RIP Spirit

There have been numerous reports over the last couple of days on the fact that after many attempts, NASA is giving up on re-establishing contact with the Spirit Rover. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy provides what strikes me as a very fitting eulogy. Followup: Another concise but satisfying summary of the life and times of Spirit by Ryan Anderson at The Martian Chronicles.

I got quite a bit of flack, early in Spirit's rovings, for pointing out that it was very slow, primitive, and limited. I stick by those comments, though. With a six-hour source of breathable air, a hammer, hand lens and camera, I could accomplish in that time much of what Spirit took six years to do. What my critics failed to grasp was that this was intended as a slam on neither the rover, its engineers, nor the mission scientists who managed the day-to-day logistics, data acquisition and analysis. The fact is, we do not have the means to put me (or others more competent) onto Mars alive. Spirit was state-of-the-art... ten years ago. My point was simply that compared to technologies of the near future, or (drool) human explorers, it's important to understand just how limited Spirit really was. That should take nothing away from the accomplishments of the plucky little rover that could, but rather provide motivation and inspiration for the next steps in our exploration of Mars and other solid-surfaced planets and moons.

To Paraphrase the X-Files, the truth is out there, and I want to believe we have the determination to find it. I know we have the resources. I know if we choose to, we can figure out how to make it happen. The only thing I'm uncertain about is whether we have the will.

Certainly, taking the next step will help make up for the undignified manner of Spirit's demise:

Moonday: Phobos

Phobos is the inner and larger of Mars' two moons. It is named for "fear" (Greek, Phobos, the son of Ares, who in turn was the god of war). Like Mimas a couple weeks ago, this moon suffered a collision earlier in its history that was very large compared to the moon itself, and as you can see from the fractures radiating from the large crater on the right limb, the moon was almost destroyed by the blast. Image from The Big Foto, where there are a number of other stunning pictures of this moon and a couple of Deimos as well.

Pathological Geomorphology... In Spaaaaaaace!

Via Emily Lakdawalla, blogger extraordinaire at The Planetary Society, I have just come across The IAG Planetary Geomorphology Working Group's Image of the Month. Here's May's image......and here's the index. I found the description fairly accessible, though I think you'd want a good background in geofundamentals to make sense of it. Putting it another way, it's not as technical as many journal articles I've tried (with varying degrees of success) to slog through... but if you don't know your geo, chem, planetary geo, spectroscopy, etc. at least a little, it'll be a tough go. Which is where Emily steps in (same link as the first one above): not only does she provide a stripped-down, translated explanation of the results, she provides some really useful and interesting background information for what we're seeing in the images above. For example, (click for full size) (Credit: Emily Lakdawalla ) the graphic below compares two aspects of imaging satellites orbiting Mars. The size of the squares represent the pixel size of the images- essentially the resolution- while the height of the stack represents the number of discrete spectral bands the satellite can resolve.

I'm going to make you read at least Emily's post to find the results and interpretation for the tres kewl landscape shown above. And I'm really looking forward to going through the previous entries in this series. There's one on Phobos that I'm particularly stoked about. See ya!

Snarky News

From The CSM:

A Wednesday article in the the Sun, a British tabloid, carried the headline 'NASA: Evidence of Life on Mars,' leaving scientists from the US space agency wondering if there's intelligent life in the Sun.

I think if news sources themselves were more aggressive about ridiculing bad reporting, it might provide some motivation to get it right. I have commented positively on the the overall quality of science reporting at the Christian Science Monitor in the past... a fact that I still find kind of surprising in the context of what I know about the Christian Science Church's belief system. But once again, they come through with a politely scathing critique of bad reporting.

The piece claimed that the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which have been wheeling around the surface of the red planet since January 2004, found pond scum, which the paper calls "the building blocks of life as we know it."

"I think they have taken this stuff out of context," Brown said.

Such a discovery would truly have been groundbreaking, since pond scum, scientifically known as cyanobacteria, are actually a form of life themselves, not just building blocks for it.

"I can only assume that the Sun reporter misunderstood," said Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover project, who was quoted in the story. "What Spirit and Opportunity have found is sulfate minerals... not organic materials, not pond scum, and not the building blocks of life as we know it.

More like this, please!

...And This Is A World in Which I Could Not Live

Geologists: 'We May Be Slowly Running Out Of Rocks'

RALEIGH, NC—A coalition of geologists are challenging the way we look at global stone reserves, claiming that, unless smarter methods of preservation are developed, mankind will eventually run out of rocks.

(...)

Kaiser claims that humanity has "wreaked havoc" on the earth's stones by picking them up, carrying them around, and displacing them from their natural habitat.

"A rock can take millions of years to form, but it only takes a second for someone to skip a smooth pebble into a lake, and then it is gone." Dr. Kaiser said. "Perhaps these thoughtless rock-skippers don't care if they leave our planet completely devoid of rocks, but what about our children? Don't they deserve the chance to hold a rock and toss it up and down a few times?"

(The Onion) The second paragraph reminds me of a favorite pastime on field trips- screwing with the geologic record. One time we left a chunk of coal near the Owens Valley Fault Scarp near Lone Pine (a site frequently visited on geological field trips, which is key). On the return to Oregon, we left a large block of granite from Lone Pine in the pumice from the Mazama eruption along Highway 97 north of Chemult. In turn, I once found a piece of (Paleozoic?) fossiliferous limestone at Siskyou Summit along I-5 near the OR-CA border. That cut is made entirely of Cascade volcanic rock; the nearest limestone (though not marble) is hundreds of miles away.

With all deference to the experts interviewed by the Onion, I'd prefer to think "picking them up, carrying them around, and displacing them from their natural habitat," not only challenges young geologists to think critically, but provides unique opportunities for the rocks themselves to hybridize, introducing novel lithic varieties for future generations of geologists to study and learn from.

And in other science news from The ONN,

Mars Rover Beginning To Hate Mars

But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning the exorbitant cost and scientific relevance of the mission.

"Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work," Callas said. "Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message 'HAPPY NOW?'"

Well, yes. I am. Thanks, Onion

Noctis Labyrinthus

Folded and faulted rocks at Noctis Labyrinthus, on Mars. I have long wondered to what extent tectonic deformation played a role in Mars' "geology." It's pretty clear that for much of its history, Mars has been more or less dead in terms of tectonism. Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano anywhere, is interpreted to be the equivalent of Earth's hot-spot volcanism erupting onto a stable, unmoving crust. So it was possible that the Martian crust was never really mobile. But you don't get features like those above without a least a little crustal motion. (Red Orbit)

Salt Flats and Dunes on Mars

This is a crop from a much larger image posted at Red Orbit yesterday showing what is tentatively interpreted as a salt flat on a playa. The polygonally jointed white material may be chloride salts such as halite and sylvite. If so, this would indicate the past presence of standing water, which, as the accompanying blurb states, would indicate "a habitable (but not necessarily inhabited) environment." It is being considered as a landing site for future rover missions. The RO post is here, and here's the full size image (2048 X 1536 px.), which is well worth a close look.

The Moon's in the Sky, Like a Big Pizza Pie

Amore!Wouldn't want to carry the joke too far, though; someone might think I'm saying they have eruptions all over their face. (Io labeled, from The Planetary Society Weblog; click over for more information, and two higher-resolution versions)

Followup: They also have an interesting article on recent science from the Mars rovers.

Trieste: 50 Years Ago

On 23 January, 1960, the bathyscaphe Trieste propelled Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, which at more than 10,900m (35,800ft) down is the deepest spot in the ocean.

BBC has a report on both the amazing (and extraordinarily dangerous) events of 50 years ago today, and the marine biology that is currently being carried out in oceanic trenches around the world. The lead graphic has a number of embedded videos, about a minute to minute-and-a-half each, which I watched yesterday, but I didn't get around to reading the article until just a moment ago.

I don't feel the same wistfulness about our apparently lack of a modern "manned deep-sea exploration program" as I do about our lack of a manned deep space program. A life support failure in the trench environment would kill people even faster than a similar breach in space. So not only is putting a person in that environment extremely difficult and expensive, it's unnecessarily risky. And while the logistics of sample retrieval are not trivial, neither are they outrageously difficult. The bottom is, at a maximum, 10 or 11 km away from the surface. For biological purposes, studying the fauna in situ makes more sense anyway.

On the other hand, consider the following image of a rock on Mars, posted today at Red Orbit, which I set aside earlier with the idea of posting it as the "Frustrating Rock Photo of the Day."

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a rock called "Marquette Island" from mid-November 2009 until mid-January 2010. Studies of texture and composition suggest that this rock, not much bigger than a basketball, originated deep inside the Martian crust. A crater-digging impact could have excavated the rock and thrown it a long distance, to where Opportunity found it along the rover's long trek across the Meridiani plain toward Endeavour Crater.

(Click here for full size) A second with a rock hammer, and one could have both a fresh (unpolished) surface, and a hand sample for a thin section and detailed chemical analysis. I'm assuming this is some sort of peridotite or eclogite, and I assume that this conclusion was reached on the basis of chemical analysis that the rover carried out. Why frustrating? I'd love to know more about the Martian mid crust, and this picture tells me next to nothing. It's coated with dust, so I can see neither mineral grains nor textures. There seems to be a faint fan-shaped lineation from the lower right of the sample to the upper left, which suggests a shatter cone. That would be consistent, but without the ability to turn it for differing illuminations and a three dimensional perspective, the pattern is so faint that I'm not really confident in my observation. How would this compare to rocks from a similar position in the earth's crust? How would it differ? So many questions! And all I have is a danged photo, which tells me next to nothing about this rock.

So is it more important to learn more about the deepest ocean floor or about rocks on Mars? That's the totally wrong question: it's important to learn about both, and it's impossible for me to objectively rank which one is "more" important. This amazing universe in which we find ourselves is worthy of trying to comprehend... whatever it takes. If it can be done effectively with remotely operated vehicles, that's super. If not, send a person.

Or Are They Bajadas?

In my continuing effort to ignore the ongoing demise of the human race (shorter news: you and your posterity are soooooo screwed), here's a very cool satellite image of alluvial fans:(Click for macrification) Below is a similar example, here on earth. Yeah, the one above is on Mars. If you look carefully, you can find quite a number of impact craters on the image- for example, there are four near the top middle.(The above is also macrifiable if you know the trick.) Anyone recognize the location of the earthly image? Bajadas (Spanish 'j,' pronounced "buh-hah'-duh") are a series of alluvial fans coalescing to form a broad wedge or ramp, so in both images, it's not inaccurate to call the landforms alluvial fans, but it would probably be more accurate to describe them as bajadas.

Smile

I opened the page with the image above, and after a moment, realized that a big wide smile had spread across my face. The abstract symmetry of these martian dunes is exquisitely beautiful to me... with the added bonus that they're on Mars! From NASA's Image of the Day Gallery, where a variety of image sizes are available.

This view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is of the Proctor Crater. The relatively bright, small ridges are ripples. From their study on Earth, and close-up examination by the MER rovers (roving elsewhere on Mars), scientists surmise that the ripples are composed of fine sand (less than 200 microns in diameter) or fine sand coated with coarser sand and granules.

The larger, darker bedforms are dunes composed of sand, most likely of fine size. Ripples tend to move slower than dunes. Because of this, over time, ripples get covered with dust, possibly explaining the bright tone visible here. The dunes are dark probably because they are composed of basaltic sand (derived from dark, volcanic rock) that is blown by the wind enough that dust does not sufficiently accumulate to change their color.

This area in Proctor Crater is being monitored by HiRISE to document any changes over time.

This image is a portion of the HiRISE observation taken on Feb. 9, 2009.

Third Anniversary of the Rover Landings

Counting in Martian years. May the little rovers that could have many more!

Also Sprach Zarathustra

The Monolith......is on Mars. But don't worry, there is a reasonable, natural explanation.

Skulls on Mars! OMG!

OK, I've wasted too much time on this post, so I'll try to make it short and sweet... with photos. This story has come across my radar too many times for me to ignore it:
I guess that rock is thought to look like a skull. I was thinking coconut or turd. Which is my point. We are hard wired to recognize patterns, even when they're not there. I see a coconut, someone else sees a skull. In fact, it's a rock. Weathering (particularly in arid and salty environments) can create some very strange forms.
Is this an octopus with it's arms cut off? Or an upside-down mushroom? (hint: it's a rock. pdf alert)
Is this a dragon? or a fossilized pterodactyl? (hint: it's a rock)
Is this a dinosaur skeleton? or a giant sponge? (hint: it's a rock)
Is this a giant worm? or a close up of renaissance neckwear? (hint: it's a rock)

The point is not that these particular rocks are dull and uninteresting. Quite the contrary. First, I don't think there is such a thing as a dull and uninteresting rock if you look closely enough (though repetition can get tedious), and these are particularly interesting in their forms. The point is that we sometimes perceive things that we're not actually seeing: perception requires interpretation. We are not always the best interpreters.

Pictures like the "skull" above have been around since the rovers landed. For a while I participated in an online discussion group, and finally had to quit because it had been entirely taken over by cranks who were literally finding several "skulls" and dozens of "fossils"every day, and the moderator couldn't understand that those of us who wanted to discuss "Serious Science" were offended by the fact that these cranks completely clogged any science discussions with their rants about NASA coverups, Martian Dinosaurs and Birds, and the implications of these "discoveries" for further discoveries of extraterrestrial life.

The most common line of self defense was that "You scientists have been so narrowly trained that you've lost all your imagination and curiosity. You just think you know it all." This from people who want to claim great insight into planetary geology but have never heard of, let alone seen, shatter cones. Now whatever faults and failings I may have, narrowness of training and background knowledge, and a conviction that I know it all, are not among them.

Since I'm tired of being polite, I'll simply respond pre-emptively: if you think a complete lack of knowledge and training in any subject gives you particular insight and credibility in that subject, you are a complete idiot, and should consider quitting your career to become a talk show host.

If Hutton Had Been a Martian

An angular unconformity on Mars. Original source, full-size image.

Actually, looking at this carefully in the full-size version, I'm not absolutely convinced. The layers that we are apparently looking at edge-on look like they could be a dike, or a shear zone. I don't know of any evidence for large-scale faulting on Mars, so the latter seems less than likely, but a dike seems to me to be a strong possibility. On the other hand, this site just lifts its images and descriptions wholesale from NASA's press releases, and NASA undoubtedly has spent more time with their conclusion and has more expertise than me. So, just saying, there's something that doesn't look quite right about this to me. But whatever the interpretation, it's pretty interesting.

Monday Mineral: Serpentine

Serpentine is the result of hydration and alteration of ultramafic minerals, particularly high Mg olivine. So you can often find it in ophiolites. This sample is from highly broken (tectonized) upper mantle peridotite.
I picked this up 3 1/2 years ago when my sister and her family were visiting. We were drving up route 199 from the Redwoods (I would have never guessed there was a connection to Winnemucca ,Nevada), and commented that there was an interesting mineral spot coming up. My brother in law made it clear that this was something he was interested in, so we stopped.
(crop from the above photo; I suspect the black inclusions are chromite)
The samples in this outcrop are not immediately obvious; you need to poke along the fracture surfaces, brush off sediment that has washed down the cliff face, and pry apart seams to find the nicest pieces- but a little effort pays off nicely.
As with this sample, most of the material here is completely faced with slickensides. I think of serpentine as being somewhat plastic under any kind of shear, and it tends to be concentrated along fractures. This whole outcrop is little but fractures.
A crop from the above photo.
If you haven't played with Google Street View yet, it's fun. And while their coverage is far from complete, there are a number of nice rocky roads that have made it into their coverage. As it happens, this outcrop is one of them. The cliff to poke around in is just beyond that tree in the middle left of the photo. If you're coming from the coast, you'll pass this landmark just before you get to the creek and the road on the other side of the creek. (Photo from Google Earth)
And this is the Google Earth view. Pin coordinates are 41.875767 -123.843614

Now as it happens, I almost did this as my first Monday Mineral last week, but decided to go with the sunstones instead. I say, "as it happens," because serpentine should have been in the news last week. You probably heard all the fuss over methane on Mars.

(This is today's APOD)

That story actually broke shortly after the rovers landed five years ago, and at the time, it was generally reported that the only explanation was either igneous/volcanic activity or biological activity. Either of these would be revolutionary. Mars is too small and too cold to be a likely place for current igneous activity- though I suppose it's not completely beyond possibility. The discovery of life off of Earth, though, would IMHO be the most profound discovery in history- I can't imagine anything that would more dramatically change our view of our place in the cosmos.

So when it was announced a few months later that the process of serpentinization could create substantial amounts of methane, I was a little disappointed. Reassured by the self-correcting nature of science, but disappointed. Note that I am NOT saying serpentinization is creating the methane (nor methane hydrates created by this process), but all else being equal, it seems the simplest explanation- less revolutionary than either magmatism or life on that planet. Phil Plait has a nice piece today on the inabilty of science journalists to actually report science in the context of Martian methane. So the take-away message is not that methane on Mars is unimportant, nor is it that we have demonstrated life doesn't exist there. Rather it's that in this day and age, hype and showmanship- entertainment- take precedence over any sort of rational balance and respect for the facts. And that a little knowledge of a mundane (if quite pretty) mineral might- just might- offer a simpler explanation.

BRRRRR!

That's cold! (Telegraph UK)

Some time earlier this month, Nasa's Phoenix Lander slipped into a cold-induced
coma in the Arctic wastes of the Red Planet. With the onset of winter, the Sun
dropped low in the sky, and the temperature fell to -1,300C at night.

Apparently the Phoenix Lander's (see here, here and here) greatest contribution to science had nothing to do with Mars; it has totally rewritten everything we thought we knew about thermodynamics. No wonder the poor thing shut down.

DESSERT DISCOVERED ON MARS!!!!

Last Saturday, I noted that there was a buzz about some discovery on Mars that had implications for the possibility of life on that planet. I've been meaning to get to this for a while, but on Monday or Tuesday, NASA held a hastily-arranged press conference and announced that Phoenix had discovered- wait for it- Chocolate-Covered Strawberries!

Ok, Ok, not really. The chocolate covered strawberries gag was put together to lampoon the over-reaction by bloggers and commenters like me that had taken this story and amplified it into something a little more noisy than a Saturn V liftoff: maybe more like a medium-yield strategic nuke. In my own defense, I have to say that while I was excited, I was careful not to speculate. I was going to say, "speculate beyond the available information," but looking back over that post, I pretty much laid out the parameters of what we knew then and what we might be capable of discovering with the instruments available. I didn't really speculate at all. Although I made it clear that any possible discovery of evidence of life was a very exciting idea that would be the most momentous thing science had ever accomplished.

Turns out what they think they've discovered is evidence of perchlorate, a combination of oxygen and chlorine. Perchlorate is a strong oxidizer that at first glance might seem to argue against the probability of living organisms. Just as bleach (sodium hyperchlorite- a similar oxygen-chlorine compound) kills bacteria by creating an oxidizing solution that chemically "burns" them and breaks down the complex organic molecules that create pigments and stains, so perchlorate in high concentration would be very damaging to living things. However it turns out that in lower concentration, there are bacteria that use perchlorate as a source of oxygen just as we use free oxygen in the air. Furthermore, in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world, where an inch or two of rain might fall once in a decade, perchlorate can build up as a result of UV light interacting with salts and the atmosphere. (Rains wash it away, and allow it to react in solution with other materials). So perchlorate is neither totally adversarial to life, nor is it's presence evidence that life cannot or does not exist in the neighborhood.

So what happened? Looks like this was one of those "A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous" situations. Someone told a reporter that there was a discovery, but didn't provide enough information for even a knowledgeable reporter to draw reasonable conclusions- I'll ignore the fact that most science reporters don't know enough science to report anything but what they're told. The report that the White House had been briefed, for example, was overstated. The president's science advisor was briefed. But the president doesn't even know he has a science advisor, so it's unlikely he ever heard about this issue. As noted above, depending on how you approach the issue, the existence of perchlorate could be an important indicator of an environment's hostility or hospitality toward life... or not. What the reporter apparently heard- correctly or not- was that the purported discovery had a direct bearing on Mars' ability to support life. This might have been an error on the part of the reporter or the leaker, who knows, and who cares? It was an easy mistake. I don't harbor anger toward either, but it does highlight the idea that clarity of communication is of utmost importance.

Some have made a big fuss over the kerfluffle sometimes with wry humor, sometimes with righteous indignation- how dare amateurs get excited and run with unsubstantiated rumors. This is science: a grave and serious business best left to the professionals. I call bullshit. In my opinion, his was a case of no harm, no foul. Wry humor is appropriate.

And to add to the confusion, the wording is that there is "substantial evidence" of the presence of perchlorate. The two wet-lab runs picked up evidence of the substance, but the TEGA (Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer) instrument did not. This might be because it was not run in such a way as to detect chlorine, or because some perchlorate compounds would not break down under the conditions that samples in the TEGA are subjected to. More tests of both types will be run over the next few weeks to clarify the results.

So in the end, you could characterize this as a false alarm. An interesting one. One that tells you quite a bit about how science moves forward, and quite a bit more about its strengths and weaknesses.

Rumor, Rumor (Oh it's Gotta be True!)

For the last day or so there have been rumors floating around the interwebs that the Mars Phoenix team has "consulted" with the White House prior to some announcement of some sort of new and intriguing data of some sort. It is very tempting to speculate. (It's even more tempting to script out a scenario of Shrub being utterly baffled by the idea of another planet: "Hunh. Well that's real inneresting. Any oil there?")

Here's what we know: The TEGA instrument may be capable of recognizing organic material, but it's not capable of detecting life. We've already determined that the soil chemistry is such that it could support some kinds of plants (asparagus was the example given repeatedly). The microscope is of sufficient power and resolution that it would be able to identify bacteria if they were present, but spokesmen are saying that bacteria have not been spotted. Water was positively identified in the TEGA earlier this week. That can be taken as exciting, but it's really just a final confirmation of something we knew pretty well from a number of other lnes of evidence. So what's the upcoming announcement? Aviation Week weighs in with a reasonable take. The article says the announcement will probably about the middle of the month, or possibly as late as early September if further confirmation and testing is required.

BTW, anybody recognize the source of the post title?

Roving Mars

The first video is a very cool computer animation of the Mars rovers project from launch to examination of a rock on the Martian surface. I presume this was created to help explain the project and secure funding.


The second video is clearly pirated and edited from the end of the first. This was circulating by late spring after the rovers had landed, but I lost the link. Yesterday I did the google thing and found the clip on U-tube. Classic.