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Strange plant-like formation captured by Curiosity rover on Mars
- deknos 5y agoelectrical charges could create something like that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dvh 5y agoMore images here: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images/ Closeup: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/03397/mhli/3397MH0001630001201028R00_DXXX.jpg https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/03397/mhli/3397MH0...
- shusaku 5y agoCool! Can you explain some more how you ended up sharing this? Did you find it yourself or maybe was there a related article?
- zokier 5y agoThis made rounds on reddit and twitter yesterday https://www.reddit.com/r/Areology/comments/t18c2r/desert_flower_on_mars_pic_1029436/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Areology/comments/t18c2r/desert_flo... https://twitter.com/kevinmgill/status/1497274717077585922 https://twitter.com/kevinmgill/status/1497274717077585922
- satronaut 5y agonasa puts all the images from their space probes up at pds.jpl.nasa.gov it's a learning curve to navigate, but once you know about it, it's addictive
- Uily 5y agoThis looks like it could have been caused by water penetrating a softer substance, causing it to harden, and then the surrounding material was removed by erosion.
- senectus1 5y agostill very cool but yeah I doubt its a biological.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoThis is really neat, and oddly it makes me wish that there were people walking around on Mars looking at these things, taking samples, etc. And generally figuring things out in real time.
- nomzta 5y agoProbably a rock or mineral deposit: https://cosmiclog.com/2022/02/25/martian-flower-blooms-in-a-red-planet-menagerie/ https://cosmiclog.com/2022/02/25/martian-flower-blooms-in-a-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- _AzMoo 5y agoI know nothing about this but I too would like to speculate. It looks like coral.
- acd 5y agoAlso think it looks like a coral. I am a diver.
- toolslive 5y agojust a desert rose? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_rose_(crystal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_rose_(crystal)
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoIt doesn’t really look like those though. Those look crystalline and repeating.
- dschuetz 5y agoIt looks like an old mineral crystal. "Strange plant-like" sounds very amateurish and does not reflect facts.
- mrtksn 5y agoIt looks like a plant in my opinion, which doesn't mean it is necessarily a plant but it means that its appearance is like a plant. I don't see any inaccuracies in the description. Of course if someone thinks that doesn't look like a plant but crystal or an animal, they are fre to describe it as "crystal-like" or "animal-like". Its alright bo be impressed with its looks I guess, noone is going to make a salad of it, so it is not dangerous to think that it looks like a plant.
- Qem 5y agoLooks more like a coral.
- mrtksn 5y agoI agree, I often forget that corals are not plants(but they look like plants, which probably means that the Mars rock that look like a coral also looks like a plant).
- DFHippie 5y agoAnd they act like plants: they photosynthesize; they are sessile; and they are structured as a thin layer of living tissue over a dead, rigid internal support.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoI could see that, or a sea sponge[1] 1: https://study.com/academy/lesson/sea-sponge-lesson-for-kids.html https://study.com/academy/lesson/sea-sponge-lesson-for-kids....
- cocomutator 5y agoI shall learn from this post how to disagree respectfully on the internet. Hats off.
- jonathanlb 5y agoWhile we speculate, I'm just marveled that we can get an image of that clarity and crispness _from Mars_.
- IceDane 5y agoIt's absolutely nuts that I can be viewing a high definition picture from another planet with my morning coffee. Sometimes I wish we didn't lose our sense of awe so quickly. Every technological miracle we create quickly becomes a normal part of "every day life" so to speak.
- gonzo41 5y agoI was buying my morning coffee today and the person in front of me paid with their watch. Things are pretty amazing, you just got to keep looking for it.
- IndrekR 5y agoI am still amazed that going out and buying a morning coffee is a thing (that can seriously compete with home-brewing it).
- JackFr 5y agoOn Saturday morning I go and buy a cup of coffee and sit outside the shop and read the newspaper (physical paper) and watch people walk by. It’s really one of the pleasures of my week. (I then go home a brew a pot for me and my wife - who prefers to sleep in on Saturdays.)
- sbarre 5y agoThat sounds wonderful. It's still bitterly cold where I am in the world these days, and I look forward to also doing that in a few months. :-)
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- dandare 5y agoI have always been fascinated by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
- g5095 5y agoNot saying this isn't plant-like but lightning can produce these same shapes in sand.
- yalogin 5y agoInteresting that it looks small yet is able to withstand the winds and didn’t get eroded. Wonder how strong it is. Does the rover try to investigate it at all?
- pharke 5y agoThe wind force on Mars is not very strong, the surface pressures is only 0.6% of Earth's and the top windspeed is around 100 km/h or 62 mph.
- somenameforme 5y agoAs a fun factoid this is one of the few things that was intentionally fudged in "The Martian." Andy Weir was well aware that the most brutal sandstorm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze, but felt it was one of the more interesting ways to create a catastrophe. That in itself is really phenomenally encouraging for the future developments on the planet - when one of the things a hard sci-fi book has to resort to fiction on is the trigger for catastrophe!
- jansan 5y agoOn Twitter someone said that it looks like the result of lightning striking sand. I did not know that this would create such awesome structures. Look up "lightning sand" if you never heard about it. I think those are called Fulgurites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite
- ivan_gammel 5y agoLightnings seem to be rare on Mars. If this one was caused by it, what are the chances it would have been discovered? https://www.space.com/mars-lightning-weak-thin-atmosphere.html https://www.space.com/mars-lightning-weak-thin-atmosphere.ht...
- chmod775 5y agoConsidering it's a mostly barren landscape with little that could wear down and prevent accumulation of such things, chances are pretty good. Mars isn't quite the Moon, where you could drop a marble and expect to find it in exactly the same condition 10,000 years later, but it's not quite Earth either. There's no organisms that will cover and break down anything you throw at them within weeks, obviously there's no rain that could cause erosion, wind speeds are about the same you'd see on earth, but atmospheric pressure is only about 1/150th.
- RugnirViking 5y ago1/150th? puts into perspective how incredible it is to get anything to fly there (like the Ingenuity helicopter recently)
- peterburkimsher 5y agoLet's analyse the chemical composition. If it's is made of fused quartz, it's likely to be a fulgurite. If it's made of calcium carbonate, it's likely to be a coral. If it's made of something else, that's even more exciting!
- amiga1200 5y agoThe erosion though… how? To me that’s amazing enough. So earth like. Apologies, that’s earthist of me.
- MaxMoney 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 5y agoCould Mars have developed chemosynthtic life? Sure, it happened ridiculously fast on Earth and I'm quite prepared to believe it happened on Mars before it lost its liquid water. Photosynthetic bacteria? That's a stretch but I could imagine it happening. Plants? Not just the prokaryotic to eukaryote transition but differentiated multicellular organisms? No, it would take an incredible amount of evidence to convince me that that happened on Mars and this does no in any way count.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 5y agoI think what's more remarkable are the couple of snickerdoodle cookies a few inches to the right of the plant-thing. Someone is leaving a welcome basket with housewarming gifts for Curiousity. I wonder what the coupons for local businesses will be.
- mrfusion 5y agoWill they investigate more? Maybe drill into it or use some of the other onboard instruments?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jessaustin 5y agoI wish this picture came with a scale. Is this formation a millimeter wide or a meter wide?
- guessmyname 5y ago> I wish this picture came with a scale. Is this formation a millimeter wide or a meter wide? A few millimetres, according to this Twitter post: https://mobile.twitter.com/abbyfrae/status/1497375698985521153 https://mobile.twitter.com/abbyfrae/status/14973756989855211...
- jessaustin 5y agoPeople on HN downvote twitter posts, but that is much more informative than the raw picture. Given that pennies are 19mm in diameter, that suggests a width more like ~12mm for this object.
- lazerl0rd 5y agoMy initial thoughts were "sand mushroom" and "sand seaweed".
- theknocker 5y ago
- Geee 5y agoIt's clearly an alien hand reaching out of the ground.
- iszomer 5y agoAnd if you touch it, your evil doppelganger will spawn. (Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis reference fyi)
- jacquesm 5y agoReminiscent of certain kinds of sea sponges.
- pmontra 5y agoIt's a Japanese rock garden. See the rake lines?
- earthboundkid 5y agoSpace is unbelievably boring. It is so boring that it’s a news story when something in space reminds us of a thing on Earth. Mars is dead, dead, dead; and it’s depressing to even think about how dead and boring it is.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoJoins a conversation only to say they have no interest in it.
- lima 5y agoBoring things can be interesting!
- earthboundkid 5y agoSure. :-)
- javajosh 5y agoThe subject is Mars, not the conversation about Mars. And GP's comment is interesting. Consider that Earth, even after nuclear war, comet strike, caldera explosion, destroyed habitats, etc is still infinitely more habitable than Mars.
- dylan604 5y agoMars is definitely dead, and nothing there within current human technical abilities to brink it back to life. Living underground or in airtight capsules is the only way of living on that planet. Which is pretty much the same thing that would happen on Earth in any of those doomsday events you suggested. The main threat to earth is uninhabitable atmosphere, so if we figured out how to reverse those changes, then perhaps we could reverse Venus' atmosphere. If that were possible, then we might actually have a second livable planet in our solar system.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
- hownottowrite 5y agoNot a fulgurite. Not a selenite. Not even a dendrite. Probably just salt. People will always lose their minds over simple mineral intrusions because the only rocks they’ve ever seen are just round.
- Frost1x 5y agoMy first thought was some sort of crystal formation. Not sure if it's salt but it does look crystalline in nature. I'll get off my exogeologist armchair rest now.
- abeppu 5y agoWhen you say "just salt" ... what kind of conditions produce that sort of salt formation? Does it tell us anything about the conditions when it was formed? Was there some brine pool or something? How did it get exposed where it is now? Maybe describing it as "plant-like" was not really called for, can we still learn something interesting from this?
- hownottowrite 5y agoThere’s always something cool to learn about geological processes, even basic examples like this one.
- berkes 5y agoI too am wondering if 'salt sculptures' implies there was salt water at some point. I have no idea. But can imagine that another proof of water, salt even, is really nice.
- MPSimmons 5y agoThere was very definitely large* amounts of water on Mars, and there is also evidence of salinity[1], so it seems possible that there would be saline in volume to produce deposits. * - not compared to Earth, but more than you would think from looking at the surface - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars [1] - http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/ngeo2546 http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/ngeo2546
- thebeardisred 5y agoAlso looks vaguely like what happens when lightning melts sand. My parents always called them a "desert rose". (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_rose_(crystal) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_rose_(crystal)) Interesting to learn about other formations from @hownottowrite's comment.
- tectonic 5y agoJust a note, desert roses (as confirmed by your link), aren't made by lightning.
- tecleandor 5y agoA think parent might be referring to fulgurite. https://www.sciencealert.com/lightning-strikes-can-create-incredible-works-of-art-but-don-t-be-fooled-by-photos https://www.sciencealert.com/lightning-strikes-can-create-in...
- aniijbod 5y agoThey'll be here soon, Ziggy.
- politician 5y agoNASA has been strategically ambiguous about the possibility of life on Mars since Viking 1. What’s changed now that they’re touting “plant-like formations”? That seems uncharacteristically suggestive.
- jmuec 5y ago
- jmuec 5y agoThis is just a desert rose like the one found in the Africa desert of North Africa
- jmuec 5y agoDesert rose is a result of a camel peeing on the sand and the wind blowing overtime a rose shaped object forms.