Posted on 03/09/2021 3:05:22 PM PST by MtnClimber
Explanation: Is that a fossil? Looking through recent images of Mars taken by the new Perseverance rover may seem a bit like treasure hunting, with the possibility of fame coming to the first person to correctly identify a petrified bone, a rock imprinted by an ancient plant, or any clear indication that life once existed on Mars. Unfortunately, even though it is possible that something as spectacular as a skeleton could be identified, most exobiologists think it much more likely that biochemical remnants of ancient single-celled microbes could be found with Perseverance's chemical analyzers. A key reason is that multicellular organisms may take a greater amount of oxygen to evolve than has ever been present on Mars. That said, nobody's sure, so please feel free to digitally magnify any Perseverance image that interests you -- including the featured 360-degree zoomable image of the rocks and ridges surrounding Perseverance's landing location in Jezero Crater. And even though NASA-affiliated scientists are themselves studying Perseverance's images, if you see anything really unusual, please post it to popular social media. If your sighting turns out to be particularly intriguing, scientifically, it is likely that NASA will hear about it.
Pinging the APOD list.
IBMTM
Neat.
I bet that’s what vegas looked like before mo green built casinos.
Too bad they used a red filter on it. Decades ago the original first color monitor images were greenish-red ground blue sky with high white clouds, before some yahoo turned the red channel up all the way - now they carry on the tradition.
Look at the image at the end of screen right. Look low near the foreground and only a few boulders back towards the center of the panorama. There is a grey stone with a swirl that resembles and eye or perhaps a shell. What do I win?
It’s fascinating to slowly scan along that 360-photo while thinking that absolutely everything in the picture is a result of happenstance.
Not one rock, grain of sand, etc was placed where it is by any form of organism using its brain to decide where to move something or change something.
Nothing even minutely affected by something built a 1000 miles away by a life form.
Absolute randomness.
Absolutely beautiful!
MtnClimber, thank you for your Astronomy Pics every day!
‘Tis an amazing universe. :-)
I was amazed at the quality of the images.
And I like your idea about nothing built there. (Yet!)
I’m not sure I completely agree with the idea of randomness. I guess natural processes are random in the general sense, but cliffs in the background show linear patterns due to wind, also there are patches of different sized materials due to wind, and even the slopes of the volcano cones aren’t random but are based on the physics of the grain-size of the materials and the gravity on Mars.
The only thing odd that I saw was no doubt an artifact of the imaging. A small black object that appears up in the sky!
Help, I don’t see any image at all. I know I must be doing something incorrectly.
Perhaps randomness without any infuence of a life form. Simply ‘raw universe’
Amazing photo! If you make it full screen you can “pan” left or right for what seems like a very long time.
Did the fly leave?
Posted on youtube was an image of a fly sitting on the rover.
Simply ‘raw universe’
And it’s been going on for billions of years. I don’t care for wind too much - I wouldn’t last too long on Mars I don’t think!
Cat is “really unusual”.
When you go to the link it looks like a thin horizontal image. You have to click on it and use the +/- buttons to zoom in. Click and drag to scan. It is a large image when zoomed in.
If you had guessed the molded curl of hair on a Kewpie doll, you’d win that doll.
Sorry, you have to go to Mars to collect, no delivery...
now thats impressive...
About 20 stair steps in from the left is Jabba the Hut.
one thing I can determine is the size of the rocks... are they close and small, or far away and rather large. Asuming the mast holding the camera is 5 to 10 feet in the air, I would say they are big...
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