Mars Exploration Rovers Update - February 13, 2004

The fact remains that both the Spirit and Opportunity rover sites are very old, and have changed very little.

You post a driveling site like this, and call me a "crackpot"? HA!

I especially like this one:

"Compost and Hydroponics are the key to Life. Face it, after we kill off all the trees, plants and animals here on the Planet Earth, there is little else."

Except that you seem to forget that at least 90% of all life on the planet lives in the oceans, not on land. I'd like to see you try to feed compost to an anemone or a sponge. We don't even have names or proper descriptions for half of the species on the planet. Please note that life existed on this planet for two billion years in the sea, at a time when compost as we know it didn't even exist.

"Thomas Lee Elifritz" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@everywhere.net...

George, this guy uses to break any record on news-abuse - don't listen

Carsten

" George" wrote

The beam width is very narrow, so it doesn't cover a large area. To say that large areas are hematite poor is inconsistent with their other hematite map. Also note that the strip such as it is registers positive right about where it goes under Stone Mountain.

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:2iTagxgH__IJ:

That formatting is hard to follow. This is what I have re Apollo 14 spherules:

"These 155 lunar spherules ranged in size from less than 100 microns to more than 250 microns, and came from lunar soil picked up in 1971 by the Apollo

14 mission crew near Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains), the dark crater that dominates the moon's face. Statistical and chemical analyses showed that the spherules studied came from approximately 146 different craters."

The Meridiani spherules are on the order of 3 mm (3000 microns). That is, over ten times bigger than the Apollo 14 sample.

See above.

Joe

Yes. But only you are in trouble. Conclusions are called falsifiable hypotheses, crackpot. You test them, with experiments, and further evidence, to produce more conclusion and hypotheses. It's called the scientific method. However, being the crackpot that you are, you ridicule, then dismiss, and and remain skeptical, without offering any evidence, except that you still remain a crackpot.

Thomas Lee Elifritz

go look at the mushrooms

I've already come to the conclusion that he is an elfbitch. He's the only dork I know who is trying to save the planet while living on another one.

You are correct, it doesn't. However, because it made an arch across the area in question, I think it is safe to say that the analysis it made is representative of the area as a whole.

No, what it registers is slightly (green) more than none (blue), and that is below the rock, not on the rock.

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:2iTagxgH__IJ:

Ok, you convinced me on the size issue.. I went back and re-read the article, and was mistaken about what they said the size was. According to the article, and another one

they ranged between 40-500 µm, with 200 µm being common. Also, in relation to the general makeup of the site, the spectrum of the landing site indicates, in order of abundance, olivine, Fe2+ (silicate phase), Fe3+ (phases), and finally a very small magnetic mineral phase (probably magnetite). The fact that the most abundant iron phase is a silicate phase is interesting for several reasons. If I am reading it right, the fact that the spectrometer can discern between olivine and other iron-bearing minerals tells me that you can exlude that as one of the iron-bearing Fe2+ silicates. Fe2+ silicate possibilities include andradite, and various pyroxenes (ferrosilite?) and amphiboles, and others. Interestingly, Actinolite and the amphiboles require water to form. An interesting aside to that is that no amphiboles were ever found in samples brought back from the moon.

hypotheses, crackpot. You test them, with experiments, and further evidence,

method. However, being the crackpot that you are, you ridicule, then

that you still remain a crackpot.

Gee, I haven't felt the need to do this in a long, long time. So it gives me great pleasure to say to you PLONK!

Hell why look for just primitives.......

How about a fossil Pisces feces facies ... :-)

like in the Phosphoria. ;-)

Bob

Crackpot keyword : 'plonk'.

Another crackpot down, 6 billion more crackpots to go.

Too bad they are breeding like ... rabbits.

Thomas Lee Elifritz

OK, George, I'll buy that. Now, explain to me how you get a landslide on what appears to be topography that is extraordinarily flat for miles and miles in all directions? As I mentioned before, there are no large craters that would create these "splash" landforms as ejecta, at least not in the right place to have caused the effects visible in the DIMES images.

I'm not saying that water has flowed over or under this surface recently. It may have been more than a billion years since water flowed over this surface. But I believe it's very possible that water HAS had a hand in the sculpting of the surface we're observing, even at very high resolution.

Doug snipped-for-privacy@NOSPAM.mn.rr.com

Well, there you are dead wrong. The plagioclase on the Moon was formed when the early Moon, just after accretion, developed a "magma ocean" in which plagioclase flotation resulted in an anorthositic crust. (Anorthosite is a rock made up mostly of a single mineral, plagioclase.) The plag at the Apollo 14 site was excavated from the highland materials (i.e., the brecciated remnants of the original lunar crust) in the target area of the Imbrium impact. The Fra Mauro formation on which Apollo 14 landed is a huge splash sheet of ejecta from the Imbrium impact -- very little (if any) rock from the original local surface remains on the surface at the landing site. According to the experts who have studied the Apollo 14 rock samples, not even Cone Crater was deep enough to punch through the Imbrium ejecta. So everything at Fra Mauro was originally located somewhere in what is now Mare Imbrium.

The interesting thing is that there seems to have been a fair amount of mare basalt in the Imbrium target rock, since many of the clasts and some of the matrices in the breccias collected by Shepard and Mitchell are indeed basaltic, and analyze out at anywhere from 3.9 to 4.1 billion years old, considerably older than the age of the Imbrium impact itself (which is somewhere between 3.83 and 3.86 billion years). But the impact melt itself, as collected at Fra Mauro, is predominately noritic (anorthosite with some admixture of olivine).

I'd like to see a cite for these "spherules" from the Apollo 14 collection -- I've seen a lot of discussion of the breccias from the site, and seen it noted that ALL of the Apollo 14 samples are indeed breccias. Perhaps you're thinking of spherical clasts within the breccias? I'd love to know which sample numbers you're speaking of...

Doug snipped-for-privacy@NOSPAM.mn.rr.com

" George" wrote

FWIW, here is a great montage Doug Ellison made of part of the outcrop, with the blueberries resplendent & some idea of the variation.

(warning: big file)

Joe

The simple answer is that you don't. The more complex answer is that the region is a large filled crater, that indeed may have older deposts composed of landslide fill buried deep within the crater fill deposits. Noting in the following link that the fill material comes from the northeast, and has nearly completely filled the crater to the center, and sloping to the southwest towards the crater wall, I find it highly unlikely that there are landslide desposits exposed at the surface in the vicinity of Opportunity. The only likely place where you could view such landslide deposits would be possibly within the walls and floor of a large crater that has breeched the surface deposits of the plain. Such a potential crater, in fact is within traveling distance of Opportunity, and I think they plan to drive there in the coming weeks.

They don't have to be close by. There are so many craters, both large and small on Mars that any one of them, or at least most of the larger ones could have ejected material that could travel completely around the Martian globe, and even sent material into orbit. This material has to come down somewhere, and just as often as not, it will land somewhere other than in proximity to where it originated. I would not be at all surprised to find that material from craters that do exist in the vicinity to have left material at the Opportunity site. In fact, I would be very surprised if they didn't.

What features are present that leads you to believe that flowing water has had a hand in sculpturing the landscape at the Opportunity landing site and/or vicinity? And please try to restrict you answer to features that could only have come from the flow of water, and nothing else.

Thank you for that link. That is quite a good montage. I must say that it is quite annoying that JPL doesn't post these images in final form on their web site. I guess my problem all along has been to rely on the spottiness of their color image posts. And the fact that never having had to do the colorizing myself also makes matters worse. It was only recently that I even figured out how to do this, so thanks to whoever posted that information. Having said that, I find the color of the outcrop to be very intriquing, as it looks just like some rhyolites I've seen in the field in the Western U.S. That doesn't mean that I think the rock IS rhyolite, hoever, as I've never heard of rhyolites with concentration of sulfure that this rock has. What software are they using to generate the color images? I have several that could possibly be used (Corel PhotoPaint, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter 8, Picture Window Pro, and Astrovideo,which is great for processing black and white CCD astro photos into color using color filters). Unfortunately, the art of colorizing is fairly new to me. By the way, don't be stingy about posting links to great pics such as this one. Since JPL isn't posting many color-processed images directly into their web site, People like me are scarmbling to find them.

another annoyance is that they don't post higher resolution images. The Mars Express site is posting images at 300 and 400 dpi, while we have to rely on 72 and 96 dpi images. Screw the file size: I have adsl! I want HIGH resolution! The larger, the better.

Again, thanks.

As an aside commentary, I find the purplish "reaction"? discoloration on the rocks where there are "berries embedded in them very interesting, indeed. Any comments on them?

I am aware of the formation of anothosite on the moon. Those deposits are not what I am referring to. Plagioclase spherules were found at the Apollo

14 site:

Yes.

I don't doubt what you are saying, but you should read the link I provided above, and comment on it, as I am interested in you opinion of what the author has to say.

The spherules were found in the breccias.

Has the possibility of the spherules being wind rolled and rounded pebbles been discussed?

The spherules could then have been recemented into layers by periodic ash falls. If the spheres tend to concentrate on the paleo surface, this would explain the apparent layering and close packing of these abundant little things. It may also explain the sorting into remarkably consistent sizes since like sizes would be deposited in similar places.

Doesn't Mars have strong enough winds to move pebbles like the spherules easily?

- Graham Parkinson

Well, that is always a possibility. However, that idea has to take into account the material that would have accreted to the surface of the Spherule, in this case, whatever soil it rolled over. In this case, the spherules are granular, and appear to be fairly uniform in compostion, as indicated by the high resolution imagery. I've even seen crystals on the surface. Unfortunately I can't obtain a high enough resolution image to make out the crystallographic details of the spherules. All I can tell is that they appear to be either orthrombic or tetragonal, based on the apparent rectancular (trapezoidal) shape.

Its always possible that high winds could come along and move them around. Otherwise they wouldn't be distributed all over the place.

" George" skrev i en meddelelse news:1VYXb.60846$ snipped-for-privacy@bignews1.bellsouth.net...

snip

If you get around to it, I would like a look at this rhyolite.

I gather that all of you have thought of bluish hydrated Cu-sulfates as a possible origin - I think that's the ingredient used in basic chemistry lab-experiments to show growth of crystals. With some ceramic experience I can add that a few % CuO in a felspatic mixture and burned in a reducing CO2-atmosphere 'often' produces a glace with a strong bluish/turquoise color. And something hit me, Geoge, when you ascribed a possible origin of the round glassy-looking spheres as melted feldspar. Having said that, I'm still open to a 'wet' origin and a diverse composition. As a stray - I suppose that a 10 cm layer of gypsum decomposing to anhydrite on a slope could do for weak layer to cause a landslide. Or another 'diagenetic' process.... or even half a meter of hard rounded spheres ;o)

Carsten