Curiosity images strange metallic-looking object on Mars | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity images strange metallic-looking object on Mars

universetoday.com

203 pointsanigbrowl147 comments

The landing created an extensive debris field [1]. For example, the descent stage energetically disassembled on impact with 100+ kg of unused propellant still on board, as planned [2]. Bits of plastic and metal are strewn across a 30km-long strip. Curiosity has imaged several of these pieces already [3]. On the other hand, some 'bright material' that was thought to be spacecraft fragments turned out to be soil material. These fragments are important: they're a science hazard. A big goal for the mission is to find Martian organic matter, so the project is keen to avoid accidentally ingesting Earth plastic into the exquisitely precise onboard laboratory, SAM [4].

[1] http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA15696.jpg (debris from the last few minutes of flight),

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/2800.pdf (debris from interplanetary cruise and atmospheric entry).

[2] http://www.spaceflight101.com/msl-descent-stage-impact-analy... (crash movie).

[3] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16230.ht...

[4] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11214-012-9879-z (free full text)

[3] is a 404 page.

Love the phrase "energetically disassembled".

[3] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16230.ht...

Does anyone know NASA's policy on further observation of crowd-sourced findings?

BTW, you absolutely have to love the tack NASA has taken with making images virtually immediately available for the public to consume and research. Imagine if the Curiosity photo archives were only made available months after the fact - it'd be too late to do anything based off of community findings!

Way to go team!

Heh. I don't really consume images. I just view them.

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I'd say the most important number to think about when looking at rover images is the scale.

"the little protuberance is probably about 0.5 cm tall, or even smaller."

Five mm is obviously tiny. Keep this in mind before making up hypotheses as to what the thing is. =) We have to wait until better data is available.

What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology. Of course, such hypotheses have to work extremely hard before they should be accepted. Our standards of evidence for stuff like this must always remain as high as possible, given the emotions and mass misunderstandings involved. But the very fact that we've come this far and still cannot rule out the existence of life on Mars is quite remarkable.

One of my dearest wishes is that humanity will find solid evidence for other lifeforms in the universe (whether it is through remains or actual contact).

This moment, if/when it happens, will be so mindblowing on so many levels and affect us deeply as a society/species/etc. that I just WANT to see it.

So you just want to see all religions on earth, dead.

Not all religious people have gods that they have so narrowly restricted you know. Only those who have assigned an unjustifiable importance to themselves or really love cramming their gods into artificial boxes would find such a discovery disturbing.

The realization that those dots moving across the sky are not gods did little to eradicate religion. Nor did the realization that gods did not carve the canyons or raise mountains, or even create the species or the stars. Why should finding some living junk on Mars be the game changer that everything else failed to be?

Religion will survive. It survived learning the sun didn't revolve around the Earth. It survived learning disease wasn't caused by demons and that Zeus wasn't hurling lightning from Olympus. It survived evolution and the Big Bang. People will say the mysteries of God* were just greater than they realized, and their mythologies will start to seem a bit more like Star Wars.

* or what have you

You're correct. Religious belief is an evolved memetic/genetic survival mechanism.

Those parts of the human brain were never about logic and accurate observation of the material world - so they are safe from new facts and logic for now.

Probably at some point (assuming we survie), our own genetic/cybernetic modifications will so increase our intelligence, that religion will fall away completely... but that's beyond the Singularity.

Well, assuming the Singularity itself is not a doctrine of religious faith, sometimes it sounds like one.

Yes, but this (nor anything else) would not do it. Note: religion != belief. Religion is a societal construct used to control, limit, and oppress people.

Couldn't agree more...this would be amazing.

I suspect finding evidence of other lifeforms in the universe, even highly intelligent lifeforms, would briefly be novel, but would have very little long-term effect on most people's daily lives.

Many people's religion has a huge effect on their daily lives, and news like this would have a huge impact on their faith.

Also, the information we exchange with them would have a huge impact on everything. What if they have the secret to efficient solar power? Or AI?

religions have an uncanny ability to either ignore scientific facts or bend their religion to fit with the facts. Remember that originally it was thought that the Earth was in the center of the universe because God had put it there. When the facts changed religion was eventually bent to acomodate the facts.

Science changes and religion adapts.

Religious tradition and dogma changes yes, but their "holy" books can't rewrite themselves.

Interestingly the bible doesn't make any comment to suggest there is no other life in the universe. In fact it does refer to extra terrestrial life; God sent "angels", literally translated "messengers", to the earth.

The holy books aren't like a country's constitution. They're all 'interpreted'. "What this passage means is...".

To be fair, a country's constitution must also be interpreted. That's why things like Supreme Court rulings are so important. The SC gets to decide, "What this amendment means is..."

True, but it's to a much lesser extent. The constituion of a country is pretty clear on who is in charge, how to select the people who are, how many representatives, how they're set up, where the power lies. The bulk of the information is pretty straight-forward. There's certainly plenty of edge cases, but it's not really presented in terms of parables.

"...their "holy" books can't rewrite themselves."

I'm shocked. Just shocked. You mean there's no hope that translation errors are going to be fixed? For example in hebrew the same word is used for either "young woman" and "virgin". And some believe that the christian made a translation mistake by transforming the young woman mary into the virgin mary.

I think that if that one is a mistake, it should be fixed ; )

Just a note, the "virgin" that applies directly to Mary (Luke 1:34, "And Mary said to the angel, 'How will this be, since I am a virgin?'", among other passages) is written in Greek, not Hebrew. Granted, there are some prophetic passages in the OT that use virgin (e.g. Isaiah 7:14, "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."), but just make sure everyone's on the same page when challenging dogma. Is the Greek word thought to be mistranslated as well?

That's a mistake alright, but it's made by naive atheist commenters on the intertubes (and/or poorly researched books).

The New Testament is quite clear on the matter of virginity, and no, it's not based on the misinterpretation of a single word.

(I'm not saying that the incident of the virgin birth is true, of course. Just that the "mistake" is false).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/the-pope/8009299/Po... I always found the Catholic Church's response amusing.

"The senior Vatican scientist, Brother Guy Consolmagno, said that he would be delighted if we encountered intelligent aliens and would be happy to baptise them. His pronouncement opens up the possibility of space missionaries heading out to the stars to convert aliens to Christianity. Speaking on the eve of addressing the British Science Festival, Dr Consolmangno said he had no problem with science and religion co-existing together. But he dismissed Creationism and claimed that the revival of “intelligent design" – the controversial theory that only God can explain gaps in the theory of evolution – was “bad theology". Dr Consolmango is one of a team of 12 astronomers working for the Vatican, said the Catholic Church had been supporting and funding science for centuries."

Granted, not enough centuries, but still a nice statement.

"but their "holy" books can't rewrite themselves."

Hah, want to bet? Both the Bible and Buddhist scriptures have been rewritten and retranslated and had additions made countless times in the last few thousands years. The teachings of Christ and Buddha are now not able to be found in those texts. They're just the words of ordinary people.

Right. Note my comment didn't say religion would be destroyed.

> news like this would have a huge impact on their faith.

Not necessarily. Non-believers often underestimate the intellectual sophistication that one can find in religious traditions.

For instance, Augustine in the 4th century was already saying things like this:

"With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures."

And C.S. Lewis (best known as a Christian apologist) wrote some interesting religious science fiction novels with extraterrestrial angels. (The Space Trilogy.)

Really?

Living as pet slaves for extra-terrestrial overlords would have little "long-term effect on most people's daily lives"?

I share this with you... Kind of.

Personally, I'd not be that mind-blown, more like vindicated for years of conjecture and lively debate.

How is it any way remarkable that we haven't yet ruled out the possibility of life on Mars, given what you correctly said about the high standard of proof?

> What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology.

You can never completely rule out that possibility, regardless of how much evidence you collect, but it's a matter of semantics at that point. Immediately and without collecting anymore data, we can dismiss the hypothesis that this is non-human technology as unworthy of our attention. It's not merely that the hypothesis has an immense burden of evidence to heft, but that it's a waste of time to even consider it.

Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition.

"Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition."

I agree, and I hope I didn't give the impression that this is what we should be doing. This thing is still just an observation - it's not evidence of anything yet. My point was this: we know of things that would effectively rule out the 'life as we know it on Mars' hypothesis (e.g. absolutely no evidence of any water, liquid or otherwise), but we're not seeing them.

It's true that we keep trying to dream up new ways of allowing the possibility of life on Mars to counter existing hurdles (e.g. hypothetical microbial life buried underground to shield from radiation), but if there were some solid evidence that would allow us to say 'yeah, there was almost certainly never any life on Mars, and neither is there any life on it today,' we would accept that filter.

We could then put Mars in the same category as the Moon when it comes to the life hypothesis. This is not the case - so I'd say a search for evidence of life on Mars (past or even present) is justified.

If you want to understand the "huh?" reactions you're getting, you might want to wrap your mind around the idea that it's effectively impossible to prove a negative.

Take a look at Russell's Teapot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_teapot

Follow that with careful study of Occam's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor

>it's effectively impossible to prove a negative.

Really? "There is no cat in this box".

Opens box. No cat inside. Proved.

You're totally correct. I should also consider the fact that you can prove that negative voltages exist. The opportunities for pedantically ignoring the context of the discussion at hand are endless.

You didn't stop at the "discussion at hand". You invoked the general principle of "proving a negative" and Russel's teapot (which is rather naive reasoning in itself).

Well, proving a negative is certainly feasible:

>In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence as positive proof of its non-occurrence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence

You might want to check the whole Wikipedia lemma on "Proving a negative" before retelling old wives tales:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative

I'm sort of annoyed by the notion that "you can't prove a negative". It's true when we're talking about empirical evidence, but it's only a specific case of "you can't prove anything". There's nothing at all special about negatives. It's just that at no point can we ever say "Well, that's it, our confidence in this belief is now 100%" (even though we can get damned close). Of course, sometimes people say "proved" to mean "supported by evidence to the point that all reasonable people should believe it". In that case, you can prove negatives just fine.

I think that the "can't prove a negative" thing must originate from the subtler "it's hard to confirm the null hypothesis", but even that one isn't a hard rule, so long as you have lots of statistical power.

>We could then put Mars in the same category as the Moon when it comes to the life hypothesis. This is not the case - so I'd say a search for evidence of life on Mars (past or even present) is justified.

Of course searching for evidence of current or past life on Mars is justified. But there is a huge difference between searching for evidence, and declaring every anomalous discovery to be potential evidence. In addition, the hypothesis "a technological civilization has lived on/visited/probed Mars" is a minuscule subset of the hypothesis "there is, or has been, some form of life on Mars".

There's a [dead] reply taking me to task on my use of the word "superstition" because apparently Wikipedia thinks that superstitions have to be beliefs in the supernatural. Like all semantic arguments, this is boring and dumb, but in point of fact, the first definition in every dictionary I can find supports my usage.

Here's Random House:

a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

Well, at 5mm it's clearly an antenna in the 112GHz band, from which we can conclude that 1) there'll be other alien antennas in line-of-site of this one, and 2) Martians clearly run very high bandwidth wifi networks.

Not to nitpick, but the fact that we can't rule out that possibility is nothing special.

You cannot rule out the possibility that when you drop a ball it won't fall to the ground. Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes. Only inductive reasoning operates that way.

"Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes."

Precisely, and so 'rule out' shouldn't be taken to imply an absolute ruling out of things. =)

Perhaps I should've said effectively ruled out. Life on the Moon has been 'effectively' ruled out (lack of liquid water, no atmosphere, full exposure to radiation and impactors, etc.) - but many years ago it wasn't extremely unreasonable to suppose that life might exist there. Now we know better - we'd have to reach for very convoluted scenarios to argue for the existence of life on the Moon. The same is not true for Mars (although it's not a picnic, obviously), which I would say is remarkable - there aren't many celestial bodies that have passed that test.

I find these things fun, of course some folks want to find alien technology, but I remind people that we've lost roughly 2/3rds of all the probes and ships that we've sent to Mars [1]. Since there isn't a lot of stuff covering them up, eventually we may find a bit of antenna from the Mars Observer sticking up where the spacecraft attempted to fly through the planet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Past_missio...

Seriously? You're implying that this is an antenna from an Earth spacecraft?

Well, it's a more reasonable explanation than aliens at least.

I'm interested as to why you'd assert that so confidently.

Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities?

I can't imagine there's anyone on this forum who doesn't want it to be alien technology.

I don't want it to be alien technology if it isn't.

I don't. If aliens exist and are able to travel to our vicinity, we're probably screwed as a species.

What is nice with alien is that we really don't know. So the sentence above tells much more about your pessimism than about aliens.

I tend toward a similar pessimism.

Hawking has said that we need only look at the history of inter-species relationships on our planet (let alone race relationships) to get a hint of what exopolitics might look like. He goes on to mention that in terms of the search for alien life, we'd do best to keep our heads low.

It's too late for keeping our heads low. There's a sphere of EM radiation travelling at 3x10^8 m/s that started expanding out from Earth about the time that we turned on the first radio set. It announces our presence to anything capable listening.

After a few light years non focused radio/tv transmissions will drop off into background noise. Active SETI is what's needed to send a signal to other planets

History up until... when? The last 60 years has seen considerable advances in inter-race politics, and it's improving all the time. Why wouldn't exopolitics be an advanced form of this?

except of course, when the "advanced" species wants something that the "lower" species has. What if liquid water is a rarity, and the earth happens to have a lot of it?

Sixty years is not a long time, and there's no reason to believe that this trend will continue forever.

There's also no reason to believe it won't, unless you're aiming for bias in the analysis.

I would not deny the possible that, for reasons I don't understand, any species advanced enough to be capable of interstellar travel behaves like a cross between Bono and Peter Singer. But I would not stake the survival of my species on it.

And there is a reason to believe that they probably won't be - they will be the product of Darwinian evolution, just like us, which is really not a very nice thing.

I completely agree on not staking the survival of the species on it, I just think that it's an overly cynical view. Same as I think most people are good people, but I still lock my car because a very few of them are thieves.

The strong assumption here is that the is no divide between intelligent and non intelligent life forms. I don't think it is the only view.

I'd rather compare alien encounter with something like Marco Polo going to China: he didn't wish to kill them all, was impressed by some achievement and inventions but was also disgusted by the Chinese diet. Came back and wrote a book, and it was so foreign most readers didn't believe him.

Any alien lifeform that can reproduce would be subject to Darwinian natural selection. It would tend to grow exponentially, if the resources were available, and if you do the math, the universe ain't big enough for more than one exponentially reproducing species.

You don't know. Alien could be of a different scale, ant or mountain sized, and then most likely wouldn't even notice or mind our presence.

If aliens decided to use our resources, they would probably do something like build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, which would mean there would be nothing left for us. It wouldn't matter how big they were, because they would use the resources we need. Look at it this way - we don't notice or mind the presence of insects or flowers, but that doesn't help them when we pave or plow their habitats. A lot of wild things escape us because we aren't that good at harvesting every possible resource, so there's a lot left over, but presumably aliens would be more efficient.

Because of the properties of exponential growth, there would be nothing left over for us. If two organisms double their numbers 250 times, their numbers would roughly equal the number of atoms in the observable universe, which means there would be none left for anyone else.

The only hope would be that they either don't reproduce, which seems unlikely since they would be the survivors of a process of Darwinian evolution just like any other critter, or that they're Space Vegans with a moral code against exterminating other species. We really don't know how they would think.

you seem to take exponential growth from granted, I'm not sure why. this seem to be the exception, not the rule.

we really don't know

I think that's the point. When you don't know anything about the motivations of an alien race that can easily wipe out our species, why would you take any chances?

Pretend for a moment that I have a Button. The owner of that Button can push it and eliminate every person on the planet besides the people that owner didn't want to kill (friends, family, city, state, country, whatever)

Would you be an advocate of giving that Button to any random person on Earth?

Any race of aliens capable of interstellar travel probably has that Button. So while (I assume) that you wouldn't be okay with giving that Button to any person on Earth -- you'd be okay with having an alien race that we don't understand even a little bit in possession of such a thing.

Oh yeah it's a totally safe assumption that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and made it all the way to Mars that they won't find us... you know... one planet over, with a century of RF radiating away from our home.

Unless of course you believe they're hiding inside Europa...

Which message are you even responding to? Maybe you should read the thread in order to understand what was being discussed. It had nothing to do with your response.

Well I don't think I said I'd purposefully give such a killer switch to an alien race, I just said we don't know.

We are all aware of the reasons to be pessimist, because of all the books and movies, but there are reasons to be optimist too: advanced technology may come with advanced ethics, for instance.

This isn't about "giving" the button to an alien race.

You criticized the original poster's sense of pessimism for holding the only parsimonious, evidence-based and logical position on the subject.

Have whatever fanciful opinion you want to on the subject, but pretending it's based in anything but wishful thinking is naive.

I love (sarcasm) how a supposedly technologically superior and enlightened species of non-earth intelligent beings would only be out to destroy or punish us, according to science fiction and a lot of people.

Do you remember what happened when the europeans travelled around the world? 90% of populations died from new illnesses. They basically saw nothing ill in settling and displacing the remaining population.

Well, alien illness probably won't kill us. Without a common ancestry, it's highly unlikely that anything that uses an alien as a host can live in our bodies.

We don't know that. There are plenty of examples on Earth of cross-species infections. No telling how microbial/fungal agents could directly attack or indirectly impact the delicate balance here on Earth.

Further, any microbe hitching a ride aboard an alien may well find Earth's general environment to be easy to thrive in. Think Kudzu, but at the microbial level. Eventually, the alien microbe and/or the natural Earth microbes will mutate in order to out-survive the other.

You assume that all life would be carbon based. And even assuming a "super fit" carbon-base alien microbe, the worst you could get would be some kind of eco-disaster that will end up being controlled anyway - like some sort of alien-algae overpopulating our oceans doing some eco-havoc. Even that would involve a kind of "super-fitness" created by an accelerated evolution running for much longer than here on Earth, as this microbe will have to compete with many others that are much more adapted to our environment.

Anything really dangerous, like something that can infect multiple species, would have to be "engineered". "Mother nature" (aka evolution) doesn't engineer bio-weapons made to take over alien ecosystems - you would need huge time spans plus ubiquitous means of interstellar transportation for natural selection to favor such features (think "star gates" but zillions of them with tons of creatures and cargo running through them for at least tens of millions of years).

So I'd take contact with a "non-engineered super infection" like you describe as a sign that someone has been operating a huge network of interstellar transportation systems for quite some time, as this would provide the only "peacefull" evolutionary history (again, excluding civilizations expert in bio-war things...) for such thing to evolve, so it would be quite a good omen for hopes "intergalactic fraternity" :)

The possibility of non-carbon based life is so remote as to be irrelevant. We'd have to go through many star birth and supernovae cycles to get to the point where silicon is even anywhere near as abundant as carbon is now.

As for microbes from other worlds, who knows. The properties of water are pretty much required for life (as far as we know) and so they'd have 0 trouble interfacing with most organisms. Combine that with the fact that the basic amino acids can form in a wide range of conditions and you've got the recipe for interference. Also, infections happen when organisms invade and multiple, some times the damage is a secondary side effect (i.e. waste or toxic byproducts)

It's rare that scifi paints klingons and their ilk as 'enlightened'.

Why would they be enlightened?

They might not be out to destroy or punish us. They might take no more interest in us than we took in thousands of species that have been destroyed to make way for farms and shopping malls. Maybe our planet would make a good Vogon parking lot.

enlightened species

Name the occurrence in the history of our planet where the much-more advanced/capable species did not displace and diminish the indiginent one. In many cases, the more advanced or aggressive species completely wiped out the existing one.

There's a lot more that's extremely unlikely in the Star Trek universe besides just transporter beams and faster-than-light travel.

A sufficiently advanced species might not feel any more compunction about eradicating the human race than I would feel about eradicating mosquitoes.

> Name the occurrence in the history of our planet where the much-more advanced/capable species did not displace and diminish the indiginent one.

Name the occurrences where they did. That word, species, I'm not so sure you know what it means.

You seriously want a list of every species alive today? (Or can I just mention homo neanderthalensis?)

No, I just wanted to make sure you weren't conflating what happens to species with what happened with Columbus and Hispaniola. I'm not so sure we know in enough detail exactly what happened to Neanderthals for that to be a good example, especially since the conversation is about the meeting of different civilizations, not just different species.

Humans and buffalo. Humans and passenger pigeons. Humans and mastodons. Humans and elephants. Humans and tigers. Humans and smallpox. Humans and dodos. Etc.

> Enlightened

Huge, unfounded assumption.

Enlightenment and technological superiority don't necessarily go hand in hand. In fact, looking at human history, a lot of technological advancement came directly out of actual or potential warfare. (Remember that the U.S. went to the moon to beat the Russians.)

As Douglas Adams said:

"Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason."

You're trying to use humans as an example for the possible disposition and psychology of aliens? Really?

Does it not strike you inappropriate to do so considering the billions of years of evolution and absolutely random events like mass extinctions that led to the rise of mammals and eventually humans?

Humans are the only real evidence we have of how a technological society develops. Evolution produced us, and evolution arises from the physical laws of the universe. Why should we believe it would operate differently elsewhere in the universe?

No planet will have infinite resources, so it's logical that life will develop through continuous competition for territory and materials--just like it did here.

Looking back at Earth's history, it's not like we are the only violent forms of life we know of. Quite the opposite.

If the evidence becomes associated with conspiracy theory though, many people prefer to shy away because of the commonly held feelings about "those people." For example the recent claims of ET corpses being genetically studied, mysteriously absent from headlines it seems: http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1109-disclosu...

No, it's just the more reasonable. Most likely it's not any kind of artifact, but we have a lot more evidence for the existence of man-made spacecraft than we do for alien spacecraft, and Mars is a lot closer to Earth than it is to anywhere aliens might come from.

Hmmm... I'm not sure we have reasonable evidence either way on this thing. At face value it is a seemingly artificial object where (reasonably) such a thing should not be, and (reasonably) you cannot honestly claim to know where in the universe aliens might come from.

Please stop butchering Occam's Razor.

> Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities?

The more plausible of the two (Occam's razor). Even though it's highly unlikely to stumble on a spacecraft wreckage on Mars. It is even more unlikely for this to be an alien tech. Though, I do admit, I want it to be :)

I think Occams razor would dictate that it is just a weird looking piece of metal formed in the early days of mars, when there was more volcanic activity.

Regardless of your interpretation of Drake's equation, we have no evidence for life existing anywhere else but on Earth. We never sent Curiosity to look for intelligent life, we sent her to look for evidence of past life or life buried in the rock. To assume that one of the first shiny object we see could even remotely indicate alien life is laughable.

Discovery of alien would be nothing but revolutionary for the human race but don't let scifi and fantasy get in the way of reality. A rock formation like this is not unheard of just because you've never heard about it.

I dunno. We did find that WW2 bomber on the moon once.. http://www.flickr.com/photos/62440303@N04/5683785190/

So those are the ONLY choices for the source of something metallic-looking on a roughly earth-like planet in our Solar System?

A. Aliens

B. Piece of one of our own spacecrafts

I choose C. None of the above.

That seems extremely unlikely. If a few dozen planes crashed on Earth (on land), how likely do you reckon you'd be to ever run across significant debris from any of them just by randomly driving around?

Here is a map of mars landings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_landing#Image_map_of_Mars_...

They are separated by hundreds/thousands of miles.

Devil's advocate: those are of the successful landings, it doesn't include the other Mars "landings" that were unsuccessful or unintentional. Such as Beagle 2, MPL, MCO, Deep Space 2, Mars 2, and Mars 6. Here's a full list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_M...

Most of the impact sites of those objects are known except for a few. MCO's impact point is unknown and whether or not Beagle 2 hit the surface is unknown (it may have skipped out of the atmosphere into a heliocentric orbit, or into an elliptical orbit and reentered elsewhere, or burned up entirely).

Even so, the chances are astronomically low that Curiosity has managed to stumble upon the wreck of another spacecraft.

> Even so, the chances are astronomically low that Curiosity has managed to stumble upon the wreck of another spacecraft.

And the most likely alternative is?

The parts falling off this vehicle are of the very finest American manufacture.

parts falling off this vehicle

Hate to be cynical, but this seems most likely explanation.

If only there were any minerals that were prone to being shiny, we'd have one.

The problem is the shape, not just the material. As a layman, I'm not used to rocks having that shape, except in very rare circumstances but in those cases "abnormal" shapes are usually found in clusters (Grand Canyon etc). This is a seemingly-solitaire rock of abnormal material AND abnormal shape, which is possible, but almost as unlikely as random probe debris.

Just to put a bit of context here, you should visit Death Valley. It is the strangest and most wonderful place you can walk around and find amazing mineral deposits, geologic formations, and generally odd sorts of things.

Mars has had during its life a very active volcanic system, these systems imply magma, and magma implies melting and cooling of basalt. 'Shiny' objects in volcanic fields are typically obsidian or some other form of basaltic glass. Erosion by wind of a piece of obsidian can carve it into a pretty bizarre shape.

So all said and done, the geology is fascinating. And one of the differences between having a rover up there and having humans up there was that this would have been a 15 minute news story with humans, "Oh look, shiny!", "What is it?", photo, photo, chip, chip, "Some sort of <analysis result>, what is over where you are?"

Now its 'next day' at best, and 'in a month' if there is a long list of things to do before you get a break at worst. Sigh.

If Earth were devoid of vegetation and instead uniformly rocky, running into a sliver of a downed plane might've been far more probable. Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that doesn't look like a rock.

> Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that doesn't look like a rock.

I don't think anybody is confusing the likelihood of finding a piece of a plane due to not looking at the picture well enough. It's a question of if there would be anything in that picture to begin with.

>If Earth were devoid of vegetation and instead uniformly rocky, running into a sliver of a downed plane might've been far more probable.

Yes, more probable, but still not probable enough to seriously consider.

>Especially with volunteers scouring every taken image for anything that doesn't look like a rock.

You'd still be preposterously unlikely to even encounter any debris.

It's probably still a lot more likely than stumbling across a crashed alien spacecraft.

More likely this may be human created with Photoshop.

That should be easy for nasa to invalidate this finding then.

I'm sure they can see from the pixels and from seeing quite a bit of shoops in their time ;)

Those images are straight from NASA's website. Unless you're suggesting there's a photoshop troll on NASA's Curiosity team?

Here's the link to the full-res photo from NASA: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0173MR092... and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00173/mcam/0173...

Why those things?

My first thought is that it's a vein of metal that is exposed.

Agreed. Curiosity is exploring an area known (or at least apparently) to have had quite a bit of water activity in the past. It seems quite likely that a river or glacier would have peeled off all the softer stone around the metal and left something like this behind.

Usually I prefer not to speculate on this sort of thing, because if we just wait we'll have a ton more information soon. However, I wonder if it could be a fulgerite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite

Interesting theory. I had to check, and yes, Mars does have dry lightning (in dust storms).

If not that, I wonder if it's something produced volcanically like onyx.

I was thinking an ore vein that was harder than the material around it, and said outer material had been weathered away faster to expose it.

Either that or a door handle! :P

Mars likely had more lightning when it was wetter, as well. Also, some Mars rocks and regolith have extremely high concentrations of Iron, so lightning induced in situ sintering of a little hunk of fulguritic Iron isn't out of the question.

The cool thing is that Curiosity is so crammed full of equipment for studying mineralogy and chemical composition that we'll likely be able to solve the riddle pretty quick.

If the object really is 0.5 cm tall, it could be similar to this calcium vein in a rock which is comparable in size: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=5017

Yep, it has a distinctly 'mineral vein' appearance to it.

The human brain is a remarkable pattern recognition machine with a keen penchant for extracting meaning from noise.

This, of course, will turn out to be nothing more than an unremarkable optical illusion; an urban legend is born.

That doesn't seem likely, since there's images from a second camera of a stereo pair. The suggestion that it's a fulgerite or offthrow of the landing seem the likliest explanations to me.

This is called Pareidolia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).

> Pareidolia ... is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.

When you're driving in a snow storm (sometimes unavoidable) one of the hardest things is to maintain a feeling of heading and not to respond to every impulse when your brain thinks it has made meaning out of the falling snow just ahead of the car. And even harder to realize when it actually has picked up something of significance.

I got caught in snow storms several times and what surprised me was how much physical effort it takes to do this for any length of time.

So that's where R2D2 ended up.

It looks almost like molten metal poured into a sand cavity, and then with the sand blown away. I guess you wouldn't get oxidation or similar activity on Mars (?), so it remains nice and shiny. I wonder how far the shape goes down, and what could have caused it?

> I guess you wouldn't get oxidation or similar activity on Mars

Mars is principally deeply covered in iron III oxide. That's why it's red.

I'm hoping that we can just drive the rover over to take a closer look before very long. I can't guess whether this is the result of past erosion or the result of a past meteorite impact, or even some offthrow of the Curiosity landing that just appears to be embedded in the rock but really isn't. In any case, this seems like it will be educational.

"Images"? Really? What is happening to language? It took a photo! Imagine someone saying: "I went to Paris and imaged the Eiffel Tower".

Photographs are formed by light through a lens falling onto film (or a sensor).

NASA has images like that. They also have images formed after extensive post-processing, or merges of several images, or from frequencies other than light, or computer rendered from map data, or etc etc.

I can easily imagine someone saying that. What is happening to language? Only the same thing that has happened to it for thousands of years. Language changes and evolves – inevitably, constantly, and in my opinion, beautifully.

Just as you used "photo" synonymously with "photograph", "image" is coming - as another commmenter pointed out - to become synonymous with a photo because languages evolve. I don't understand the irritation.

"The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one", he said.

Surely there is a very reasonable possibility of a crashed asteroid/comet... at least much more so than some of the other wild speculation (non-human intelligent life, etc.)

As a reminder, if a human explorer had seen this, we'd already know much, much more about it. They'd naturally take a few steps over for a closer look as soon as they saw it.

Robots are a poor substitute for humans when it comes to planetary exploration.

Well, exactly because humans are not replaceable.

Nobody cares that Curiosity is not going back to earth. For an astronaut, that's different

Not to mention all the instruments in Curiosity (which not necessarily a manned mission to Mars with the intention of coming back would have)

Well, exactly because humans are not replaceable.

I think we could all agree to send Paris Hilton to Mars.

A human explorer probably wouldn't have seen it though; it's really tiny. The reason this was seen at all is that the high resolution images are being looked over by a large number of people on Earth. NASA themselves didn't even spot it.

(High resolution imagery + many many human eyes) > Human eyes

Never mind that Curiosity has now been operating for 6 months without food, water, or sleep, and is expected to continue doing so for years.

It's shiny, the odds are very high that a human would indeed have seen it. For one thing, a human's eyes are constantly processing the world as they move through it. Curiosity's eyes are not.

What Curiosity has done in 6 months could have been done in a couple of weeks by a human, sleep time included. Robots are vastly inferior to humans for this work, and will remain so for some time to come.

Resembles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster

Kind of looks like a drill bit to me

Perspective switch: "It's an alien weird shiny object much larger than us, and it's mobile! It has arms and lets Hmm...we won't shoot it down, let's wait and see what it does next. I think it's looking at us directly now! On the side it reads, 'C U R I O S I T Y'"

I'll go straight out and say it: if there is intelligence elsewhere in the universe, we have no guarantees to say that that form of cognition would in anyway resemble our own since the only models we have presume terran conditions.

Mathematics appears to be universal.

Good info... i want to say thanks for share with us...

Its a UFO from Venus

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