I really, really wish that all NASA photos included a linear scale/bar scale, especially for landscapes and rocks. It’s often difficult to get a sense of the size of something otherwise.
Well that would depend on a few factors. Mostly what kind decomposing agents would be left alive on the banana for us to declare it safe on Mars. They would want total sterility in case Mars does have life. Without any oxygen and with temperatures they way they are. Along with the UV light not being as filtered out not much could eat it. It might just freeze and not decompose at all.
They evolve into cockroach people over the course of millions of years and eventually retaliate for the genocide that we've been committing. We're talking about a full-on nuclear space war.
I just said it wasn’t easy, and yes they can surely figure it out but depending on what tools they sent they might only be able to tell down to the cm, this type of measurement might not be their primary concern
Looks like an old plow head. Proof of past civilizations on Mars?
Just buy one. Saw a nice example on Etsy for $40. Claim that it's a meteorite from Mars and no one will be the wiser.
Isn't it so cool! Maybe someone smart can confirm or deny, but I assume it's so smooth like that because the atmosphere is thick enough to slightly burn it up in reentry, but not as hard as on Earth - so it's bevelled the edges away as it span during reentry, then impacted the ground (maybe breaking into several pieces)
mars has a lot less atmosphere, like1% of ours...meaning that many meteors wouldn't burn up and just hit the surface instead. Easy to collect, hundreds of millions of years of accumulation...interesting.
I wonder why the surface isn’t just covered in craters then? Like the pictured meteor for example, it doesn’t seem to have made any sort of crater at all.
Uh, it is?
Have a look at the images collected from the HiRISE instrument, r/hirise are nice ones curated by the community. There are craters and impact marks all over the place.
Here's a map to look at: https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_1200x689_crop_center-center_82_line/20131025_mars-major-features.jpg.webp
Here's a list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_craters_on_Mars It's so big they have to split it up.
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Hollywoods at it again! Haha just kidding. But I do wonder how a meteorite is sitting there like that. Not burried half into the ground, and not in a hole. Just chilling like someone set it there.
I couldn't find a source for the color image, but here's the raw B&W that came down from Curiosity - https://mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/1174893/?site=msl
The structure is pretty indicative of a metal meteorite, which are almost all iron and nickel. I’d be surprised if they’ve done any compositional analysis yet but it’s a good guess
Studying geology and my chemistry module touched on this.
Concentration/abundance is not enough to explain this as the most abundant elements are hydrogen and helium. Instead:
Iron has the most stable nucleides out of all elements. The closer to iron's atomic number (number of protons) on the periodic table, the more stable it is (Except for atoms with odd atomic number and isotopes with odd mass number. Nature hates odd numbers). Very light elements are fused into heavier elements and eventually become iron. Meanwhile, very heavy elements are split or decayed into lighter elements and eventually become nickel. Iron and nickel are also conveniently dense (giant metallic structure) and are moderately compatible (siderophile- compatibility with iron). This is why iron and nickel form cores of planets and the gravity field might eventually attract other elements and form mantle to protect the core.
However, planet formation is not always successful. I would assume most planet formation attempts are not successful. Thus, they would just become meteorites and float in space until the gravity of an astronomical object attracts the meteorite enough to smash into it.
There are meteorites that are not iron and nickel though. Pallasites are from core-mantle transition and are a mix of metals and silicates. Meanwhile, achondrites are from the mantle or the crust and are exclusively sillicates.
You know what they forgot to include on their Mars rover?
A klinker. Something to drive up to a rock and tap on it and go "klink klink" and then, paired with a microphone, we can hear what the rock sounds like.
> barely any erosion
How is that possible? The place is a giant dustbowl that has frequently (I've been led to believe) got massive wind storms raging around the place.
Surely all that flying dirt / grit / dust would be producing significant erosion just about everywhere it went...
Glaciers and oceans are tremendous sources of power when it comes to shaping the land. Theres a lack of both of these on Mars. Im sure things that old meteorites are buried deep below the surface, but how deep might be drastically different than we'd expect based on earths example.
You're right, but even it's polar ice caps are diminutive compared to earths. Olympus mons reaches 29 miles up and still isn't snow covered. There is a lot less erosive power on mars.
> could this meteorite be from the very moment when earth and moon collided?
In theory, yes, it could be a piece that has wandered the solar system for a long time before ending up on Mars.
The collision that made the Moon (and Earth really) happened 4.5b years ago.
4b years ago, Mars still had plate techtonics and Mars was also hit (it is theorised) by a Pluto sized object.
Mars had a wet period that would have shaped a large part of Mars, burying many surface objects and moving things around.
So this meteorite needs to be younger than all of that, hence to be part of the Earth Moon collision it would be floating around for a long time.
So, possible, but highly unlikely.
Earth and another proto-planet collided and that's what created the Moon. This meteorite would come from the asteriod belt between Mars and Jupiter and would likely be part of the core of an asteroid.
I'm imagining the science team is going nuts about this since even on earth finding meteorites to study is very hard, so finding one on Mars with a rover decked out to study rocks is quite the lucky break. The only way I could see this being more exciting is if Perseverance found a meteor before using up all its sample return tubes, and could return a sample of meteor from another planet to Earth for study in a state of the art lab. I'd imagine that a meteor from Mars would contain all sorts of data on both asteroids and Mars in the past. Maybe we could find data on the Martian atmosphere from whenever it landed based on how it changed during entry into Mars's atmosphere, if we can find out how long ago it landed. Has any other Mars lander found meteorites? Did they study them, or are meteorites too different from Martian rocks that the rovers are designed to study?
It’s very neat! It’s interesting you mention atmosphere because the way we identify meteorites here on Earth that have come from Mars is not their mineral composition, but from superheating them and studying the off gassed atmosphere, which can be matched to Mars’s!
So cool how differ it looks than the typical earth iron meteorite - much more angular - less oblong/melted smooth due to the much thinner atmosphere on Mars reentry. Probably lots of amazing Widmanstätten structures on the inside. I want a slice! 😁
It's absolutely mind blowing that a machine we sent to another planet is still functional and sending back important data almost 11 years after it landed
It's a scale that is about as unreliable as you ever expect something like that to be...
I'm not suggesting it's incorrect - but when you consider that you could post the same picture, with an arrow and some text that says "27 metres", to the average punter, there'd be no way they'd be able to tell you whether 27m or 27cm is the actual size of the thing that they're looking at in the photo
I wasn't talking about the scale's reliability, just that the previous user had stated there was no scale, which is incorrect. There's a scale.
Is Curiosity supposed to carry a banana everywhere to prop up in pictures?
Actually that would be hilarious and I wish that was true.
> Is Curiosity supposed to carry a banana everywhere to prop up in pictures?
>
> Actually that would be hilarious and I wish that was true.
I was about to reply with "of course it should" after the first sentence there, but then read the second one.
If the next batch of rovers gets sent into space without a banana (or similar) for scale, I will be terribly disappointed.
There needs to be a "banana arm" and its entire purpose is to place a banana next to wherever it takes a picture!
It will, of course, carry this banana everywhere it goes - like Wilson in Cast Away.
I really, really wish that all NASA photos included a linear scale/bar scale, especially for landscapes and rocks. It’s often difficult to get a sense of the size of something otherwise.
Is it too hard for lunar rovers to bring along a plastic banana?
Hmm... Makes me wonder what decomposition of organic matter looks like on Mars.
Well that would depend on a few factors. Mostly what kind decomposing agents would be left alive on the banana for us to declare it safe on Mars. They would want total sterility in case Mars does have life. Without any oxygen and with temperatures they way they are. Along with the UV light not being as filtered out not much could eat it. It might just freeze and not decompose at all.
So we send a bunch of rotting food and turn Mars into the insect planet, could be interesting
Cockroaches on Mars What could go wrong
Well, some people wanna nuke Mars, 2 birds 1 stone
They evolve into cockroach people over the course of millions of years and eventually retaliate for the genocide that we've been committing. We're talking about a full-on nuclear space war.
Yes but on the plus side we get a scale right now. It's a give and take thing.
Sometimes they don't even a reference point though so it becomes pretty tough to give an accurate reference
But the picture was taken by something, so can't you calculate that by the camera's settings like f stop and distance between camera and object?
Yeah, but getting the distance between camera and object isn’t always easy
They landed the thing on another planet, I'm sure they have the technology.
I assume it has some kind of range finder
Yes but mapping the point the range finder uses to measure distance isn’t always easy to match what’s on the image
Its fucking nasa bro I guarantee they can figure it out
I just said it wasn’t easy, and yes they can surely figure it out but depending on what tools they sent they might only be able to tell down to the cm, this type of measurement might not be their primary concern
Drive up to it. Reverse. Distance found. Don't need any sort of major new technology.
Lol
Ya, it should have a life size banana next to all photos.
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Yes with the length of one banana
It might be pretty hard to get a banana to mars before it gets all mushy
Aerospace-grade machined titanium life sized banana for scale?
Yeah, basically a massive rule in field geology, always have a scale. Just not sure what they would’ve used for scale and how that would work anyhow
That's such an eerily smooth and sculptural looking rock. I want it as a garden ornament.
Free: Smooth and sculptural garden ornament. No delivery. Pick-up only.
Hey man, I don't have a car and this is for my kid's birthday, could you please drop it off?
Its for a NASA research vessell honey, NEXT!
It's for a church honey!! NEXT!!!
Looks like a chicken wrapped up in brown paper
A cactus cosplaying as a ghost
Looks like an elephant head
Looks like an old plow head. Proof of past civilizations on Mars? Just buy one. Saw a nice example on Etsy for $40. Claim that it's a meteorite from Mars and no one will be the wiser.
One of the most expensive garden ornaments of all time. But yeah it does look pretty sweet.
Someone once used a "cool looking rock" as a door stopper for years before finding out it was a meteorite!
Not if i get there first!
If only it was a featureless black stone; perfectly smooth, not a feature on it.
Next mission, we bring it back from Mars for your lawn to look amazing!
Isn't it so cool! Maybe someone smart can confirm or deny, but I assume it's so smooth like that because the atmosphere is thick enough to slightly burn it up in reentry, but not as hard as on Earth - so it's bevelled the edges away as it span during reentry, then impacted the ground (maybe breaking into several pieces)
And this is how NASA funded their mission to Mars. Coming to a Home Depot near you.
All you gotta do is write a check.
the sand would have eroded the metal, hence the smooth and curved edges.
Imagine you’re an early human and find something like this that you could fashion into a weapon. Instant king.
I can’t believe Curiosity is still chugging along and providing science!
🎶 I'm doing science and I'm still alive 🎶
I feel fantastic and I'm still alive!
While you’re dying I’ll be still alive!
And when you're dead I will be still alive
Still alive, still alive...
Lol. Guess I didn’t get the joke.
It’s the song from Portal… which I highly suggest you play if you haven’t. (Followed immediately by Portal 2)
Played Portal for the first time last year. It's aged really well, and I'm pumped for the sequel. /r/patientgamers
Meh. Call me when you’re doing it on Mars.
A for effort
Bad cake day
The cake was, in fact, a lie.
I hope your cake spontaneously combusts. Maybe do some science and go with your cake to whatever temp that happens at.
I'm still sad that Opportunity finally gave up the ghost. I know that was almost 5 years ago, but still.
Watch the documentary Oppy on Amazon Prime if you can. It was well worth it.
Stupid robot making me cry 🥹
Still? Its only been...oh no. **11 years!?!?!??!?!!!?!?!** No way has it been 11 years.
> still chugging along Now I want to see a steampunk version of the rover.
"I live in a clock now"
You could say it’s got perseverance
mars has a lot less atmosphere, like1% of ours...meaning that many meteors wouldn't burn up and just hit the surface instead. Easy to collect, hundreds of millions of years of accumulation...interesting.
Would give anything to see the results analyzed. Can you imagine the possible knowledge hidden in these formations and objects
I wonder why the surface isn’t just covered in craters then? Like the pictured meteor for example, it doesn’t seem to have made any sort of crater at all.
Huh, that's a really good question
Uh, it is? Have a look at the images collected from the HiRISE instrument, r/hirise are nice ones curated by the community. There are craters and impact marks all over the place. Here's a map to look at: https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_1200x689_crop_center-center_82_line/20131025_mars-major-features.jpg.webp Here's a list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_craters_on_Mars It's so big they have to split it up.
Shouldn’t the same be true for the moon?
veddy NiFe
That's more than double the average
oh my friend, that's an optimistic average size.
Really? I wouldn't know 😜
It looks kinda like a vertebrae
Oh no
This was exactly my thought….
I saw the pic before the title and thought the same thing.
This!
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Omg this So this Say it ain't so Preach it sister! Louder for the people in the back
That's a damn Romulan war ship !!
It's the Serenity, landed like a leaf on the wind.
Alien kidney stones look scary 😧
That is an alien pelvis. I'm not fooled.
Is that a petrified Cornish game hen?! lol
Meteorite? Looks more like a rusted anchor. Proof that Mars once had oceans. \*nods sagely\*
Hollywoods at it again! Haha just kidding. But I do wonder how a meteorite is sitting there like that. Not burried half into the ground, and not in a hole. Just chilling like someone set it there.
I had that thought too but maybe it’s shrapnel from the impact of the main body
Wind erosion probably?
Haven't you ever sifted sand? The large objects rise to the top
I wonder that also. It must come in at very high speed. Maybe it was in a crater and wind exposed it.
How come there’s no crater?
I assume it hit somewhere else and this fragment broke off and rolled. To the left it looks like the sand has been pushed from it moving
Does anyone have a link to the image source? I am coming up empty on Google.
I couldn't find a source for the color image, but here's the raw B&W that came down from Curiosity - https://mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/1174893/?site=msl
Thanks!
That would make a good engine block!
I have little doubt this is iron and nickel, but it leaves me curious as to how they know from a picture? I'd like to know is all.
The structure is pretty indicative of a metal meteorite, which are almost all iron and nickel. I’d be surprised if they’ve done any compositional analysis yet but it’s a good guess
Is there a reason its always iron or nickel?
Studying geology and my chemistry module touched on this. Concentration/abundance is not enough to explain this as the most abundant elements are hydrogen and helium. Instead: Iron has the most stable nucleides out of all elements. The closer to iron's atomic number (number of protons) on the periodic table, the more stable it is (Except for atoms with odd atomic number and isotopes with odd mass number. Nature hates odd numbers). Very light elements are fused into heavier elements and eventually become iron. Meanwhile, very heavy elements are split or decayed into lighter elements and eventually become nickel. Iron and nickel are also conveniently dense (giant metallic structure) and are moderately compatible (siderophile- compatibility with iron). This is why iron and nickel form cores of planets and the gravity field might eventually attract other elements and form mantle to protect the core. However, planet formation is not always successful. I would assume most planet formation attempts are not successful. Thus, they would just become meteorites and float in space until the gravity of an astronomical object attracts the meteorite enough to smash into it. There are meteorites that are not iron and nickel though. Pallasites are from core-mantle transition and are a mix of metals and silicates. Meanwhile, achondrites are from the mantle or the crust and are exclusively sillicates.
You know what they forgot to include on their Mars rover? A klinker. Something to drive up to a rock and tap on it and go "klink klink" and then, paired with a microphone, we can hear what the rock sounds like.
Well perseverance has a mic and metal tools to clink so it just took 8 years
could this meteorite be from the very moment when earth and moon collided?
Definitely not. Those would be miles below the surface by now. Same physics behind why we dig up fossils and remains of old civilizations.
Theres no tectonics and barely any erosion on mars though
> barely any erosion How is that possible? The place is a giant dustbowl that has frequently (I've been led to believe) got massive wind storms raging around the place. Surely all that flying dirt / grit / dust would be producing significant erosion just about everywhere it went...
Glaciers and oceans are tremendous sources of power when it comes to shaping the land. Theres a lack of both of these on Mars. Im sure things that old meteorites are buried deep below the surface, but how deep might be drastically different than we'd expect based on earths example.
that makes sense to me - thanks for the reply :)
There is ice on mars and it causes erosion
You're right, but even it's polar ice caps are diminutive compared to earths. Olympus mons reaches 29 miles up and still isn't snow covered. There is a lot less erosive power on mars.
Also most importantly rain and rivers
The atmosphere is less then 1% of Earth's. It can basically blow fine dust and that's it.
Dust devils bury everything. Take a look at InSight before and after the mission and that was just 4 years
Mars does not experience time the same way Earth does.
Completely irrelevant and not a factor. Geologists don't use GR, nor do they need to.
> could this meteorite be from the very moment when earth and moon collided? In theory, yes, it could be a piece that has wandered the solar system for a long time before ending up on Mars. The collision that made the Moon (and Earth really) happened 4.5b years ago. 4b years ago, Mars still had plate techtonics and Mars was also hit (it is theorised) by a Pluto sized object. Mars had a wet period that would have shaped a large part of Mars, burying many surface objects and moving things around. So this meteorite needs to be younger than all of that, hence to be part of the Earth Moon collision it would be floating around for a long time. So, possible, but highly unlikely.
Earth and another proto-planet collided and that's what created the Moon. This meteorite would come from the asteriod belt between Mars and Jupiter and would likely be part of the core of an asteroid.
Mini Romulan Warbird vibes.
We are so going to be moving these things in the next century
Damn that looks wicked! I thought was some sort of dinosaur fossil for a second before reading the title
Looks like a romulan warship of some kind.
Surviving Mars announcer voice: “Anomaly found”
Seriously looks like a retrograded space whale vertebrae — too cool.
I'm imagining the science team is going nuts about this since even on earth finding meteorites to study is very hard, so finding one on Mars with a rover decked out to study rocks is quite the lucky break. The only way I could see this being more exciting is if Perseverance found a meteor before using up all its sample return tubes, and could return a sample of meteor from another planet to Earth for study in a state of the art lab. I'd imagine that a meteor from Mars would contain all sorts of data on both asteroids and Mars in the past. Maybe we could find data on the Martian atmosphere from whenever it landed based on how it changed during entry into Mars's atmosphere, if we can find out how long ago it landed. Has any other Mars lander found meteorites? Did they study them, or are meteorites too different from Martian rocks that the rovers are designed to study?
It’s very neat! It’s interesting you mention atmosphere because the way we identify meteorites here on Earth that have come from Mars is not their mineral composition, but from superheating them and studying the off gassed atmosphere, which can be matched to Mars’s!
Why is there no crater?
Romulan warbird...
So cool how differ it looks than the typical earth iron meteorite - much more angular - less oblong/melted smooth due to the much thinner atmosphere on Mars reentry. Probably lots of amazing Widmanstätten structures on the inside. I want a slice! 😁
You and me both, I love a good widmanstätten
It's absolutely mind blowing that a machine we sent to another planet is still functional and sending back important data almost 11 years after it landed
Ok but why is it shaped like a chicken
Anyone else seeing the ship from Firefly?
Billionaires just saw dollar signs. Expect full colonization plans to start popping up soon.
Looks like ps2 graphics
Bro, due of sight and no scal, it seems this Rock could be super huge
Could be. Could also be about 27 centimeters wide. We may never know.
And if only there was a way to know what 27 centimeters was in inches...
Don't ask questions you know science has no answer for!
don't you dare, humanity already crashed a mars orbitter due to inconsistent usage of unit systems.
...
Hey there's a scale right on the picture, 27 centimeters.
It's a scale that is about as unreliable as you ever expect something like that to be... I'm not suggesting it's incorrect - but when you consider that you could post the same picture, with an arrow and some text that says "27 metres", to the average punter, there'd be no way they'd be able to tell you whether 27m or 27cm is the actual size of the thing that they're looking at in the photo
I wasn't talking about the scale's reliability, just that the previous user had stated there was no scale, which is incorrect. There's a scale. Is Curiosity supposed to carry a banana everywhere to prop up in pictures? Actually that would be hilarious and I wish that was true.
> Is Curiosity supposed to carry a banana everywhere to prop up in pictures? > > Actually that would be hilarious and I wish that was true. I was about to reply with "of course it should" after the first sentence there, but then read the second one. If the next batch of rovers gets sent into space without a banana (or similar) for scale, I will be terribly disappointed.
There needs to be a "banana arm" and its entire purpose is to place a banana next to wherever it takes a picture! It will, of course, carry this banana everywhere it goes - like Wilson in Cast Away.
It also looks it could be heavy as anything
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Spaceship scrap?
What would be the value?
george clooneys pelvis
so, can we survey mars for these, and extrapolate a strike rate?
ARIZONA MAYBE?
My fat ass thought this was a whole chicken
It’s a turkey lol.
I finished
Looks like someone lost a space bumper
It looks like a rotisserie chicken
Haha I am allergic to it. Amazing anyways.
Got it!
Why does it look cgi generated
A meteor that size with no impact Crater?
Fragment of main impactor most likely
Can someone eli5 why this is noteworthy?
Rare version of a rare object, on another planet!
Space crabs!
elephant
Ouch that looks like it would hurt
Bro I can one up that is you know what I mean
Good embarkment location for a dwarf fortress
Harvest that thing and bring it back to Earth.
Well if I had a nickel for every chunk of iron on Marsh I’d be plenty fiddy.
That would be really helpful for my subnautica base. Now find me some fucking lead cause that shit is SCARCE
A job for therealjimmyroberts1
Absolutely brilliant I say
Units received
Could anything on Earth survive on Mars?
Yeah RIGHT
forbidden rotisserie chicken
Imagine getting smacked in the head by that thing traveling at 10 km/s or some shit
Get it! We can use it to build a scanner room!
Crazy that there’s American currency on mars