Curiosity has discovered something on Mars

[salamala]

NASA has a bad habit of saying something awesome and ground breaking and when they finally tell us, most are like uhh yea that was completely not interesting to us laymen. My pridiction is they found a black rock where there should only be red rocks - and they have no clue how it got there... fascinating.

[gullfaraz]

I doubt it's something as huge as life on Mars. Maybe more along the lines of it has the potential to sustain life, in the future.

I don't know. At any rate, I am ridiculously excited to find out what this could be. I mean... if it IS life, then everything changes. Everything.

[Tomatketchup]

nope there is treaty subscribed by over 100 nations that proibit any claiming and also any military base on the moon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

I foresee that countries will set up individual camps around the planets, just like in Antarctica, which will after a while turn into territories belonging to respective country as the treaty becomes more obsolete.

[Tinykong]

NASA has a bad habit of saying something awesome and ground breaking and when they finally tell us, most are like uhh yea that was completely not interesting to us laymen. My pridiction is they found a black rock where there should only be red rocks - and they have no clue how it got there... fascinating.

A thousand times this. :\

[SoulAndBone]

*crosses fingers* please be The Martian Manhunter please be The Martian Manhunter please be The Martian Manhunter.

It's probably not him....

Oh well, hope they have found proof that life existed on Mars, that would be amazing to discover I also hope if they find out they didn't find anything, they let us know what they thought they had found.

Sorry but they would never discover the Martian Manhunter. And if they did he would make sure that everybody forgot about him, and will make a trip to Earth disguised as a rock or something

[Sighz]

Remember when they found the planet with two suns?
It's probably something like that again. And while that was extremely fucking fascinating, the way NASA was going on about it you'd have thought they found aliens on the moon.

Expect something fascinating - don't expect a revelation about life as we know it. It was just something different in a small soil sample.

I'm betting on they found a large amount of salt in the soil mixed with remnants of H2O, which would point to oceans on Mars! Or something like that.

[Sayl]

3rd if you have a good telescope you can still see the flag planted on the moon.

This has been repeated several times on the forums lately and while I wish it were true, it's not. Just to view the largest Apollo hardware left behind on the lunar surface (like the descent stages or LRVs), you'd need a telescope with 100 meters of aperture, which is about ten times larger than the biggest optical telescopes on Earth. To resolve something as small as the flags, you'd need to bump that up to 200 meters.

I think people have gotten confused about this from seeing popular articles (like this) talking about the flags still standing on the lunar surface -- but the imagery used to make that determination came from the LROC camera aboard Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, not Earth-based telescopes.

---------- Post added 2012-11-27 at 02:13 PM ----------

NASA has a bad habit of saying something awesome and ground breaking and when they finally tell us, most are like uhh yea that was completely not interesting to us laymen.

In this case, it wasn't NASA hyping anything up though. Joe Palca, the NPR journalist who was hanging out in John Grotzinger's office (Curiosity's Principal Investigator) for an interview, picked up on his excitement about the observations he and his team were working on in advance of the AGU conference. That somehow got translated into an article with the title "Big News from Mars?" and from there the speculation in the press went apeshit. This was never an official NASA announcement or statement.

What you mention has happened before though (and with disastrous results in that case), so I understand the sentiment. It's just not what happened in this instance.

[Gabriel]

I seriously hope it has something to do with them finding traces of there having been life on mars during it's wet period. From the looks of it the rock that they have been analyzing (called Rocknest 3) has some porous structures to it, which might indicate it has come into contact with liquid water sometimes during it's history. Please do note, that I am in no way professional on this matter, just really interested in it.

[dazie]

I dont think anything they announce could make me that excited even if they said we found the bones of an ancient alien I would be like well i want to see a living one , only thing that ever gets me in a bad mood is worrying I wont get to see the day Humans find out what the "Bigger Picture" is about all this.

[Sayl]

I doubt it's something as huge as life on Mars. Maybe more along the lines of it has the potential to sustain life, in the future.

I don't know. At any rate, I am ridiculously excited to find out what this could be. I mean... if it IS life, then everything changes. Everything.

Whatever the Curiosity rover has found, it's not evidence of life on Mars

[Shippai]

They've found the entrance to the Noctis Labyrinth where Mag'ladroth sleeps.

[phenix]

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-...er-all-1115437


"John was excited about the quality and range of information coming in from SAM during the day a reporter happened to be sitting in John's office last week," Webster said. "He has been similarly excited by results at other points during the mission so far."

pretty much ends the discussion. lol...

[Geminiwolf]

I find this to be really interesting and exciting but the thing is if we found something as big as finding life on Mars I don't think the government would allow NASA to release the truth. They would want them to just lie and say something dull and boring like it's some new kind of rock or something. Maybe I'm wrong but I just KNOW the government has their eyes all over NASA right now. It's the same way with the other "exciting" news from NASA before.

[AdrianCC100]

I find this to be really interesting and exciting but the thing is if we found something as big as finding life on Mars I don't think the government would allow NASA to release the truth. They would want them to just lie and say something dull and boring like it's some new kind of rock or something. Maybe I'm wrong but I just KNOW the government has their eyes all over NASA right now. It's the same way with the other "exciting" news from NASA before.

Yup. This is true.

[Decagon]

NASA has a bad habit of saying something awesome and ground breaking and when they finally tell us, most are like uhh yea that was completely not interesting to us laymen. My pridiction is they found a black rock where there should only be red rocks - and they have no clue how it got there... fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(Space_Odyssey)

I hope so.

[draganid]

I find this to be really interesting and exciting but the thing is if we found something as big as finding life on Mars I don't think the government would allow NASA to release the truth. They would want them to just lie and say something dull and boring like it's some new kind of rock or something. Maybe I'm wrong but I just KNOW the government has their eyes all over NASA right now. It's the same way with the other "exciting" news from NASA before.

unless its all dead life and has undergone the process to become oil, in which case there will be a mad rush to get rigs set up on mars.

[Frazzle.d]

The other half of the Mayan calender that goes all the way up to 3012?

[pacox]

I find this to be really interesting and exciting but the thing is if we found something as big as finding life on Mars I don't think the government would allow NASA to release the truth. They would want them to just lie and say something dull and boring like it's some new kind of rock or something. Maybe I'm wrong but I just KNOW the government has their eyes all over NASA right now. It's the same way with the other "exciting" news from NASA before.

I don't understand why the government would want to hide existence of life on Mars. It would obviously be either dead or microbial. I don't agree with it, but I could see the government hiding information about intelligent life form until they worked out how they wanted to handle the situation.

[Sayl]

I find this to be really interesting and exciting but the thing is if we found something as big as finding life on Mars I don't think the government would allow NASA to release the truth. They would want them to just lie and say something dull and boring like it's some new kind of rock or something. Maybe I'm wrong but I just KNOW the government has their eyes all over NASA right now.

This has been a mainstay plot device in sci-fi movie scripts going back to the 1950s but it's not how things work in reality. Think about it: the organizational structure of NASA missions like Curiosity is comprised of various teams of scientists, from the individual instruments themselves to the project as a whole. All the mission details and findings are shared throughout the teams with the principal investigator in the lead, keeping the project manager up to speed, and so on down the line to the Science Operations Working Group.

It's not like when they discover something new that they have to go outside the agency to Congress and the White House asking "Hey guys, is it okay if we share these results with the public?" and then wait for a thumbs-up or otherwise. Communicating their results with other scientists and the public is an existing part of their job responsibilities, for which they already have approval. These guys are all tied in to educational institutions and laboratories in addition to whatever capacity they hold as NASA employees. There is no way you could keep entire teams of excited scientists, engineers, and academics quiet about anything.

Additionally, NASA as a whole has an existing obligation to share its information. That's why such huge quantities of documents, pictures and data are available to scientists and the public. NASA would get in serious trouble for hiding anything, and it's not like they'd want to anyway. A truly earth-shattering discovery like the existence of microbial life on Mars would guarantee significant increases in funding for science operations and likely future human exploration.

Seriously, it's time to leave the conspiracy angle in cheesy science fiction movies where it belongs.

[gunner_recall]

They've found the Mechanicum. Now all that's left is for the Emperor of Mankind to begin The Great Crusade.