This 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.
This 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.
It 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.
I 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).
And 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.
This reminds me of when I heard the phrase "lenticular cloud". I looked it up, hoping to learn something about how these clouds are formed, etc. It simply means "shaped like a lentil".
Perhaps this is autocorrect gone awry, but it has nothing to do with lentils.
Not a meteorologist, but from all I understand it means lens-shaped, and to me that immediately gives a strong clue as to how they form since lenses have focal points and can, to some degree, have shapes expressed as formulae about some origin. Which to me is suggestive of the relation to the mountains around which they form.
I think he got offended because he understood "plant-like" in a functional sense (e.g. that it uses photosynthesis), maybe "plant-shaped" would be more accurate.
Stalagmite-like formation would also be an accurate description, without the hype. The abuse of bombastic announcements like this one does a disservice to science in general and the space exploration in particular. This gotta stop.
It'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.
I 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.
I think people believe that you need complex/expensive equipment for good coffee, but that's not true. Get yourself a grinder and a chemex and be happy!
I think the prevalence of people buying morning coffee is a more complex phenomenon.
In Malaysia, you would see people complaining if their Nasi Lemak costed more than RM 5, but the same person would happily pay RM 15 for coffee. It appeared that there was a norm at play, that Nasi Lemak belongs to Malaysian streets and should be cheap, while coffee is a western thing and it's normal to be expensive.
For some others, queuing up, the micro-interactions, and drinking while walking to the office (or even back to their home office) seems to be a morning ritual. I could see myself in this group if I did not prefer my own blend and brew.
Pour-over, single-origin coffee costs about 120฿ in Thailand, 3× street food as well. Cafés are often used for setting for social media photos as much as the coffee itself and they are popular—especially right after lunch.
But with coffee being grown in the North coffee itself isn’t seen as “Western”, and the older styles using robusta beans—like กาแฟโบราณ, โอเลี้ยง, etc.—are still sold for 20–30฿ from street carts, while the arabica espresso options with an ‘experience’ to it costs way more.
On 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.)
There's nowhere left near me at all that sells the New York Times, which was the paper I liked to read in physical form. Used to be a fun weekend ritual to pick up the Sunday edition from the coffee shop down the street and sit around reading things and doing the crossword, but I can't find it anymore. I'm not sure if it was covid that killed off the distribution or just the economics of print.
Making those assumptions about IndrekR isn’t very fair. Like him/her, I brew my own coffee (using locally purchased beans) but I go out of my way to support local businesses. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since 2010 and the only online purchases I’ve made in the last three years were FFP masks (I couldn’t find a local chemists who stocked them for some strange reason), RAM chips and an SSD drive (the local PC shops are gone). Having said that, I regretted paying €20 for a bicycle chain from a local bike shop (who weren’t particularly pleasant to deal with) when I could have purchased the same chain from an online retailer for €5.
Almost certainly the latter. The economics of distribution are extremely harsh. Fixed cost per site per day has to be covered by all parties and a profit. Say it costs USD$30 for a van stop at a place, idle the vehicle, unload the goods, and pay the driver then you need to sell a whole lotta newspapers to break even. The solution, if you enjoy print as I do, is to purchase longer term periodicals. Weekly news magazines are good. The New Yorker, Economist, etc. Smiles from China where we have no such options.
It's a fun ritual. I go with my wife to get a coffee in the morning twice or three times a week. I pay with my watch, and we sometimes talk about astronomy.
I wonder what the data-rate is like (or rather, I'm too lazy to look it up myself). The image is 1010K which with a 14.4 Kbit/s connection would take ~10 minutes to download from Mars. 1 KBit/s would take ~2.5 hours.
NASA's Mars rovers use several orbital probes to relay communications back to Earth. They do have radios that can talk directly to Earth up to 32kbps but primarily use the relays. The UHF uplink to the Mars Recon Orbiter is up to 2Mbps and it's visible to the rover for about eight minutes a day. The orbiter's uplink to Earth is can hit up to 6Mbps.
The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have a fair amount of on-board storage (for an interplanetary probe). So they can spool a lot of data and then send a batch to the orbiters and then go about their next tasks. The orbiters also have a lot of storage (for interplanetary probes) and can themselves spool a lot of data until they're in a transmit window to Earth.
The Mars rovers aren't doing OnlyFans livestreams. They've got science data to upload and can empty their spool in the time the orbiters are in range. They also have their direct uplinks to Earth at up to 32kbps for control and telemetry.
While I agree it's amazing and inspiring, I'd also emphasize that we have pictures [1] and even sounds [2] from the surface of Venus and it's 91 atmospheres of surface pressure alongside 900F degree surface temperature. Those are from 40+ years ago. 20 years before that, we'd never sent a single object into space.
And so if you asked people from that time first consuming that media what they imagine the world (in terms of space) would look like 40 years later, us looking at somewhat higher resolution pictures from Mars would sound skeptical to the point of absurdity.
> And so if you asked people from that time first consuming that media what they imagine the world (in terms of space) would look like 40 years later, us looking at somewhat higher resolution pictures from Mars would sound skeptical to the point of absurdity.
As such a person, I do in fact concur. We really expected a moon colony fairly soon, and by now, a thriving colony on Mars.
We were wildly naïve about how hard it was. To have a self-sustaining colony on Mars, you would have to re-invent every single piece of technology we use on Earth to work in an environment of complete scarcity.
I agree, thus the discussion about stagnation of Peter Thiel.
I think that WW2 and the cold war push the US to outdo itself, after that we became comfortable.
Interesting 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?
As 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!
On 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.
Considering 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.
Could 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.
I 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.
People 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.
140 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadCloseup: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/03397/mhli/3397MH0...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Areology/comments/t18c2r/desert_flo...
https://twitter.com/kevinmgill/status/1497274717077585922
https://cosmiclog.com/2022/02/25/martian-flower-blooms-in-a-...
It looks like coral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_habit#/media/File:Bari...
After a long time of sanding down.
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.
1: https://study.com/academy/lesson/sea-sponge-lesson-for-kids....
Not a meteorologist, but from all I understand it means lens-shaped, and to me that immediately gives a strong clue as to how they form since lenses have focal points and can, to some degree, have shapes expressed as formulae about some origin. Which to me is suggestive of the relation to the mountains around which they form.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117500
In Malaysia, you would see people complaining if their Nasi Lemak costed more than RM 5, but the same person would happily pay RM 15 for coffee. It appeared that there was a norm at play, that Nasi Lemak belongs to Malaysian streets and should be cheap, while coffee is a western thing and it's normal to be expensive.
For some others, queuing up, the micro-interactions, and drinking while walking to the office (or even back to their home office) seems to be a morning ritual. I could see myself in this group if I did not prefer my own blend and brew.
But with coffee being grown in the North coffee itself isn’t seen as “Western”, and the older styles using robusta beans—like กาแฟโบราณ, โอเลี้ยง, etc.—are still sold for 20–30฿ from street carts, while the arabica espresso options with an ‘experience’ to it costs way more.
A V60 pourover is usually much more better ( and easier to clean and less chances of breaking too )
For me atleast V60 usually provides consistently better coffee then a chemex brewed one and is also less effort.
(I then go home a brew a pot for me and my wife - who prefers to sleep in on Saturdays.)
Compare and contrast the Eagle Nebula from it's raw form enhanced with "false colors".
It’s sweet how the simplest things bring babies joy, but we wouldn’t accomplish all that much if jingling keys fascinated us our whole lives.
You can probably fund a moon colony just on tourism and entertainment.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/mission/communications/
The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have a fair amount of on-board storage (for an interplanetary probe). So they can spool a lot of data and then send a batch to the orbiters and then go about their next tasks. The orbiters also have a lot of storage (for interplanetary probes) and can themselves spool a lot of data until they're in a transmit window to Earth.
And so if you asked people from that time first consuming that media what they imagine the world (in terms of space) would look like 40 years later, us looking at somewhat higher resolution pictures from Mars would sound skeptical to the point of absurdity.
[1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZDW53U8qQ
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Sony_wat...
As such a person, I do in fact concur. We really expected a moon colony fairly soon, and by now, a thriving colony on Mars.
We were wildly naïve about how hard it was. To have a self-sustaining colony on Mars, you would have to re-invent every single piece of technology we use on Earth to work in an environment of complete scarcity.
Why are people taking pictures of Chuck Norris’s bathroom?
I think those are called Fulgurites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite
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!
https://www.space.com/mars-lightning-weak-thin-atmosphere.ht...
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.
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.
A few millimetres, according to this Twitter post: https://mobile.twitter.com/abbyfrae/status/14973756989855211...