
Curiosity images strange metallic-looking object on Mars - anigbrowl
http://www.universetoday.com/99750/another-weird-shiny-thing-on-mars-2/
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edwinkite
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...](http://www.spaceflight101.com/msl-descent-stage-impact-
analysis.html) (crash movie).

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

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

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alxndr
[3] is a 404 page.

Love the phrase "energetically disassembled".

~~~
edwinkite
[3]
[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16230.ht...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16230.html)

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

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hdivider
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.

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

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krapp
Religion will survive. It survived learning the sun didn't revolve around the
Earth. It survived learning disease wasn't caused by demons and that Zeus
wasn't hurling lightning from Olympus. It survived evolution and the Big Bang.
People will say the mysteries of God* were just greater than they realized,
and their mythologies will start to seem a bit more like Star Wars.

* or what have you

~~~
crusso
You're correct. Religious belief is an evolved memetic/genetic survival
mechanism.

Those parts of the human brain were never about logic and accurate observation
of the material world - so they are safe from new facts and logic for now.

Probably at some point (assuming we survie), our own genetic/cybernetic
modifications will so increase our intelligence, that religion will fall away
completely... but that's beyond the Singularity.

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krapp
Well, assuming the Singularity itself is not a doctrine of religious faith,
sometimes it sounds like one.

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ChuckMcM
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Past_missions)

~~~
mistercow
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?

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abcd_f
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.

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ramblerman
> Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that
> doesn't look like a rock.

I don't think anybody is confusing the likelihood of finding a piece of a
plane due to not looking at the picture well enough. It's a question of if
there would be anything in that picture to begin with.

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InclinedPlane
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
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.

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stock_toaster
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

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

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vectorpush
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.

~~~
confluence
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._

~~~
jacquesm
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.

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bpc9
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
> _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.

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anigbrowl
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.

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

~~~
DanBC
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.

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

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twelvechairs
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.)

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waterlesscloud
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.

~~~
robertskmiles
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
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.

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avodonosov
Resembles <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster>

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skc
Kind of looks like a drill bit to me

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sev
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'"

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lists
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.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
Mathematics appears to be universal.

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

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mrslx
Its a UFO from Venus

