Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
81–90 of 93 posts
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#82I'm probably crazy, but I've been staring at the two images for five minutes and can't see anything in one that isn't in the other, unless it is obscured by the annoying "view related gallery"button. EDIT: Ok, half the time I load the page, the page works and I see the rock, but the other half of the time, the image is shifted down, the top half of the display box is black, and the "rock" is off screen...
You're not crazy, they've discovered a Schrödinger's rock. With a ridiculously high Planck's constant, and conscious observation working backward in time through an imager and interplanetary transmitter to collapse the wave function. So, pretty big news. [Edited to add umlaut.]
Wouldn't Schrödinger's rock with a high Planck's constant be a stick?
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#83How big a deal is it, scientifically speaking, that the rover has access to the freshly-exposed underside of the rock?
The original Viking landers had scoops capable of penetrating a few cm down:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/vl1_11d12...
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty big. I've often wondered why they don't send a dragline digger to Mars, so they can dig a decent trench. When Spirit's wheel broke and they started dragging it along, digging a little trench, they made a nice discovery and that was with something not designed to dig at all. If they could get a few feet down, who knows what they could find?!
The Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far. It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a…
What exactly is the downside of contaminating the environment?
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#85Looking at the images, there appears to be a disturbed region above and to the left of the mystery rock, suggesting it (or something) might have impacted the ground there.
The question I've got is whether there's any sort of local slope down which the rock could have fallen on its own. That's hardly clear from the photos.
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far. It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a…
What exactly is the downside of contaminating the environment?
Makes it harder to what compunds are indigenous and what you just brought yourself. No use shouting Eureka over some organic compound in a hole you just spilled oil in.
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#87Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far. It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a…
What exactly is the downside of contaminating the environment?
In general great effort is made to ensure that probes don't contain any biological contaminates so if we do discover signs of life we're very certain it wasn't a microbe that hitched a ride.
As far as contamination from drilling (due to lubricants or something else entirely) I imagine that the desire for general cleanliness is for much the same reason. If we're going to spend hundreds of millions of billions of dollars on a probe to another world we want to be really confident anything interesting we find is actually from that world and not Earth.
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#89I have to admit I laughed at this: "Only two options have so far been identified as the rock’s source: 1) The rover either “flipped” the object as it maneuvered or, 2) it landed there, right in front of the rover, after a nearby meteorite impact event." So, you know, our leading theories are that either the rover did it somehow, or, approximately 8-10 orders of magnitude less likely, we just witnessed a meteor strike…
What else could it be?
Calvin and Hobbes?
Honestly its not like we have many real options. The rover flipped it or it fell there sound good too me. The area is pretty open there so it didn't crack off another rock, let alone the shape precludes that.
Re: Mystery Rock 'Appears' in Front of Mars Rover
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not crazy. Psst. Discovery folks. You've got yourself a race condition. You're calculating a `margin-top` to center an image vertically irrespective of whether that image has loaded. You either need to explicitly set the width and height as attributes on the image (good for preventing reflow anyway) or hold off on calculating your dimensions until after the image has loaded. You could even just wait for window…
CSS has race conditions ?
Imagine the horror.