Didja see the new Mars bunny picture at
LINK
Opportunity Sol 60 PamCam.
{Troll on}
The picture clearly shows that the rover did try to run over the Mars
bunny, despite NASA denials and despite dubious posts to the contrary.
Fortunately the bunny was able to leap out from in front of the
wheels and save himself. I want to see those NASA spin-meisters talk
their way out of this picture. Those are the same guys who say my
spherules pictures are not fossils either, by the way.
{/Troll off}
Have you seen my Mars Fossils page, by the way. Drop by and have a look some time.
Mars Fossils, Pseudofossils, and Problematica
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~weinberg/mars
The best Mars Fossils page on the Internet

best regards,

Michael

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Mars Fossils, Pseudofossils, and Problematica
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~weinberg/mars
The Best Mars Fossils Page on the Internet

Mrs. Bunny?

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Yeah, look at all those tyre tracks, lucky he's a quick little thing to be able to get away from that speedy rover at 1" per hour.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Not knowing who runs lyle.org, I tracked down the raw image on the JPL site. Here it is.

There is something there. It may be another piece of airbag. The first, more famous bunny picture was released on February 2, so that would be around Sol 9 or so for Opportunity. This new one is from Sol 60, so it's clearly not the same piece of airbag, or whatever. It's been almost two months now, 51 Sols.

Why can't it be the same "bunny?" It's been blowing around the crater, so it will appear in different places. JPL located it under the lander at one point, and it was gone from that location the next day.

Assuming I'm looking at the right thing (white object right around the middle of the picture, but slightly to the right), to my eye it doesn't look anything like the "bunny" in that famous picture from February 2.

However, it does look like a piece of airbag.

Great. A new probe arrives on Mars and the first thing it does is litter.

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Life is like a box of chocolates. All of your choices are bad for you.

>> However, it does look like a piece of airbag.

It doesn't look at all like a piece of the airbag. Wouldn't a piece of airbag fabric lie flat? This is definitely fluffy like a chunk of fibreglass insulation. No wonder there are filaments all through the soil pictures.

This one has a little trail beside it. The original Mars bunny didn't.

Michael

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Mars Fossils, Pseudofossils, and Problematica
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~weinberg/mars
The Best Mars Fossils Page on the Internet

The "bunny" (airbag fragment) is not a static form; it's a piece of cloth, tumbling around and seen from different angles. So it wouldn't be expected to have the same form in different shots, particularly at this poor resolution. What is the chance that one airbag piece blew away and just now another is visiting the crater? Ockham's Razor says they are the same.

It would be expected to have roughly the same size, about 5cm as stated earlier by the JPL bunny-tracker. So what is the size of this object based on stereo ranging?

As a guesstimate, it looks to be about three rover tread marks in width. That's 3*2.5 = 7.5cm. Close enough for government work?

Part of me cringes whenever I see all the wheel tracks and junk the rovers are leaving all over the place. I guess it's the environmentalist in me....

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Hey, the next dust storm will take of the wheel tracks. And eventually, I guess, the junk and the rovers.

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Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

Considering the origin of the "bunny" trail, it looks like it might be a piece of insulation off the rover as it was manuvering.

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"If you don't understand it, don't screw with it".

Was the guy driving that day drunk??

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What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory (insert least favorite test animal, person), we can assume it will be pretty bad.
{changed as per Frogesque's request :D}

Hi all, first post.

So now we have a second "bunny" on the surface of Mars. An airbag's fragment is of course the most likely explanation. But the obvious question arises: Why and how pieces of the airbag come off?

Sorry if the subject has been treated before, I'm a newbie here

They did say it had blown under the lander.

This may say something about the winds since it appears to have blown back to about the same position it was in on 2nd Feb.

There are only 2 other possibilities:

the rover did rub it out and this is new growth, or

acting rationally this martian life form hid under the lander until the cyborg alien left its crater.

Patricio!!! Welcome aboard!! (Leave us a few of the ladies, here, willya? Thanks...)

...ahem...where were we...where'd the airbag pieces come from? Well, there were something like 30+ airbags, and the odds were that some might pop when dropped on a sharp rock from 30 feet up. The testing films actually showed a couple of them ripped during the testing here on earth. That was the general idea, though. There were so many of them that the redundancy factor made for good odds for a safe landing. BUT -- just like a balloon, when something like that blows, little pieces wind up going all over the place, especialy when the object is bouncing and rolling and scraping the loose torn fabric for several kms.

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"If a tree is cut down in the rainforest, and is used to make paper to print a book, and the book is really bad, and there's nobody that will read it, do you still hear a sucking sound?"
Charlie in Dayton, A.AsC.

Hiya Charlie!!, my friend. Thanks for the welcome, and thanks for the explanation. It makes sense, specially if testings on Earth showed that bags are likely to rip.

As for the ladies, well ..... I can't promise

Bewildered:

Thanks for addressing my question as well