The Mars "Thread" Thread

MER raw images ^

[ElkGroveDan]

At NASA's Thursday JPL briefing on the Mars rovers, the issue of an unusual object in one of the photos from the microscopic imager at the Opportunity landing site was discussed.

On SOL 19, several images taken with the microscopic imager of the soil and the "mars berries" appear to show a hair-like object. Steve Squires with NASA has speculated that the airbags bouncing around that crater may have shed a whole lot of fabric and this could simply be a stray thread. Squires also suggested that as they move away from the bounce-down sites they will continue to look for these objects. He noted that if we continue to see them, well then we'll have to reconsider what we are looking at here.

For your interest, here is one of the pictures that shows a thread (or hair, or root, or beastie). You probably can't see it in this smaller shot, but if you click on the photo it will take you to an even larger image. Look in the upper right hand corner, immediately below the largest pebble in that corner.

Anyone care to speculate? Is this a thread from the airbag fabric? Is it something else?

[Ophiucus]

If I didn't know better (for now, I'm buying the thread theory), I'd say they're roots.

Yep, if threads broke loose from the air bags, I assume that the winds would scatter them far and wide.

Wacky theory - not threads but some type of hyphae being "unearthed" (unmars-ed??). There's a fungus among us!

[Don Joe]

I think the "threads" stand out a little better, even though the picture is still out of focus. If I didn't know better (for now, I'm buying the thread theory), I'd say they're roots.

I don't buy the airbag theory for several reasons. Occam is not on the side of the airbag.

Some facts to consider: the airbags are incredibly rugged, designed to take a tremendous amount of abuse. Then, consider that even if they did take enough abuse to cause them to shed their materials, you'd likely see tufts, patches, etc., not the occasional thread here and there.

But that's just the logical assumption part of the "occamization of the threads". Let's move on to the observed facts.

They don't look like textile threads. They are of unequal width(diameter). Thinner at the end, thicker in the middle. The only way this would make sense would be if they used organic, rather than synthetic materials to construct the airbags. I rather suspect they used something like Kevlar, not cotton in the construction.

Then there's the fact that they're not even "threads" at all, but fibers.

Go find an old shirt or pair of pants, and work at removing a thread. It's not that easy to remove a single thread from a piece of woven cloth, and when you do, what do you have? You have a thread, made of a series of twisted fibers.

Now, work at removing a single fiber from that thread. Again, not so easy -- and when you do extract it, it's not a nice, straight, smooth fiber. It's kinked, corkscrewed, etc., from being twisted into a thread, which was then woven into a fabric.

I can't think of a scenario that would be on the one hand suffiently brutal to rip the airbags apart so violently as to break the fabric's threads down to their individual component fibers, while on the other hand, leave the fibers in such relatively pristine condition (smooth, straight, unkinked, untwisted, unfrayed, and otherwise unmolested).

The "airbag theory" is flawed on many different levels, with the only thing to support the idea being the fact that the lander had airbags.

Nope, I don't buy it. They look to me like fungal threads. I think it's entirely possible that "the big one" that hit the Yuccatan region may very well have thrown a lot of "stuff" into the sky, some of which may have reached Mars, just as the Mars rocks hit Earth when something hit that planet.

This could also explain the "conch-shell rocks" I've seen in several images so far. (Past Master Councilor pinged because he asked me to provide the pics, which I'll so shortly (a day or two) after I catch up with some "real life" issues. I've gotta dig around a Great Heaping Pile of shortcuts and archived material to locate them. I think I've seen 3,4, maybe 5 of 'em so far.)

[gitmo]

Didn't that guy have a hare problem on Mars?

[Don Joe]

Earlier in the day I used MS photo editor to enlarge the image. Now I look at it in Photoshop and it still has the thread-like appearance when highly magnified.

I am wondering if there are different algorithms for rendering jpegs.

IMO/IME PS has better resampling/resizing algorithms (it has several options available) than MSPE. "Normal" pics I've resized with MSPE are not nearly as sharp as those I've done via PS.

Any time you do anything other than a straight multiplication of the image (i.e., 2x, 4x, 8x), it's necessary to interpolate the actual pixels, in order to "create" the "missing" pixels. Different algorithms vary in their quality. PS has more elegant resampling/interpolation logic IMO. IIRC, "bicubic" is supposed to give the best results. Also, you may have better results if you resize in smaller increments rather than all at once when making a major change in image size. (And, the closer you can stay to exact multiples of the original (or intermediate) size, the better the final results are likely to be.)

[Don Joe]

Wacky theory - not threads but some type of hyphae being "unearthed"

No, not so wacky at all IMO.

[js1138]

I feel somewhat vindicated. When I enlarged the image with photo editor, the threadlike line became indistinct. It's quite distinct in Internet explorer and Photoshop. I assume this wouldn't happen in a bitmapped image.

[Ophiucus]

No, not so wacky at all IMO.

I just read your post #42 - I guess I beat ya' by 1. :-)

Somewhere about three or four years ago, I remember reading a speculative article on possibilities of life in a Mars type environment, what we knew of it then, and the suppositions tended toward lichen or fungal life types, if that advanced.

If the thread or fiber is not from the airbag, what is the possibility of other material in the lander apparatus - is there another source of fibers, say insulation materials that might be more likely to shed threads or fibers?

[steve86]

They look to me like fungal threads.

Really good post. I have seen fungal threads that look exactly like that. And they show up in the strangest places (on earth).

[greenwolf]

That's not the interesting picture from the spirit probes; the interesting picture is this one:

[djf]

I agree. Airbag is out. If nasa sent the craft up with an airbag that would shred, it would make no sense at all. This is the second anomaly that has been blamed on airbag, piece of insulation, etc. The first was the rabbit.

It is appearing more and more that something is there that does not fall into any regular geologic processes.

Something......



organic.

[steve86]

I'm too lazy to go and look it up right now but I seem to recall that Opportunity had an especially gentle landing (far less than the max design Gs). Odd that the airbags would have been torn to smithereens. There are some sharp rocks at the site, but not so numerous so as to have "caught" the airbags repeatedly.

[LibWhacker]

Then, consider that even if they did take enough abuse to cause them to shed their materials, you'd likely see tufts, patches, etc., not the occasional thread here and there.

Excellent analysis, Don Joe. I do like the fungal theory myself because that's what the Spirit picture looks like. But remember we did see a tuft or a patch (the "rabbit") at the Opportunity site that was variously attributed to fabric or insulation. One press briefing I saw mentioned that Spirit experienced 40g's on it's first bounce. Given how sharp the rocks are, I can believe the airbags were chewed up pretty good during landing.

What I can't buy is the ridiculously super cautious claim that, no matter how far we move away from the landers, any observed "threads" we see are most likely to be from the landers themselves, blown there by Martian breezes. Anybody who says that doesn't know beans about probability. And NASA knows plenty about probability.

But we can bet our bottom dollar there are some people at NASA who are going to be making that argument on the very last day we get the last bit of data from the rovers, and it's silly. I mean, we've known for a long time how to model contaminant dispersal. I did it myself for my master's thesis (not fibers, but groundwater contaminants). And if NASA didn't plan for it, somebody's head needs to roll.

[Jimmyclyde]

You know that all these pictures and this "misson" is fake right?

It's funny to me that "Mars" looks just like Northwest Mexico.....

Think about it......

[VRWC_minion]

What I can't buy is the ridiculously super cautious claim that, no matter how far we move away from the landers, any observed "threads" we see are most likely to be from the landers themselves, blown there by Martian breezes.

The rover itself may be carrying fibers with it.

[VRWC_minion]

You apply Occam's razor to rule out that the source of a thread came from man made elements that have landed in the area recently so you can rule in that a fungus survived a direct hit from a meteor, was blown into space, just happened to intersect mars, survived martian atmosphere for hundreds of years and just happened to be where our rover took a recent picture.

Nice, very nice.

[LibWhacker]

Not a problem at all to work that into the model and we'll still see fewer man-made threads as time progresses. At some point, the model will tell you it's time to abandon the thread hypothesis.

[Ophiucus]

You know that all these pictures and this "misson" is fake right?
It's funny to me that "Mars" looks just like Northwest Mexico.....
Think about it......

Only after I make a shiny, new tin-foil hat.

[Don Joe]

You apply Occam's razor to rule out that the source of a thread came from man made elements that have landed in the area recently so you can rule in that a fungus survived a direct hit from a meteor, was blown into space, just happened to intersect mars, survived martian atmosphere for hundreds of years and just happened to be where our rover took a recent picture.

Nice, very nice.

Fungi spores are quite robust, and, due to their incredible lack of mass, would float gently to the ground rather than burn up during descent. As to being freeze-dried in space before landing, I doubt that would be too much of an issue for at least some spores of some fungi types.

Finally, they are ubiquitous in earth soil. Any impact of sufficient ferocity to send them into space would doubless succeed, since they're everywhere it might have struck.

Since you challenge this relatively common-sense theory, please let me know what type of "thread" that "came frome man made" sources would have the same appearance of a fungal thread (varying taper, not "corkscrewed" due to having been a single fiber twisted into a thread and woven into fabric), and, the process that would present them on the surface where they've been found -- without also leaving more obvious fabric artifacts visible (i.e., tattered threads (made of groups of fibers), torn patches of fabric, etc.)

Ball's in your court. Before you answer, you might want to look at some photomicrographs of various fungal threads, and do some reseach on the durability of fungi spores.

[Don Joe]

If we do want to enter the "wacky theory" zone :) I've been thinking of all those little balls. Earlier today, it occured to me that they look like pearls, but now that I'm thinking about fungi, it seems like they also look like fruiting bodies (i.e., puffballs, truffles, etc.), or intermediate forms such as the morel's sclerotium phase (grows in the mycelium prior to the fruiting body formation), or imperfect fungi.

[Don Joe]

Continuing to muse on this notion...

The first question is, if these are actually fungal "somethings" (fruiting bodies or intermediate forms), why don't we see them in other stages too? The answer would likely be (presuming for the moment the theory) the same as why we don't see orange oranges in a grove early in the season, or why we don't see 17 year locusts for years at a stretch.

They could be waiting for the next rainstorm (even if it's never coming), or for some other conditions (unknown) to be just right for them to leave the dormant state.