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NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
One small piece of the Curiosity rover's high-resolution panorama shows the spacecraft's high-gain antenna in the foreground, a blast mark left behind by the rover's sky-crane descent stage at lower right, and the rim of Gale Crater in the far background.
NASA's Curiosity rover is almost fully reprogrammed for its two-year, $2.5 billion science mission on Mars, and mission managers say it should be ready to take its first short drive in about a week.
The final phase of Curiosity's four-day software transition was getting under way today, NASA spokesman Guy Webster said. The software for science operations, known as R10, has already been installed successfully on the rover's primary computer and is currently managing the rover's functions. All that remained was to finish installing the same software on the backup computer.
The software switchover called for removing the thousands of lines of code that were required for managing Curiosity's flight from Earth to Mars, as well as the instructions for the entry, descent and landing sequence known as the "seven minutes of terror." The R10 software package instead provides Curiosity with full use of its autonomous driving system and all the tools on its robotic arm. Curiosity's 4 gigabytes of data storage capacity wasn't enough to hold the entire software suite in its brain simultaneously.
The rover team put science operations on the back burner during the reprogramming.
"After the software transition, we go back to preparing the rover to be fully functional for surface operations," mission manager Art Thompson said today in a news release. "We are looking forward to the first drive in about a week."
The first short drive will be part of a routine to check out the rover's equipment as well as the characteristics of the landing site in Gale Crater.
Over the weekend, the Curiosity team released a partial panorama incorporating 79 high-resolution pictures from the rover's Mastcam imaging system. Each picture in the mosaic measures 1,200 by 1,200 pixels — and the full-resolution panorama, including the black patches of missing data, amounted to more than 120 megapixels.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
This strip is a massively scaled-down version of the full high-resolution panorama provided by the Curiosity rover team. The high-gain antenna is visible toward the left side of the strip. A dark dune field can be seen in front of the crater's mountain toward the middle of the image.
Even the limited view strengthened the impression that Gale Crater was reminiscent of California's Mojave Desert. One part of the picture shows a section of the crater wall, north of the landing site, where a network of valleys enters Gale Crater from the outside. NASA's image advisory says this is the first view that scientists have had of a one-time river system from the Martian surface.
One big difference between Gale and Mojave is the presence of a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in the middle of the Martian crater, known as Mount Sharp or Aeolis Mons. The partial panorama doesn't show the full rise of the mountain to its peak, but even the limited view shows a dark, distant dune field, and then the layered buttes and mesas of the mountain's environs farther beyond.
Eventually, scientists plan to send Curiosity up the mountainside to document billions of years of geological history on Mars. During the odyssey during which the rover will use a laser zapper, a drill, an onboard laboratory and other scientific instruments to determine how hospitable the region was to life in ancient times.
Curiosity's primary mission is due to last an entire Martian year, the equivalent of nearly two Earth years, but scientists hope the nuclear-powered rover will last even longer. The rover team is due to discuss the road ahead during a media teleconference at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) Tuesday. Audio of the event will be streamed live online via NASA's website.
More about Mars:
- Obama tells rover team: Let me know if you see Martians
- Search for life to shape future Mars missions
- Mars rover getting reprogrammed for science
- Why the rover has such a dinky camera and computer
- How to build your own Mars rover with Lego blocks
- The Puff on Mars: Photo mystery solved!
- Panorama reveals a colorful Mars
- NBC video: Panorama featured on 'Nightly News'
- Curiosity reveals a Martian Mojave
- Tour the Martian Mojave in 3-D
- Flying saucer spotted over Mars
- First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
- Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
- Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
- Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
- Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
- NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
- Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
- Mars probe provides radiation revelations
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBC News' other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Gentlemen, "START YOUR ENGINE"!
I guess someone has to say it: Mars is ugly.
It's pretty interesting that we spend all of this time, energy and money going to a parched desert on a barren lifeless planet while we mostly ignore and neglect our own opulent, water and life filled home world.
Like the song says: you never miss your water till it's gone.
GO ROVER GO!
The US can't leave Afghanistan until they quit filming this adventure.
I was so excite when it was annouced that the rover had landed safely; it was then that I remembered what I had actually heard Paul Ryan say on the floor of congress recently, and I quote
“There are many areas in the federal budget that can be scaled back or cut entirely and that includes wasteful spending at NASA and the NSF”.
I fear that even though ‘Curiosity’ is one of Americas greatest exploratory achievements since the moon landings; further scientific achievements like it may never happen because of a political party that does not believe in supporting any scientific endeavor. After I heard Ryan’s comment my heart sank and all I could think was “What has become of my country?”……
BS!!!
Quote it properly with an independent reference...you can`t.
if this was Lockheed Martin, paul ryan would be looking for all kinds of tax payer dollars to go to them...hypocrite.
Just like our solar power president?
What's with you people. How about we discuss Curiosity. So doing, I must vehemently disagree with Arch. The money spent here is what we need to spend to advance ourselves as a species. It is also a small drop in the bucket of money spent including money spent on the blue planet. There are many mysteries to be solved. For instance, why so many small rocks and pebbles? You may say that's not important, but as a species, we have the ability and the power to question and hopefully to answer. What other animal or plant has that ability. Use it or lose it.
What the government chooses to spend its money on is completely out of my control. ("But you can vote!" Psssschh...right, and then what? Anyway...)
If they are spending money, at least they are spending it on something that fascinates me and doesn't involve blowing children's arms off in the name of patriotism and oil.
@ArchStanton all of that money? We spend less money on NASA than anything else. Psht, it's people like you that will hold our race back. Exploration is the way of the future, it always has been, wether it be to the New World, the Moon, or Mars.
Parched? Certainly
Barren? Well, that's a fairly subjective term. Plenty of geologists would argue that point with you.
Lifeless? How can you know if you don't look for it? Just because it doesn't look like a rain forest doesn't mean there is no life. Antarctica is good example of a dry barren place that still has life. And I would say that the possibility of finding even that kind of life on another world is most definitely worth the trip.
I hope it will be my turn soon to take control! *gets out the xbox controller*
Endless red desert with no lifeforms of any kind! So what exactly happen to the other 2 probes that landed on mars? I'm guessing they are completely malfunctioned.
Critics of the space program keep talking about wasting all this money in space. Maybe you don't realize ALL that money is spent here on Earth and here in America. The factories that built it. The rockets that launched it. The technicians that control it. The janitors that clean the waste baskets in the lab. All that money is part of the American economy. And even more so it is being used to advance the human race and not kill anybody. Knowledge we learn about a dying planet can help us understand our own environment. I assume that matters to you.
And if this probe happens to discover life on Mars- life existing somewhere besides our planet- it will be one of THE most defining moments in human history.
You are trying to fool us BullwhipGriffin. We all know what actually happens. NASA takes that money, stuffs it into the robot's money-to-power converter, and burns the money. People on earth only get a fraction of it.
Those who still adhere to a young-earth belief system should be questioning such beliefs. It strains credibility to think that a god created a river system on Mars that never held water. All to fool future evolutionists. Ha! the joke is on us. Thanks god!
@Gravedigger - there were three other rovers counting Sojourner, the other two (Spirit and Opportunity) are still somewhat functional, well past the 90 days expected. marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov / mission / traverse_maps.html
For those of you talking about how much we spend on NASA... it's 0.5% of the budget. That is the lowest percentage of budget in over 50 years and it's been dropping in terms of inflation adjusted dollars for many years. Compare that to DoD (20%), Medicare/Medicaid (20%), SS (20%), and Discretionary (19%).
Seeing photographs from that automobile parked on Mars is absolutely AWESOME!!
Great civilizations will never stop exploring and learning. Good job America!
To the jackass that tried to make it seem as if Paul Ryan wanted to eliminate funding for NASA: even if your quote is accurate, notice how he said "wasteful" spending. Are you really mocking him for wanting to cut wasted money from a program? That should be our goal with everything we spend money on: reduce or eliminate waste.
Science and exploration are far from wasteful, and him citing NASA as an example of having wasteful spending is downright despicable. NASA has cost us a total of about $500 billion, in 50 years. We spend twice that in 1/5th the time on the military, at least. The amount of technologies, discoveries, and knowledge that has resulted from NASA programs are beyond count. If there is anything that isn't wasteful spending, it's science and education - the two things some particular politicians seem to accuse the most of being 'wasteful'....
Sigh.
I never said it was all a waste, and neither did Ryan. My point was that there is money that can be cut that is being spent irresponsibly. Once again, the program is not a waste, but not controlling expenses properly is. Given Ryan's history in regards to fiscal responsibility, I think he meant the same thing.
Please read more carefully next time.
But, again... why cite NASA of all places? There are hundreds of far better examples of 'wasteful spending' than NASA.....unless the intent was to appeal to the anti-intellectual crowd, which is quite likely.
No idea. I don't know the context of what he was saying and when, and the OP conveniently neglected to cite anything of reference for his claim.
Perhaps he was referring to Senator Coburn's report about money wasted at the NSF, either on things that don't have any scientific bearing (surfing porn, skinny dipping) on studies that we really didn't need to spend money on (why certain teams are always good in March Madness, how parents respond to trendy baby names) or mismanagement (ineffective contracting, unspent grant money to the tune of $1.7 billion). All of what I just mentioned was pulled from that report. Looks like a waste of money to me, and that wasn't even the full list.
Wow, what a waste this thread was. Sheesh. I thought the article was about Mars and Curiosity, not politics.
For those of you concerned about Ryan cutting funding to NASA, don't worry, he's not going to be the Vice President and will soon lose his powerful chairmanship. NASA is safe.
For those of you who don't like the President..well, I don't have anything for you because he's going to be re-elected in an historic landslide thanks to his choice of VP.
That's it for politics so shuddup about it.
Or..is this all part of the smoke screen to cover up the fact that Curiosity has already found LIFE ON MARS? Giant Martian Sand Worms! They are there and they taste just like chicken!
Fundamentalist Christians want to stop space exploration out of the fear that some day life will be discovered somewhere else and will make their heads explode. Their book of fairy tales does not mention extraterrestrial life. When it's finally discovered, let the rationalizations begin!
If they were so really, really sure of the supposed word of god, then they would have nothing to fear from science and scientific discovery. The fact that they fear science is PROOF that they do not have the faith that they claim to have.
Now...knowing this...why do people still believe in the fairy tale god?
I have to hand it to you Skip, that was the best laugh I've had all day. I almost died laughing, literally. Obama will win in a landslide because of Joe Biden? Really? Do me a favor...tell that to the next 10 people you meet, and see what their reactions are. I would bet that at least half of them will say, "Who is Joe Biden?"
Now to temper expectations ... it's going to be a long haul.
I see something there in the upper right, a kind of blue-gray thing. I think it's a rock!
It could be the one that fell out of your head.
Exciting, I can't wait to see all the pictures and new discoveries!
4 gigs of memory?
Hell I have flash drives bigger than that.
What is the deal with the rover not having memory?
The memory is the cutting edge of radiation hardened memory when it was built. I think it was built around 4-7 years ago.
The rover was designed about eight years ago. The entire computer system is archaic by today's standards. I found this last week.
Yea but the question is does all that really cost 2.2 billion dollars? If its outdated that is. Must have been that nuclear reactor strapped to its back.
Well, obviously a group of super smart people decided not to update the hardware prior to launch... Which in turn is leaving us dumbfounded.
Like Yitzach-5438768 said. most of this was fairly new when the computer system was built.
Also the newest, latest & greatest computer hardware is not hardened for the radioactive environment of Mars. A virtually non-existent magnetic field around the planet means that there isn't much to stop the radiation that the Sun puts out. I'm sure you would all be whining about a failed, previously untested in space, newer piece of computer hardware should one have been sent and failed.
The previous two rovers had a life span that was guaranteed for 90 days. One went roving for 1944 earth days and the other is still going strong. Chances are this rover may last a few decades. Voyager 1 has the same power source and is still sending back info 34 years after launch.
Modern high density flash memory has feature sizes as small as 19nm. That's as wide as about 40 silicon atoms in a crystal matrix. An energetic cosmic ray particle could disrupt a substantial chunk of that.
I assume that they need to use lower density memory with larger feature sizes in high radiation environments. The memory in your new Iphone would probably be unreliable in space.
Well Chris, you're obviously not a rocket scientist. Making significant changes to the hardware configuration at such a late stage in the game would invalidate all of the testing done up to that point and would necessarily require going back to square one with systems testing.
Best to leave this to the people who know what they're doing.
i know, i saw that too. basically it's being run by an ipod touch or your average smart phone. not that it needs that much, but that seems pathetically limited...but then again, entire home entertainment systems aren't much more than that...it just sounds weird.
dan and gumps are right. The main reason is the radiation hardening that must be effected. The space environment is highly charged anad radiation is aproblem. One of the reasons we are on this planet is becasue of the earth's magnetic field deflects a lot of the stuff (except at the poles and that's why we get auroras). In fact sending a spacecraft through the Van Allen belts is a hazard. However, having said that I think that there could have been a compromise hybrid design with critical features radiation hard and non critical features, like photo pixels a high density non-hard memory since a few bad bits won't make any real difference.
Armchair engineers make me laugh. Do people even notice that 'powerful' PCs crap out after a year or 2 and you have to buy another one? Does anyone even wonder why your 8 core isn't much faster than your Pentium II was? Some very talented people have succeeded in convincing you that what you just blew your cash on is better than what you already had.
They aren't much faster seeming because as the computers get faster, the programs get much more labor intensive with such things as 3-d graphics and data manipulation. If you were to put many of today's programs on a computer from 8 years ago, it probably wouldn't even be able to run it because of incompatabilities and if it was able to, it would take hours to run it instead of less than a minute for today's computers.
Another reason PCs don't seem that much faster is that the version of windoze most people are running is much more bloated than the version they were running back then. Try running a lean version of linux on that new CPU if you want to see fast - or get an SSD to load windoze on.
You can't just 'update' specially designed hardware without it costing mucho dinero, needing to be retested and evaluated, and... well, essentially initiating a redesign that will set it back further. It takes only a novice's understanding of design and production to comprehend that fact.
It takes years to develop these systems - and any change in requirements late in the R&D phase is MAJOR. Anyway, it's not like this rover is going to be playing BF3 while listening to music and downloading alien p0rn. 4 gigs is plenty.
Gumps,
I'm a Rocket Scientist? Really? Nah, that's SOOO below me!
God, I love people's inability to digest sarcasm.
Such a small computer and small memory for a $2.5 BILLION dollar machine!!! I know what their claimed reason is, but I don't buy it. Even in 2002 you could buy a faster computer with more ram and rom for less than $2000. Something stinks with their explanation. I'll wait and see, but if something goes wrong with their dinky computer system or if they claim they lack computer processing power, I'll be the first to flame NASA. Even in 2002 they could have had Intel or Motorola or Samsung put the entire Rover computer system and memory on a single chip with twice the processing power and twice the memory, plus they could have had five backup computers-on-a-chip that could be doing other jobs until needed as a backup to the main computer.
and why don't you buy it? I hope you don't say it is a conspiricy.
Riiiiight. They pocketed all those extra billions by scrimping on the computer hardware. You sir, are a dipsh*t.
I believe that the "Whys?" of your question have to do with Weight. Every gram counts when you're sending something over 62 million miles.
You really think your Intel or Motorola or Samsung could survive the trip to mars?
I think not. Try giving the smart one some credit and quit thinking like the NK
62 million mile miles? Try 350 million + miles. I don't think weight was the real issue, more like can the chip and related components withstand the radiation. What they sent does stand up to the riggers of space.
Foreigner, if they followed your advice, then they WOULD have a problem with their computer. Fortunately, they know what they are doing and you don't.
They should have sent my old laptop as the backup. If it survived the radiation they would have a much better system and Dub Side of the Moon.
quite frankly, I credit the programmers!!...some hardware dude probably poked in on em one day and said something like "got the hardware specs, it's a dell p2 133mhz with 4gig is that ok with ya all?" (guy with thick rimmed black glasses not even glancing up replies) huh? sure, what ever man, hey close the door this assembly compiler is touchy...(hardware dude) ya, see ya at the meeting merv, bye....I would love a peek at the files, real time os has been a favorite of mine long before I knew the word GROK! The whole team deserves a KUDOS with respect from all of us who will benefit from their awesome work.
Funny, Ray Smith, but the hardware is really important. A Dell p2 would never have made it there alive.
Foreigner* you are one stupid _____.
come to think of it, in 2002 our country was being run by a president with limited brain function and memory, too....
Dorado,
compared to yours?
The vast majority of the money doesn't go into a computer, but into the engineering that it takes to send this one of a kind device to Mars. Also, the launch cost is non-trivial. It's a lot more expensive to send interplanetary that into low earth orbit, lots more fuel. If you buy a computer built for you, the cost is amortized over the millions built and sold. Here we have just one! So you have to understand a little about engineering before you condemn these things.
It's a good thing that people are expensive, I are one!
Calling him a dip@!$%# is a compliment.
Seriously, 6.0 is one of the dumbest comments I have read in all Newsvine history.
Bookmarking this one for future reference.
@ Foreigner
The hardware designed and installed in the rover was state of the art at the time it was built. Keep in mind that these are not the components that you buy at Best Buy or Frys. This stuff is radiation-hardened with the ability to withstand severe thermal stresses and high positive/negative G's. This is pretty much hardcore military hardware designed to operate in the vicinity of a nuclear explosion.
You're next question may be... Why didn't they use the cheaper components and save the American tax payer a few bucks. Reason: There are no way to swap out parts if the lesser parts fail. No service calls to Mars. These components have to be dependable, and they have to be always on 24/7 365 days a year in the harshest of environments.
It's good planning that has panned out for NASA. Look at the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. These rovers have been designed to operate for only 90 days, and though we lost Spirit last year, Opportunity has a good chance to hit the 10-year-and-running mark on Mars a year from next January.
Good Luck to Curiosity - May she have the same luck and life as her sisters, Spirit and Opportunity.
not really, it was a power pc from ibm...a lot of stuff was using bae, that was and still is state of the art for rad hardened. Nothing wrong with the power pc but INTEL inside would damn well of been the REAL state of the art, and THEY, the design team, would of been BLAZING THAT TRAIL...good reason for not being trailblazers in that realm? Longterm proven reliability. Besides, for most things, you got plenty of pc power in a 386....toss in a bunch of sounds and graphics, well, then you need more flops.....not that I agree, I think they shoulda had sixteen or more cores per machine with plenty of ai and SUPER fast table lookup for spectrograph analysis....the rad hard shells and cooling cold of been easily addressed when you factored in an honest to goodness NUCLEAR BATTERY......
Uh, no. IBM did not produce the PowerPC - that was a Motorola chip.
Gumps It was an IBM Motorola consortium that built and designed the power PC.
ray an Intel chip would not be rad-hard. Intel is not state of the art for rad-hard applications. Radiation hardening is VERY expensive since a lot of engineering has to go into it. Back in the day a rad-hard Pentium which had to be made via SOI (Silicon on Insulator) technologies cost a fortune and was much less capable than the Pentium you could get in your computer.
1-1 comparisons cannot be made.
I am waiting for little green men to walk in front of the camera with refreshing drinks in their hands and solar umbrellas
their all kinds of thing running around up their. bugs that leave tracks like crabs.
lizards about half an inch/ insects . they found soo many fossils up their its not funny.
ROFLMAO@Shosyn
Green men saying...WTF is this? LOL
I'm wondering if Iran has a plan to take control of this thing as it did with the drone? Do we have any security measures in place if they do? Would really be funny to see it drive off by it self and then write F'U in the dirt then send back that picture for the next 4 years.
I hate to burst your bubble, but an Iranian-American already has control of it. Mr. Bobak Ferdowsi is NASA's flight director for the program.
I think Iran has enough trouble with their own desert.
4 gig hard drive? That cannot be correct. They spent billions on this mission but 5 bucks on a used hard drive from 1997? I would think just its photo storage alone is 100 times that big.
I don't think that is a hard drive. I think it is a radiation hardened flash drive. Little more spendy than a platter drive from '97.
It is amazing how many readers get some knowledge from the Radio Shack catalog and just have to show it off.
Brian, nothing you could buy at the mall would survive space. This was the best available when it was built. Yes, technology does change fast.
The Cameras have their own radiation hardened storage separate from the computer's.
Brain - you are an example of just why we need to increase the level of science education in the US.
Can't really understand why this keeps coming up, unless some people are just trolling. It's been discussed in just about every story about Curiosity, including by some of the same people. Guess just trolls never bother coming back to read the answers to their previous bombs.
There is no shade. Not one tree? No life!
Well, no, we didn't really expect many trees.
lol i don't think we where expecting to find life....just maybe evidence of past life....
The word is out. Obama has sent voter registration forms to Mars. "anything that can be construed as a life form, register them as Democrats on vacation from Chicago. We'll take care of the details. We need the votes."
Oh I won't bother.
Go get em, little rover!
At first I thought this was some drought stricken area in the midwest. So maybe this is what happened to Mars and shortly most of our planet will look like this when all the water is gone.
Space exploration should never stop.
Sound? Is there anything on board to hear sounds on Mars? Or anywhere else along the way to and/or on Mars?
This seems logical to me, but I've read nothing yet that answers my question.
Alan Boyle ... do you know?
I believe the answer is "no." The Mars Polar Lander had one, but it crashed. I'd be interested to hear the sounds on Mars as well. I'd like to know what Martian thunder sounds like, especially since the atmospheric pressure and composition are different than earth.
The martian atmosphere is so thin that there probably would be no sound to speak of. The thin atmosphere was the reason for the complicated landing sequence - it was not thick enough to slow the craft down during entry.
It's still a lot thicker than space and there is a sound barrier even at 50,000' on earth. In fact a lot of the slowing down was performed by compression of the atmosphere and it used a parachute, so there really is plenty enough atmosphere for sound. They had designed an electric powere airplane for a previous mission but sadly didn't use it. I microphone would be nice.
I think it comes down to value judgement when they design the rover. Very little atmosphere means very little sound, and if you add a microphone and sound processing systems, what are you going to take off? What are you expecting to hear, except the wind?
Computers and other electronic equipment sent to another planet absolutely, positively (no kidding) have to work. There's no Geek Squad up there. They don't have to necessarily be fast or have enough storage capacity to archive your entire iTunes collection. But they have to stand up to:
(a) intense temperature swings (the coldness of interplanetary space and then the hotness of Mars during the day and coldness by night);
(b) radiation extremes (your hot sh*t computer that is sooooo much better than Curiosity's is protected by the earth's magnetic field; Curiosity's is not because Mars has a very weak magnetic field);
(c) intense vibration and impact events (see how well your hard drive works after lofting into space on a rocket and then re-entering another planet's atmosphere, being jolted by the deployment of a parachute, eventually to land by rocket sled, only to spend its operational life rumbling across an uneven rocky surface);
(d) intense electrical overload protection (Mars is known for having dry lightning); and
(e) protection against dust (Mars has lots of dust devils and dust storms).
For what it is worth, Curiosity has the most potent computer suite ever sent to Mars. It should do the job and then some.
Nicely explained.
I hope they find signs of life,past or present.
they already have , nasa cover up till man mission da.
@lord shado: humina humina humina humina,laddle laddle laddle,loo loo loo loo loon! Thank you for the amusement. I will be even more amused when you respond with a lucid, coherent post with evidence.
On the examination of 'past life' on Mars, I would think the pure lack of any type of trees or tree stumps (as in petrified for 1000's of years in our desert SW) would indicate that there could have been--but there's none. Zip. I'm thinking that the 'water' that made the erosion culverts and canyons, liquid as it was--was not like the 'water' we have on earth. Liquid, yes. Could you drink it or could it sustain life?; From all appearances-no. I'm no scientist, obviously, but I know that no matter how hard I wish or hope for it, I can't make something what it's never been and I feel it's rather plain to see there was never any life on Mars. Especially with an atmosphere just 1% of Earth's.
Water is water no matter where in the universe it is located. The evidence of liquid water exsisting is evidence that Mars' atmosphere was not always this thin. And as for the petrified tree stumps... 1000's of years is a popcorn fart in the life of the universe and mars itself. if life had been there a billion years ago there would be no remaining "tree stumps" (if trees grew on mars anyway, get a little more imagination life on mars doesn't have to mimic life on earth)
Ess...it has been established beyond a doubt that Mars had liquid water on its surface at sometime in the past. Lots of it. Water is water, unless we're talking about "heavy" water, which occurs in nature in very small amounts. It is very likely that there is water under the surface either in liquid form, or as ice.
Because of its smaller mass and weak gravity, whatever atmosphere Mars had simply escaped the planet and the water evaporated away over the eons.
Very likely you won't find petrified trees or stumps there. Although Mars had water at some time, it would be highly unlikely that anything like a tree would have had time to evolve. Microorganisms maybe, but complicated live forms like trees that would be just like on earth? I don't think so.
Mars may be a dead planet, but it was the closest to an earth-like environment a very long time ago, and for a short time. So life could have developed, and we should look for signs of it. But I think trees/stumps is something that never would have had a chance to develop.
I would expect either microbial life or something like stromatilites that developed very early in earth's history and are found as fossils, and even exist today.
http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Tree_of_Life/Stromatolites.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite
@Ess Vdb: Life on earth has been around for about 3.8 billion years and the first trees date back to about 450 million years ago. So that's 3.3 billion years of life on earth without trees. Do you have anything else you need to be made more plain to see? Mars is also estimated to be 100's of millions of years older than earth. A lot can happen and change in this amount of time. On earth that was how long it took life to go from microbes to what we live with now. I could really care less that you know but it never ceases to amaze me how people will go on and on and on about things they know nothing about. Maybe you like to drink or are on drugs?
I've read several of Chris' posts - he appears to be a troll.
Oh Gumps,lets not reduce ourselves to name calling.Calling people trolls can be just a cheap shot way of being dismissive or appear that way. By definition your comment is a troll. You seem to also have your Chris's mixed up.
To all the people complaining about the cost of this mission: We spent three times that much per month during the Iraq war. I would rather have my taxes used for building Mars robots than have it spent on blowing things up.
AMEN!!!!!
This is so exciting! It's amazing that people here can send and receive data across the galaxy.
I'm a bit lost as to what the trip to Mars is for, because science has already confirmed that the planet is not fit for habitation because it's so cold; I've read that temperatures can be between -63 F and -184 F.
Even though I don't get the idea behind this mission, I find it all very interesting to read about.
It's called scientific exploration Linda. Doesn't have to have a benefit to mankind, just explains how things work and what they are. That is why we know about black holes, quasars, what makes electricity flow, and Relativity. Boring to most, but fascinating to us curious scientists.
Exploration, is ingrained in humans.
It has, time and again, proven to be the most lucrative human activity (in the long run) even when the reward/benefit isn't immediately obvious or defined. You'd be surprised how quickly 'useless' discoveries become 'useful'....
If our ancient ancestors were not curious and didn't explore unless they saw a 'clear benefit' - we'd still be living in caves.
oscy, before you head out, there is a neat rock I think you oughta zap for calcite...it's between the two thruster marks and towards you about a meter......you'll know it's the right one because it is the only one that is apparently a four sidded trapezoid with a darker color on the upper third....some sort of indentation on the top that looks like a shadow of a hole,.....
This is tecnology at it's best....science is man's best hope for the future
im sick and tired of nasa not giving us the true color pics.
the sky their is blue . when china send their probe will get the real story nasa.
Color camera is not up yet, the sky there is reddish.
Where would we be if so much had not been wasted
on the Space Shuttle and Space Station.
Think where we might be if Space Exploration was
dominated by NASCAR
Probably crashed into a wall LOL