Curiosity: Potential Anomalies (Update 01/2014)

Baby doll arm (or baby arm):

mars.jpl.nasa.gov...

a reply to: Blue Shift

curious looking arm shaped thing you have there , beware the marzombies

another oddity from the whatsupinthesky geezer



sol631

eggses? :@D

funBox

a reply to: funbox

Water, wind, or just rolled-a-long-way erosion?

a reply to: astrostu

well its conspicuous amongst its environment , around it I see maybe two or three stones that share the same texture, water erosion and tidal rolling does that to rocks,, but again it takes many rocks to tumble together in water to get similar shapes, I just don't see enough rocks around like it to imagine it formed in water, sore thumb syndrome

maybe its one of them slow moving meteorites and parked itself there?

or its just a fluky, quirky rock .

seems to have deadened the thread though , or did MrShifts Baby arm do that ?

funBox

a reply to: funbox

That (and other cases like this, of rocks that appear to have a different type of erosion) is one of the things that makes me thing that we are looking at the result of two different erosion eras, with some rocks remaining from the first era and showing erosion signs that are not the same as those of the surrounding rocks that were eroded in the second (and maybe present) era.

a reply to: ArMaP

a bit of a puzzler for you is it ? how two harshly different environments can have such effects on one thing and not another, I presume you mean that in this example of the egg shaped rock, that you think it formed in the wet , as apposed to the other layered, creeping rocks that appear as if they were formed in the present conditions?

im not sure what you mean, feel free to use the egg shaped thing and surrounding to illustrate

funbox

a reply to: funbox

Yes, that's what I think, that the egg-shaped rock is the result of watery erosion in a more distant past and the rest of the scene we are seeing is mostly from a more recent erosion, but even that appears to me the result of two different eras, one with a thicker atmosphere that allowed for stronger (capable of moving larger particles) winds than what we see now and today's erosion, limited to movement of the smaller sand particles.

a reply to: ArMaP


that fine grade shotblasting wind has done a wonderful job of keeping that distinct shape , the occasional dust devil ,with its higher grade particles taking the occasional pot shot , attempting to defile its pristine look , amazing really given the mind buggeringly long time since the wet,

ill bet Faberge egg shop owners are chopping at the bit to know the secrets of egg longevity , if only they could create such a long lasting display cabinet, their eggs would last for ever..

someone should have told them just to mimic the mars environs

as usual one picture is never enough , on the otherside of it it could be planar with enscriptions 'happy easter'

funBox

a reply to: funbox

You are the eggman, koo koo ki choo.

I dare say that's more than a fun find. Nice one.

Its obviously a kind a surprise, its a dragon egg.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
Baby doll arm (or baby arm):

mars.jpl.nasa.gov...

that is obviously a cyborg arm

a reply to: Aleister

since you kickstarted Aleister

musical interlude*



how do they snide?



a reply to: symptomoftheuniverse

KInda surprise? curiosity needs to crack it open and claim the blue-it constructible toy

or at least blast it with a laser beam

funBox

Not really an anomaly but still strange. On Sol 637, Curiosity may have run across not one, but two iron-nickel type meteorites:



Source



Source

They are close together too:



High Resolution

If they are meteorites, which seems likely, they are the largest yet found by rovers.

It may be one meteor which fragmented on the way down. Since there are no obvious craters, they are speculating on UMSF that it must have happened long ago, maybe millions probably billions of years ago, when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and water or mud existed at this location. Traces of the impact craters have been lost due to water and wind erosion over the eons.

Link

a reply to: ionwind

Excellent! Nasa must do all the tests in can on those babies. This curiosity mission is absolutly fantastic.

a reply to: ionwind

ChemCam images make it very certain that they are meteorites, most probably iron/nickel.


mars.jpl.nasa.gov...

The parent asteroid may have exploded in the atmosphere (like the Chelyabinsk meteor) and those are just fragments that survived and fell to the ground.

a reply to: wildespace
Could the asteroid have landed in water?

originally posted by: symptomoftheuniverse
a reply to: wildespace
Could the asteroid have landed in water?

There was water in Gale crater billions of years ago:



Link

However, I read this today:

Meteorites on Mars have been estimated to decompose completely from chemical weathering on a one-Gyr timescale [Bland and Smith, 2000].

Link

So, surprisingly, these meteorites completely decompose in one billion years. That means the two meteorites shown landed more recently than that, maybe millions of years ago, maybe less. There would not have been any water then. So only wind erosion would have exposed them.

a reply to: ionwind

Your illustration shows only a little bit of water when, as I envision it, the whole thing was full of water. Mt. Sharpe is a sediment mountain, made from water, and look how high it rises past your illustrated puddle. /goes looking for Martian rubber duckie/

originally posted by: Aleister
a reply to: ionwind

Your illustration shows only a little bit of water when, as I envision it, the whole thing was full of water. Mt. Sharpe is a sediment mountain, made from water, and look how high it rises past your illustrated puddle. /goes looking for Martian rubber duckie/

I've never heard of the entire crater being filled with water, do you have a source or link?

According to NASA in the link previously provided:

For this illustration, the possible extent was estimated by mapping ancient lake and stream deposits and recognizing that water flowed from the crater rim into the basin (arrows). The water would have pooled in the linear depression created between the crater rim and Mt. Sharp. The area's history likely included the coming and going of multiple lakes of different sizes as climate conditions evolved.

Possible Extent of Ancient Lake in Gale Crater, Mars

At this stage, this is what NASA is claiming based on the evidence collected by Curiosity.

Also, last year researcher claimed wind, not water formed Mount Sharp:

New analysis suggests wind, not water, formed mound on Mars

The Curiosity mission is still ongoing, so there may be more surprises ahead.

originally posted by: ionwind
I've never heard of the entire crater being filled with water, do you have a source or link?

I think the crater was presented more than once as having been a lake, I also got the idea that they meant the whole crater.

But as they say, it's most likely that the lake had different sizes at different times, following the changes in Mars' climate, and the areas I marked in red in the image below, not only point to the area they marked in blue for the possible lake, they also point to other areas and appear (at the least the area I marked on Mount Sharp) to be at a higher altitude than the whole bottom of the crater, so I suppose the lake could have been bigger.



The problems I see is that Curiosity landed on the area marked in blue (I think), so we don't have data for the rest of the bottom of the crater, and the wind erosion on the bottom of a larger lake would make it different from the bottom of the more recent, smaller lake.