Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’

Comment: The shock and surprise at a little rock causing a ruckus should pale into insignificance when you compare it to the massive symmetrical anomaly - and a host of others both on the Moon, Mars and our very own planet Earth over the decades - which have baffled and disturbed scientists. Though some are clearly faked from people with too much time on their hands, many others are very genuine indeed. They remain very outside the mainstream media purview.

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The Independent 

A mysterious rock which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is "like nothing we've ever seen before", according to Mars exploration scientists at Nasa. 

Experts said they were "completely confused" by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity's various measuring instruments.

Astronomers noticed the new rock had "appeared" without any explanation on an outcrop which had been empty just days earlier. The rover has been stuck photographing the same region of Mars for more than a month due to bad weather, with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California monitoring the images it sends.

Nasa issued a Mars status report entitled "encountering a surprise", and lead Mars Exploration rover scientist Steve Squyres told a JPL event it seems the planet literally "keeps throwing new things at us".

He said the images, from 12 Martian days apart, were from no more than a couple of weeks ago. "We saw this rock just sitting here. It looks white around the edge in the middle and there’s a low spot in the centre that's dark red - it looks like a jelly doughnut.

"And it appeared, just plain appeared at that spot - and we haven't ever driven over that spot."

 

 Images captured by Opportunity show the mysterious rock 'appeared' on an outcrop that had been empty just 12 Martian days ('Sols') earlier Squyres said his team had two theories on how the rock got there - that there's "a smoking hole in the ground somewhere nearby" and it was caused by a meteor, or that it was "somehow flicked out of the ground by a wheel” as the rover went by.

"We had driven a metre or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation," Squyres said.

Yet the story got even stranger when Opportunity investigated further. Squyres explained: "We are as we speak situated with the rover's instruments deployed making measurements of this rock.

"We've taken pictures of both the doughnut and jelly parts, and the got the first data on the composition of the jelly yesterday.

"It's like nothing we've ever seen before," he said. "It's very high in sulphur, it's very high in magnesium, it's got twice as much manganese as we've ever seen in anything on Mars.

"I don't know what any of this means. We're completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means).

"That's the beauty of this mission... what I've realised is that we will never be finished. There will always be something tantalising, something wonderful just beyond our reach that we didn't quite get to - and that's the nature of exploration."

Squyres was speaking at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit on the surface of Mars.

While Spirit lost contact with Earth and was later declared "dead" in 2010, Opportunity has now roamed the planet far in excess of what was originally planned as a three-month mission. Nasa said that with its maximum speed of just 0.05mph, as of "Sol 3547" (15 January 2014) Opportunity had covered just over 24 miles (38km). 

 

Catastrophe looms as toxic 13-tonne Mars probe falls to Earth

Independent

The heaviest interplanetary spacecraft ever launched is about to become one of the most dangerous man-made objects to fall from space when it crashes to the ground early in the new year.

The Russian Phobos-Ground probe was destined to land on a moon of Mars but problems soon after launch in November meant that it was stuck in an unstable, low-Earth orbit.

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said yesterday that the lorry-sized probe weighing 13.2 tonnes and laden with 11 tonnes of toxic rocket fuel and 10kg of radioactive cobalt-57 will fall to Earth between 6 and 19 January.

The agency told the Associated Press that it will not be possible to calculate the precise crash site until a few days before the £120m probe re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.

However, it insisted that much of the dangerous material will be incinerated during re-entry and any remaining fragments will pose little danger to people on the ground.

Phobos-Ground, which was designed to bring back rock samples from Phobos, one of two Martian moons, was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

It separated from its booster rocket 11 minutes after launch but its engines subsequently failed to fire it out of Earth's orbit.

Roscosmos said that between 20 and 30 fragments of the probe are expected to fall to Earth somewhere between 51.4 degrees north of the Equator and 51.4 degrees south, which covers much of the most densely populated areas on Earth.

Some experts said soon after the probe failed to leave the Earth's orbit that the on-board fuel of nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine could freeze solid before re-entry, which may make it less liable to burning up during re-entry.

NASA Spacecraft Data Suggest Water Flowing on Mars

NASA

PASADENA, Calif. -- Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars. 

"NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration." 

Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere. 

"The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science. 

Some aspects of the observations still puzzle researchers, but flows of liquid brine fit the features' characteristics better than alternate hypotheses. Saltiness lowers the freezing temperature of water. Sites with active flows get warm enough, even in the shallow subsurface, to sustain liquid water that is about as salty as Earth's oceans, while pure water would freeze at the observed temperatures. 

"These dark lineations are different from other types of features on Martian slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Repeated observations show they extend ever farther downhill with time during the warm season."[...]