

[KangaWallaFox]

Awesome pics! Kinda looks like parts of outback Australia

 

[looseliam]

Curiosity discovers pyramid shaped rock on Mars

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/09/mars-rover-curiosity-to-make-a.html


*waits for the Ancient Aliens helping out the Egyptians with their pyramids conspiracists*

This picture makes me giggle: "ooo, look... a rock! Hey Jim, better get a picture of that."

 

[DigitalFudge]

Mars Rover Finds Ancient Streambed—Proof of Flowing Water

NASA pictures offer unprecedented on-ground evidence: telltale pebbles, gravel.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has made its first major science discovery, and it's one for the ages.



Scientists announced Thursday that water—fast-running and relatively deep—once coursed over the now bone-dry surface, a finding based on the presence of rounded pebbles and gravel near the rover's landing site in Gale Crater.

What's more, the team has concluded that the water was present for "thousands or millions of years," though the researchers said it would take far more research to get a clearer picture of the flow's longevity.

The discovery is the first proof that surface water once ran on Mars. Planetary scientists have hypothesized that the cut canyons and riverlike beds photographed by Mars satellites had been created by running water, but only now do researchers have on-the-ground confirmation—and the promise of learning much more about the nature and duration of the water flows.

"We've now identified pebbles and gravel at the landing site that clearly have been carried down by water, have been broken down and very much smoothed out," said William Dietrich, a geomorphologist working with the Curiosity imaging science team. "This is the beginning of our process of learning how much water was running and how long this area was wet."

(Related: "Mars Has Liquid Water Close to Surface, Study Hints.")

Past Potential for Life?

The evidence in the newound streambed led Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger—known as a cautious and careful scientist—to conclude that the rover had already found a site that was potentially habitable in the distant past. That doesn't mean life existed there or anywhere else on Mars, he said, but rather that some key physical conditions appear to have allowed for its possible emergence.

"Habitability requires water, a source of energy, and a source of organic carbon, and now we have a hall pass for the water observation," he said at a press conference Thursday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where the Curiosity mission control in headquartered. Chemical assessments will come later, when the two miniature labs on the rover begin doing their work, though not necessarily at the current site.

"We're still going to Mount Sharp," a three-mile-high (five-kilometer-high) mound at the center of the crater, said Grotzinger, "but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."

While Curiosity is not a life-detection mission, it is considered an astrobiological exploration—a search for the building blocks of life as we know it and habitats where it might have emerged. The rover has been on Mars now for 51 Mars days, which translate into several additional Earth days.

(Also see "Mars Has 'Oceans' of Water Inside?")

Pebbles Like M&Ms

The full river and drainage system by the Curiosity landing site is about 200 square miles (520 square kilometers), Dietrich said. It includes the elevated area beyond the crater wall, with fossil streams that feed into a deep, 11-mile (18-kilometer) channel slowly falling down that cliff, and then a 20-square-mile (50-square-kilometer) alluvial fan—the roughly triangular deposit left behind by the long-gone flow. The canyon channel was about 2,000 feet (610 meters) wide.

The most interesting gravel and pebbles—the size of M&Ms or hard candies—were found in conglomerate rocks at three sites close to the landing site. Curiosity's thrusters had dug out the first, Goulburn, at landing. The two others, called Link and Hottah, showed the same pavement-like formations.

According to geologist Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute, the team did not expect to see the remains of the alluvial fan—now known as Peace Vallis—as far down as the landing site. That they were found, she said, appears to expand the size of the area once touched by water.

"The shapes tell you [the rocks] were transported, and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind," Williams said. "They were transported by water flow."

(Related: "Rover Finds 'Bulletproof' Evidence of Water on Early Mars.")

A Rich Crater Site

Grotzinger said the team had decided to release the dramatic new information so early because the data were so strong and because they showed the essential connection between satellite imaging (which had initially identified the canyon and fan) and on-the-ground geology.

That geology was conducted entirely by analyzing photos taken by Curiosity's large suite of cameras.

The rover will soon be headed to an area named Glenelg, which many team members believe is more clearly in the alluvial fan. The two chemistry labs are expected to be used for the first time at the Glenelg site—where three rock formations join—and could shed more light on the nature of the water that once flowed there.

Author of the National Geographic e-book Mars Landing 2012, Marc Kaufman has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including the past 12 as a science and space writer, foreign correspondent, and editor for the Washington Post. He is also author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, published in 2011, and has spoken extensively to crowds across the United States and abroad about astrobiology. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lynn Litterine.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...-riverbed-science-curiosity-rover-nasa-water/



Holy fucking shit, just using my naked eye I can tell that looks EXACTLY like the ground/rocks near water beds at parks but it especially looks like those rocky areas where those sea creatures get caught near beaches.


It's called something, like mini ponds. Tide pool?

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

is hope discova it round ans folk go COOR world nogs awsums
* ooh look dat moon round too *
% yea it official %
$ quick da mars rocks invadin $
world public SCREAAAAAAM ans world nogs get lot a money ta play BANG BANG YOU BAD MARS ROCKS

anyway

it nice mars giv "folk" sumthang ta do

thankyou

 

[ChickenGuy]

What's more, the team has concluded that the water was present for "thousands or millions of years"

If that's true, then it's the strongest sign yet that there MUST have been life on Mars at some stage in the past.

Over that colossal period of time, the same processes would have occurred that happened in the oceans of early Earth - the development of single-celled organisms based around various chemical reactions and deposits related to minerals, crystals, sediments, gases, subterranean vents, etc. However, I suspect that this 'life' may never have gone beyond the stage of, say, algae or microbes or bacteria, before the water dried up and disappeared forever.

This new Curiosity rover should really be looking for fossils in the rocks, and small ones at that. It needs to start drilling and breaking apart as many as it can to look for these microscopic signs inside the rock. If sedimentary layers can be identified then perhaps some basic pattern might be spotted to identify the best sources of fossil-bearing rock layers.

I think that's the most we can hope for, as Mars has now sadly been a dead world for many millions of years.