I've come upon two articles about "NASA COVERS UP MARTIAN WOOD ZOMG" and "HISTORIC LEAK!!!".

Please tell me this has been debunked already. For those of you who are curious, a link to the original image.

I've already searched the forum and a cursory search of the web was unhelpful as well. I am interested in what the debunkers have to say about this.

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If only it was as easy to soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.
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- Old Joke

Those articles are a hoot.

This is an example of pareidolia.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

"Where would a piece of timber (if that is what it is) come from, if there are no trees on Mars? The author of the article says "There are vast forests on Mars, ones that are kept from the public."

I stopped reading after this segment. Why and how would they keep this secret?

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www.gonzoscience.com

Cue the sitar music!

I once had a girl,
Or should I say she once had me,

[Sitar] BOING!

...
So she lit a fire,
Wasn't it good?
From Martian wood.

[Sitar] BOING!

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I suppose they're talking about the thing to the left that looks like a railroad tie?

"Looks like" <> "is."

The photo's address has an embedded date of 2005/05/24, so this is in the neighborhood of Endurance Crater. Notice that the rover drove right over the "tie!" Looks like NASA did nothing to suppress this image, but the caption makes no mention of the "tie." It's hardly been leaked.

If there is an online archive of all rover images (and I suspect there is, I'm just too lazy to search for it), it would be interesting to see if there are other images of the same thing. The rover site has a couple of 3D anaglyphs of the panorama.

I'm more curious about the bright spot closer to the horizon. It's not an imaging artifact; it's on both the left- and right-eye images.

Fred

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There is. Here's the gallery link for Opportunity:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity.html

Here's the referencing page for this image:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/p...20040524a.html

From there:
and here is a link to images for sol 115:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...nity_n115.html


See, specifically:

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...P1994L0M1.HTML

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...P1994R0M1.HTML

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...P1994L0M1.HTML

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...P1994R0M1.HTML

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

One of Van Rijns links:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/a...0P1994L0M1.JPG
This shows the image in better clarity- and shows it to be geological not woodological

It gets better. About half way down the page, he starts talking about the Biblical flood story (and this is supposed to tie in to that).

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

No, that cannot be, every Dutch child knows that the only other woods in the solar system are at Venus:

Waar wouden zijn als vuur zo heet
Toren hoog en mijlen breed

(Where there are woods hot as fire, towering high and miles wide)

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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
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“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

There really is nothing to debunk. It's a rock, like all the others. If it goes mainstream like the tiny mars yeti that hit the media a year or so ago, then my fellow UMSFers will probably do all the maths, find every image.

For example - none of the stories mention the simple fact that the rover drove straight over it.

Doug

It is obvious that the bright spot is a camp fire. They must have dropped that piece of wood while carrying it out of the forest.

No, No, must read on...it gets better and better. Earthrise over the moon was actually an alien ship; photos of plants growing, and my favorite photo caption of all:

"The lake, although frozen, Mars having a mean surface temperature of -46 degrees C, must contain more than just water. There has to be some amebas and other single celled organisms in these waters. There are most likely fossils of Martian fish and perhaps even Martian animals. On Earth, old lake beds are a prime location in which to find dinosaur fossils. Why would Mars be any different?"

2+2= a chocolate milkshake, ergo I think. The only thing he doesn't suggest is that the "timber" is a remnant of Noah's Ark. (But I confess it looks more like evidence of migrant Chinese building a railroad to me. He must have thought the same).

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"To complete the picture all the photons can be seen to be synchronising friction on and off throughout the overall cone which itself is synchronised to the equal and opposite reaction of equilateral triangulation"... by a scientificator in ATM, too priceless to be lost to posterity.

Of all the mixed up...

Wait! Is that a signal fire in the background?

It's an artifact, evidence of an alien intelligence on Mars.



It is the MER B heatshield.

The panorama shot, that includes the not-log, on the rim of Endurance Crater, was on the southeast side, probably close to the farthest extent of the counter-clockwise trip, before they headed back for the drive in. (Opportunity traverse map)

From there the white thing would lie roughly south, and that's where the heatshield was found.

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Gotcha, 01101001.

I can't help but wonder... It still appears to be a piece of wood. Was it sampled? If it's thousands or millions of years old, is it possible that it's a piece of petrified wood? If so, would the samples be able to discern this, or would the mineral counter peg while the life-counter came up empty?

Without further info, my curiosity will remain piqued.



For obvious reasons...



Petrified wood from the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, Washington State, USA

If you want to enjoy more imaginary petrified wood (actually layered sedimentary sandstone), there's plenty of it, dozens of shards, in the wall of the crater roughly below that location: imaged from inside, very large format available (15-megabyte JPEG!), Planetary Photojournal: 'Burns Cliff' Color Panorama.

Soak up the woody goodness.

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So it's an artifact, but not an imaging artifact. I thought it might be the heat shield, but perusing image archives over dial-up is very tedious.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
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I appreciate the link. While I see the sandstone layers, the thing up topside of the crater, while similar, doesn't seem quite the same.

More interestingly, I'm not a geologist, so what



are



all



these



Little Green Balls lying around all over the place?



They may not actually be green. My first thought would be sphericles created by the liquifying of the rock when the meteor struck. They'd form into sphericles, then harden before landing. My question would then be, "why are they all the same size?" Admittedly, rain drops are generally close to the same size, at least for any given rate of rainfall (the greater the rate in inches per hour, the larger the raindrops).

They're the "blueberries" -- hematite concretions littering Meridiani Planum, and embedded within.

How did you miss that news?

Wikipedia: Martian spherules

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Did I miss any news? "The spheres may have formed when molten rock was sprayed into the air by a volcano or a meteor impact." - Wikipedia (your link)

My original: "My first thought would be sphericles created by the liquifying of the rock when the meteor struck. They'd form into sphericles, then harden before landing."

My question concerned their uniformity of size!

Apparently.

Why don't you research the long story of the concretions and then if you still have questions, you can ask in Q&A? They were first discovered in 2004 and there has been so much written about them. They are part of the water story.

You don't seem to be promoting the ATM theory about Martian wood -- nor for that matter does anyone here. Maybe this whole wood topic should be in Q&A, too.

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I'm amazed, Mugs. Were you not into following Spirit and Opportunity when they landed? Those spherules were one of the main talking points for months!

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I know right. Even I knew about them.


I think Mugs failed to hit the "Search" button.

Tsk. tsk.

wink wink

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I have to agree with you on that. I also don't understand why hiding such things would benefit NASA who is hurting for money right now. I would gather that they would show everything they have in stock to gather public interest right? This martian wood stuff bothers me! I mean it does not make sense that NASA would just investigate Mars and then decide to hold on to the data until the right time came alone to show it to anyone. What hey? That is like putting money in the bank and needing money for an operation at the hospital and telling everyone the money is not real and could you lend me some money to get an operation?

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BA Blog: Pining for Mars

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well, it hasn't been hidden, we are looking at the picture.

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Indeed - the pictures would have been available from the day they were taken as raw JPG's.

Then as calibrated images 6 months later, with radiometric calibration, terrain wedges, iof etc.

One thing the MER team can not be accused of, is hiding things.

I am an expert. It looks to me as if Norm Abram is also involved in this conspiracy. I recognize his framing techniques on that piece of martian lumber - and 'This Old House' is up for a new season soon. Could they be rebuilding a martian villa? Find out next season. Also he's making a dresser.

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Another Face on Mars. A long slab of layered rock on the surface: looks like hewn wood if you permit rationality to take a vacation and hide Occam in your hip pocket. So I'll join the party and discount "floating" with an alternative hypothesis about glacial deposition. The glaciation must have been recent because wood being wood, a block of it exposed to surface storms would have have been eroded to dust in no time at all. Ooh... I think I'm learning ATM-speak.

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

"To complete the picture all the photons can be seen to be synchronising friction on and off throughout the overall cone which itself is synchronised to the equal and opposite reaction of equilateral triangulation"... by a scientificator in ATM, too priceless to be lost to posterity.