Remember this before and after picture in the news recently from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity?
Well, it appears there’s a conspiracy theory under every rock, more fodder for Lewandowsky and Cook I suppose.
Science doesn’t advance by lawsuits, though some people think it does.
I’ll point out the obvious: that “biological organism” hasn’t moved since.
The explanation from NASA’s mission leader Steve Squires (al la Occams’ Razor):
“We think the most likely hypothesis is that it was dislodged by the rover wheels from a location that may currently be obscured by the solar arrays,” he said via email.
Squyres described the rock as “white around the outside, in the middle there’s low spot that is dark red. It looks like a jelly donut,” and said it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen before on Mars.
And Squires has a photo to back up the claim:
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-ideas-jelly-donut-mars.html#jCp
Anyone who’s ever driven a vehicle down a gravel road knows that rocks get dislodged by the tires and may move a foot or two.
The lawsuit seemed almost too ridiculous to be real, so I checked to see if the plaintiff was real. Yep, he has his own Wiki page.
Rhawn Joseph is a neuropsychologist who worked at the Veterans’ Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California.
He is involved with the Journal of Cosmology, and he advances eccentric views on the origin of life on Earth.[1]
Joseph is the author of Astrobiology: The Origins of Life and the Death of Darwinism, published in 2001. In the book he writes that “Contrary to Darwinism … the evidence now clearly indicates, that the evolution of life had been genetically predetermined and precoded…”
…
Joseph has been described by some evolutionary biologists as a crank for embracing unorthodox mechanisms of evolution. In one instance, the blogger P.Z. Myers ridiculed a claim by Joseph that a rock found on Mars is a living organism similar to a type of fungus existing on Earth.
In the lawsuit there is this language:
“Petitioner immediately recognized that bowl-shaped structure, hereafter referred to as Sol 3540, resembling a mushroom-like fungus, a composite organism consisting of colonies of lichen and cyanobacteria, and which on Earth is known as Apothecium.”
“When examined by Petitioner the same structure in miniature was clearly visible upon magnification and appears to have just germinated from spores.”
Strangely, and for the first time ever, I find myself in agreement with P.Z. Meyers.
h/t to reader Ed Zuiderwijk
Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/202863315/NASA-Lawsuit
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I wish Curiosity had photos as good as the 2 rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. They used to have multiple high resolution photos every day, which I used to print out in full color and post on the wall of my 92 year old father who was interested in astronomy. Remember the “blueberries”?
No body seems to agree with me that the scientific principle of tiddlywinks is responsible for the dislodging of that rock. I think I heard it first from some guy at NASA.
Huh – magic mushrooms on Mars… Who da thunk it?
It’s rather obvious to me that it is a candy bar wrapper, dropped by a tech in the studio where this is being produced.
I was wrong about it being Sheila Jackson Lee, I remembered hearing about this in early 90’s and the answer lay in Red Green Season 1 Episode 2 and Hap Arnolds undersea gunpowder mine accidents.
https://www.theconservativevoices.com/media/cat/humorous/hap-arnold-explains-the-markings-on-mars-r663
Please try to get the basic things right — the man’s name is “Squyres,” not “Squires.”
Sorry lads it is an artefact of the lighting. Where was the sun shining from.? Left or right. What time of Martian day? It’s a matter of angles.
Just as the Australian view of the Prince of Wales misleads by it’s angle.. perhaps you could explain to the unenlightened U.S Citizens, who have not found out for themselves , that a Monarch in a Parliamentary Democracy has no executive function. So he can spend his life collecting fossil insects so long or such like as he long as does his job. He isn’t a President for Life
J. Philip Peterson wrote:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/
Lots of pictures, most every day. It’s good stuff.
A lot bigger rocks than what was photographed on Mars ‘mysteriously’ roll around deserts in the U.S. Southwest. Most likely wind, if not crop-circle pranksters.
I think we should name it “Marvin”.
(Just keep it away from Curiosity’s the illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator!)
@Q. Daniels
Thanks for photo source. Why not from Curiosity NASA??
Oh , I see why – never mind…
This is why we need to put people on Mars. Let’s start with the entire current US Administration and work our way down the list.
“Crispin in Waterloo says:
January 31, 2014 at 3:12 pm”
Doubling the atmosphere on Mars will do little to change anything. Earth is at 1bar, ~15PSI at sea level. Mars is ~0.6% of that.
If you are a person such as a geologist who has looked at stereo pair photographs, you might know of the method to ‘cross the eyes’ so one eye looks at each image. This caused an overlay type of image to appear in the middle. If you do this exercise on the photos above, you will see quite a number of changes. They appear as ‘floating’ parts of the composite, or blurry parts that seems to oscillate just a little.
In this case, quite a lot is due to shadow, presumably resulting from a different sun angle and azimuth.
A third image would help to clarify the interpretation of the terrain.
In the meantime, if you are not used to image interpretation, you might need to be a bit respectful and wary of making amateur interpretations. (I’m not an expert.)
wayne says:
January 31, 2014 at 11:20 am
It’s a booger from one of these….
——————
Man that was so funny – I’m still grinning.
By a strange cosmic coincidence I’m about to go and press me some doughnut shaped paper and sawdust briquettes for the stove…
I forwarded this on to an acquaintance, when I came across it in one of our national newspapers. This acquaintance states she regularly gets abducted by other life forms and taken to other planets. I asked her if she knew who or what it was. As of yet, no reply…
Shame.
Kitefreak, I just had to toss that one out there. My dear friend in advertising in Germany sends me some of the most outlandish, hilarious ads regularly… as you can tell.
The truth is out there.
I really don’t know what you’re all on about. They’re not even on Mars. There’s an extremely accurate documentary called Capricorn One which tells the full, true story about so-called “Missions to Mars”. Why, to add to the honesty of the whole thing, it called upon the unimpeachable O. J. Simpson to play a prominent role.
Get a grip, please.
It´s a landmine. Dud, obviously.
Oh well, at least things are going better for Opportunity than they did for Spirit.
http://xkcd.com/695/
(Have a hanky ready before clicking on link…)
I have the “I WANT TO BELIEVE” poster on the wall in my basement.
It’s a good thing that many people closely examine Martian photos. They do discover something interesting, once in a while. I feel some affinity toward Dr. Joseph’s desperate desire to find life on Mars, however whacky is his lawsuit. Besides, most of the jokers here on WUWT did not suggest any plausible explanation of the fact that two photos in question are, indeed, drastically different.
I know, why. Anyone who spent some time as a child in early spring, walking around rocky lake banks in Siberia, would almost instantly recognize, what it is. All it takes is some amount of moisture in the crumbly ground — and a substantial change of temperature, diurnal and/or seasonal (in this particular case, the second photo was taken in much colder conditions).
If there is some subsoil moisture or frost, pieces of rock can pop up overnight, whole patches of the ground can sink in a few days, network patterns resembling ancient Scandinavian runes can appear on the gravel. Weird things appear and strange sounds are heard on the barren rocky wastes some sunny days in early March.
“for embracing unorthodox mechanisms”
Yeah that can be dangerous I hear.
The obvious solution is to contact John Carter and Dejah Thoris and ask them to check it
Alexander Feht:
Thankyou for your interesting post at February 1, 2014 at 3:31 am in which you say
There certainly is “frost” on Mars: it is ‘dry ice’ (i.e. frozen CO2).
The ‘dry ice’ freezes on the winter polar region and sublimes in the Spring. Thus, the polar ‘dry ice’ cap switches between the two poles throughout the year.
So, freezing and sublimation of ‘dry ice’ is an (almost?) continuous process on Mars. Hence, your suggestion seems reasonable and some simple sums would check its possibility.
CO2 sublimes at temperatures above −78.5 °C and has a density of 1562 kg/m^3 at 1 atm pressure. Its volume at 1 atm and 0 °C is 1.977 kg/m3.
So, assuming CO2 is a perfect gas, it changes its volume by a factor of nearly 2 when it changes state between solid and gas.
Thankyou, you have convinced me.
Richard