New Curiosity Rover Findings

erco

What astounding discoveries did YOUR robot make today?

From http://www.aol.com/article/2016/06/28/nasas-findings-suggest-mars-even-more-earth-like-than-previousl/21420438

NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring the Gale Crater on Mars since 2012, and in that time has come up with some astounding discoveries that suggest the Red Planet was somewhat Earth-like in its earlier times.

The rover has come through again, this time detecting significant amounts of manganese oxides inside of mineral veins.

Said researcher Nina Lanza of New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, "The only ways on Earth that we know how to make these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes. Now we're seeing manganese oxides on Mars, and we're wondering how the heck these could have formed?"

Tor

Atmospheric oxygen or microbes.. and the way we got atmospheric oxygen on Earth was when microbes (cyanobacteria) started producing it. Microbes or microbes then.. so, yes, this is noteworthy.

MikeDYur

I still don't know what we hope to gain, by sending more research missions and possibly human explorers, to a planet that may not have anything beneficial to our existence here on earth, other than we can. Creating a moon base would be closer and a lot cheaper, certainly we we can test long duration space travel, in near earth proximity. Probes and telescopes have proven there is nothing out there within light years that is habitable to humans.

erco

Sad but true. The most toxic waste dump on Earth is still more practical & hospitable with air & water access than any planet we can reach.

Yuck: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-01/how-the-chinese-are-turning-fecal-sludge-into-black-gold-

WBA Consulting

the real news story: aol still exists??? :clown:

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-rover-findings-point-to-a-more-earth-like-martian-past

MikeDYur

erco wrote: »

Sad but true. The most toxic waste dump on Earth is still more practical & hospitable with air & water access than any planet we can reach.

Yuck: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-01/how-the-chinese-are-turning-fecal-sludge-into-black-gold-

Double YUK, We certainly need to clean up our act here, before we trash space and other planets, it's not ours to do.

Alexander (Sandy) Hapgood

What about if, when man gets to Mars, some aliens show up and say "You can't camp here. This is a national park!"

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Well, at least I hope it will be a Planetary Park rather than a National Park. One planet in this solar system infested with nation states is more than enough, IMO.

-Phil

Heater.

Wow, did I just visit a http://www.aol.com/ page?

Must be the ugliest web page I have seen for years.

What a blast from the past.

evanh

Heater, you made me inquisitive. It might be the first time I've visited AOL ever. It looks all right without scripts at least -

Heater.

Looks OK.

In God's name don't go there with scripts on. You'll go blind or insane. Takes a minute or more to down load multi-megabytes of Smile to wrap around that the text. Then the font is all messed up, at least on my Chrome browser, such that you don't want to read the actual article.

Edit: Looking in Chrome dev tools, that's 2.4 minutes to make 465 requests for whatever Smile, totalling 31.4 megabytes !

MikeDYur

The current rover MSL, still has something new to offer.



http://m.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0722/Mars-rover-has-new-tricks-self-guided-lasers

MikeDYur

@xanadu, thought I would bring this up if you hadn't seen it yet. Amazing science from that distance.

The dark, golf-ball-size object in this composite, colorized view from the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a grid of shiny dots where ChemCam had fired laser pulses used for determining the chemical elements in the target's composition.

The analysis confirmed that this object, informally named "Egg Rock," is an iron-nickel meteorite.andnbsp; Iron-nickel meteorites are a common class of space rocks found on Earth, and previous examples have been found on Mars, but Egg Rock is the first on Mars to be examined with a laser-firing spectrometer.

The laser pulses on Oct. 30, 2016, induced bursts of glowing gas at the target, and ChemCam's spectrometer read the wavelengths of light from those bursts to gain information about the target's composition. The laser pulses also burned through the dark outer surface, exposing bright interior material.andnbsp; This view combines two images taken later the same day by ChemCam's remote micro-imager (RMI) camera, with color added from an image taken by Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam). A Mastcam image of Egg Rock is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/pia21134.

Figure A includes annotation labels for the nine points targeted with the laser and is presented without added color.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed ChemCam in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency (CNES), the University of Toulouse and the French national research agency (CNRS). More information about ChemCam is available at http://www.msl-chemcam.com/ .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGNantes/CNRS/IAS/MSSS

xanadu

Thanks Mike. It's hard to believe we have all that tech up there. All of the reusable science on board should keep us entertained for a long time.

The analyzer we used on your sample was XRF. LIBS is great because you can go lighter than magnesium. Some geologists don't think we should rely on the LIBS data from Curiosity. As far as I'm concerned I'd rather have something to look at than nothing. Also it says it was designed to look for lighter elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, which works well earthbound.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-curiosity-laser.html#jCp

We need to shrink down wavelength dispersive XRF. Send this to Mars -


http://www.shimadzu.com/an/elemental/wdxrf/xrf1800/xrf.html

MikeDYur

xanadu wrote: »

We need to shrink down wavelength dispersive XRF. Send this to Mars -

That looks like it would be a project.

How does a meteorite like that end up on top of the ground with no dust on it? Just waiting for someone to find it.

xanadu

Aliens baiting Curiosity into a trap. What they need is some Boston Dynamics bots with weapons. Just to be sure.