Did Mars Phoenix pop a spring, lose a screw or what?

reply to post by scorpio9gm
Really good find. If you go to the nasa site and download these images, you will find they have definitely noticed this because one image has been cropped so as the screw shape is no longer in the image. And the image pointing to the landing pad is extremely bad now. Lots of jpeg artifacts to keep us from seeing the details. Considering the resolution that the camera is capable of, what their releasing is pretty pathetic anyway.

Cheers

reply to post by napster
This piece of rebar your referring to is actually from a very old Viking Lander 1 image, PIA10738: Mars Surface near Viking Lander 1 Footpad. Taken on Aug 1, 1976, 12 sols after landing.

Cheers

No matter when the image was taken, it definitely appears to be a bleached shell from some type of sea snail. All I can surmise is that Mars once had an atmosphere that shielded the surface from the UV that current bombards it today because that kind of snail (which usually lives in shallows) both in and out of the water would not last a minute being hit by so much radiation etc.

Image Sourced From seashellworld"





IRM

S&F 4 U!

[edit on 2/6/08 by InfaRedMan]

Originally posted by black_suburbans
-everyone with 5mpixel cellphones
-nasa cameras are the size of small suitcases and have 1024x1024 B&W resolution

anyone buying this BS? There shouldn't be a single fuzzy tiny picture anywhere. To think with our technology even in consumer products and were relegated to 1024 res cameras on these probes is downright laughable. I'm quite sick of all the nasa BS and them keeping everyone in the dark.

[edit on 2-6-2008 by black_suburbans]

Tell me about it! They can't even mount a 10Mpixel camera (a few hundred quid these days) with auto white balancing to take all those unambiguous colour publicity pictures......what utter crap.

reply to post by scorpio9gm


I found this on MSN...they cropped the pic so you can't see the spring or fossil...got to love that.

www.msnbc.msn.com...

www.space.com...

"The first step of unstowing the arm, expected to occur this afternoon, involves moving the scoop towards the arm with the wrist joint, which will release a spring-loaded pin that kept the arm restrained during Phoenix's August launch and Sunday landing, Goldstein said."

[edit on 2-6-2008 by NGC2736]

reply to post by bigboyjed


It is. Thanks for clearing that up, mate. Sorry, I should have read the caption. They only provided the image at the phoenix website to compare the soil.

Unfortunatly i can't edit the other post anymore.

[edit on 2-6-2008 by napster]

actually, it was a screw, nit an martian fossil. at might of fallen of while phoenix was descending due to g-forces of the parachute or the retro-rockets. that would explain why it is partially buried other "abnormal things" could be rocks that have been shaped by water, like the "blueberry" rocks found by the odyssey and spirit rovers.

Curse you and your interesting threads! Making me log in when I should be asleep.

This is really interesting, thanks for posting about it. I'm extremely intrigued by what NASA has to say. I mean, it does look like a shell but what are the odds of that? Too low.

It's probably a part of the shuttle, but if it is I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned, NASA usually gets pretty serious about bits of spacecraft falling off!

Poor NASA everytime they look at a old boring rock an ancient artifact gets in the way

Come on guys, it's a spring. It's probably a none-critical part that was used in something involved in the landing. You really think NASA would leave an alien shell there and (a) not say anything or (b) not cover it up if it didn't suit their agenda?

Spring.

reply to post by sensfan

Your link is for fossilzation on earth, and here I was hpoing you were going ot post of fossils are made in this alternate atmosphere! j/k we dont know what happens, so I find your link null and void.

Has NASA screwed us again?

It seems that yet again the good folks at NASA are keeping all the good data for them selfs and giving us poor quality thumb nail shots from there current taxpayer funded mars phoenix mission. This seems to be the status quo policy even in an era of Internet access when there is no reason that everyone should have equal good access to the scientific data. I like many people followed the mars phoenix mission and eagerly awaited confirmation of its successful landing and first pictures returned by the lander. I was really impressed that NASA released the first pictures to the Internet site almost as fast as they received them and i could buy the fact that the first pictures returned were small thumbnail shots due to the fact the lander needed to communicant its health and status and then preform a concert of motions to open its solar cells, lock onto the orbiting MRO and MGS to relay its data to earth. Now however mars phoenix has completed most of its mission health checks and seems to have a pretty good data transfer and connection with earth. I really was hoping to see much more impressive images then we have seen so far. And after staring at the photo of the spring looking artifact in more then one image lead me to wonder way no one from NASA had mentioned it or even acknowledged it was there, and they seemed to even be moving away from it or cropping it out of there images. This very well may be something from the lander but there are also other very possible explanations for it, like a fossil or maybe even newly discovered form of life, and after all isn't this what all of this is about anyway, the search for life or the record of past life on a planet or moon other then our own. It truly would be a wonderful discovery and totally change history as we know it. I have included an image of some Crinoid fossil's that i have found locally where i live. The fossil's that I have found are pretty poor condition due to the weak matrix that they are found in, however these are a good example of what I'm used to seeing and have trained myself to look for. I have taken this picture with an rather old digital camera by todays standards, it is only a 2 mega pixel camera and not a very good one at that. I'm really disappointed with the images that are being released from the mars phoenix if you will compare them to its older sibling mars rovers you will understand what I'm talking about when it comes to image quality and resolution. Below you will also see standard spring and bolt designs that you can compare with images from the mars phoenix. I would hope NASA or the University of Arizona will investigate this more openly and with better quality images, after all this mission was paid for with taxpayers money and I believe that we should be privy to just as good information as the scientist running the mission.

See more pictures at source www.openfuelresource.com...

Edited to use Ex tags. See here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 2-6-2008 by NGC2736]

Well it's obviously not a fossil because there was never any life on Mars, sillies!

Seriously though, I didn't think fossils just lay out in the open like that, I though they were buried into rock - sure, it could be cracked open by the lander and fly out, but it looks a bit too clean, if you know what I mean.

Same for a shell, if there was one perfectly clean shell like that on the top of the surface of Mars you can be sure there would be plenty more in the area. If it were a shell it would again have been buried in rock over the thousands/millions of years and wouldn't have that perfect clean look about it, rather it would be half covered with the red rock that has been surrounding it all that time.

I have a thought if no one else has come up with it already. It seems that NASA released a photo recently with oddly named areas around the lander which might be good locations for explorations. Maybe someone could check out that photo to see if the locations match up between this item and any area they might have designated for exploration. I think I saw the photo over at Space.com. they came up with some really goofy names for the different areas.

[edit on 2-6-2008 by GeneralLee]

Someone further up mentioned rebar from a previous mission; can this be confirmed?

Also, I don't think it's a shell, as I believe the light color of the sand near where it enters the soil gives it the illusion of tapering off towards the end.

Nice find, though it does look like a spring to me.

As for why it appears white - black and white photo. Spring is probably made out of stainless steel or another lightly colored, pliable metal.

I don't think its an spring or a screw, it could be some form of plant as opposed to an ancient fossil. The fact that the smaller end of the mystery object seems to be pointing into the ground with the larger 'mouth' clear of the ground seems to support this notion. It seems to be bending a bit too, like an soft organism.

Unless NASA uses rubber screws or poor quality springs with different sized ends, I have to assume its organic.

Starred and flagged, excellent job.

Great stuff.

Why are all the images online tiny?

It is extremely frustrating not being able to download some huge originals so that we can examine them in greater detail.

Curio asked why would NASA leave it there. Well the answer to that may well be that someone inside NASA wants the truth to come out and ensured that the image with the possible smoking gun was published.

Then again it could just be a spring that has come off of the lander.

[edit on 2/6/2008 by skibtz]

The Phoenix craft completed a hypersonic entry into the Martian atmosphere, deployed a parachute, jettisoned a heat shield and back shell, and then landed using braking rockets. I would be surprised if there wasn't some debris in the landing area. That makes more sense than Phoenix coincidentally landing next to a rare fossil that just happened to be exposed on top of the dust and soil covering the Martian polar ice. This looks like a job for "Occam's Razor."