"With respect Captain, should we regard the excellent preservation of the underpants as proof that the conditions on Mars are not so harmful as expected?"
"John, we do not know of which material the underpants do consist, perhaps it`s a titanium alloy? We have to wait for the results of the spectrographic analysis."
site AV - the website database I use does not have pancam entries that far back but there are read hazcam images for sols 1350 to 1354 to 1346 to 1332. Click on my signature and use the web research program. Enter av for the site and select spirit as the rover. each subsequent time enter the date of the last item in the end date field to get the previous 12 items.
Hi, Marsrock the "ball" you have found is not spherical. Look it in 3D anaglyph (L7-R1 images). You will see that it has amorph shape and its surface is partially shiny. The form of the shiny part does not match to a spherical object. I think you have seen this object as ball because of blurring by zooming. (In this case the contours of details will be blurred and any shiny patch becames approximately circular or elliptic due to jpeg compression algorythm).
Again, a cracking find! Do you think the rover would have taken a closer look at such a curious object? Bet it did, we want to see the other pictures of it !
Until we can attract a geologist to the board, we'll have to try to come up with the competing geological explanation ourselves.
We do know that the mini-tes and alpha particle spectrometer tell us that 5% of the material they are viewing is comprised of about 5% glass - presumed, of course, to be volcanic glass, not manufactured glass. Glass can also be quite shiny, so we should consider glass as a possibility as well as metal. Also, glass might stay shiny over vastly longer periods than metals.
Possibly, geogogists may characterize this as a silicate bubble - a glass volcanic bubble similar to what is called a blister.
"Pahoehoe blisters are thin-walled basaltic-glass bubbles formed by the release of volcanic gas from the surface of a pahoehoe flow. Like a glass blower that blows air into molten glass to create a goblet or vase, gas released from lava may force the thin glassy crust of a lava flow to form a large bubble or blister. They are found on all types of pahoehoe flows."
Geologists would likely theorize that this (from Spirit sol 913) was not a seashell but a high silicate - volcanic glass bubble - that broke at some point:
Also we might consider this as something akin to the tiny glass beads on the moon.
By the way, there do appear to be other possible round sphere shaped objects in the picture, as well as a couple of other things that look more akin to artificial shapes - at least to me, and the pahoehoe blister we see in the link I posted above is not nearly this round.
You raise an important question, "why is the sphere so shiny and clean looking", one possibility is the abrasive nature of the Martian dusty winds (as we have seen it does clean the rovers solar cells), another is like you suggest an alien probe, the smaller one does seem to be dusty (there may be another one, lower centre, close to the wedge shaped rock).
My concern is 'how it got there'?, it certainly looks like it has been designed and manufactured, it also looks like it had just been set down, although as far a I know none of the rovers carried such spheres on-board (so it hasn't fallen off the rover), I wonder what NASA has to say about it?
__________________
"Creating a fiction when stating a fact destroys the credibility of the truth one are trying to convey"
it's strange how much this object seems to be "new". it isn't ruined, burned, not even covered by the dust. i mean, it doesn't seems something that is there from hundred of years... if we suppose it is a part of a relict or machinery of some sort or a manifactured artifact of an alien civilization of the late past i suppose it should look different...
this could be a probe that alien activities are still running on mars ?
( i don't take in consideration the possibility that it's a part of a human machinery, at least of a human machinery officially known by the public )
Just to let you know, the 'sphere' is not the only object in the image!
If you take a very close look other at other parts of the image, many interesting objects can be found. I downloaded the image but it has to be 'cleaned' up a bit if you want to see what is really on the surface.
Anyway, good spotting Humanoid.
__________________
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Gosh..sol 1314, can't believe I've missed that in the Spirit pancam gallery. Thing is goggog's image is not a single image, but rather a composition of four images (mosaic) and one cannot find mosaics in the raw pancam images. Image# 2P243016986EFFAV00P2388L5M1 is part of that mosaic. And mosaics have altogether different image IDs..learning how to interpret them would be great.
Thanks for the info marsrocks. I went through these sols for pancam and navcam, didn't find anything. Could be there and missed it though, the anomaly is to small..I chose some stones as references from source image but after going through about 10 images, from then on all stones looked the same to me
-- Edited by Humanoid on Monday 17th of May 2010 02:08:53 AM
Spirit pancam site 131 - set 2388 - encompassing sols 1312 to 1359:
There are enough filtered images available for me to make color images of both left and right views, but unfortunately, they did not hold up well in the conversion to palleted gif for the animations below:
You may be able to find the exac sol by going through Holger Isenberg's pancam images one at a time from sol 1312 to sol 1359: http://areo.info/mer/spirit/1312/
It is available in color, so he may have processed it, but there is no guarantee it will be there, as these images are released at such unpredictable intervals.