Posts Tagged ‘Mars’

MrSpechtler Published on Jun 2, 2013

Die ESA-Sonde Mars Express ist seit 10 Jahren unterwegs und umkreist seitdem den Roten Planeten. Das Original-Video stammt von der DRL und kann sich auch unter nachfolgender URL angeschaut werden: http://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault….

Google translation: The ESA’s Mars Express has been 10 years since the road and circled the Red Planet. The original video is from the DRL and can be looked at under the following URL: http://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault ….

Nice views. Beautiful views.

Not much to say at the moment as the distractions of duty abound… so, for your viewing pleasure… watch this.

It’s a series of aerial flyby views of various Martian landscapes.

It is done by overlaying photographs from the craft’s stereo camera onto 3D maps made from precise laser altimeter data. This allows them to use 3D programs to generate the flyovers.

They could also, if they wanted, generate ground level walkthroughs… that would be spectacular, I bet.

Enjoy and Peace.

Oh dear. First my dear Doc Watson… and now Ray Bradbury, who, as you might imagine, meant a whole heck of a lot to this searching mind. I can’t really write too much at the moment, I’m sorry, it’s too emotional.

What a beautiful, sweet man. And what an inspiration he has been and will continue forever to be to so many.

I will just play these two videos in his honor.

In Memoriam: Ray Bradbury 1920-2012

Published on Jun 6, 2012 by 

A Mars rover driver pays tribute to author and visionary, Ray Bradbury.

Published on Jun 6, 2012 by 

Through the years, Ray Bradbury attended several major space mission events at JPL/Caltech.

On Nov. 12, 1971, on the eve of Mariner 9 going into orbit at Mars, Bradbury took part in a symposium at Caltech with Arthur C. Clarke, journalist Walter Sullivan, and scientists Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray. In this excerpt, Bradbury reads his poem, If Only We Had Taller Been.

Sir, be seeing you…

Peace.

I love Martian dust devils. Really. I do. Don’t know why, really… they’re just cool – in a decidedly alien sort of way. Yeah, yeah, we have plenty of them on Earth, but, well, these are on Mars. They act kind of weird. So there.

In case you have never seen any, here is a nice video of a whole bunch of them. Just 8 seconds and… Just delightful! To get the proper impact flowing through your synapses, you really should watch this in full screen. Note their size. You’ll need this spectacle lodged firmly in your head to fully dig the upcoming video.

Uploaded by on Dec 30, 2007

Dust devils on Mars sweep past the NASA rover Spirit. Movie sequence made by MERDAT. Sorry about the Chinese date tag, I am currently working on including other language capabilities in the programs image tagging function. Still image data courtesy NASA/PDS.

Okay… now that you are well-grounded in the visual coolness of dust devils on our dear Mars… get a load of this:

This next one is remarkable and quite seriously stunning.

I have never seen one this big! This ‘video’ is just a HiRISE image so we can’t see it’s true power and beauty, but after checking the video above, you will most likely get what I’m driving at here. It must be just intense to watch! Apologies in advance for the silly robovoice, maybe this tuber doesn’t have a mic.

Uploaded by on Mar 7, 2012

The Serpent Dust Devil of Mars
A towering dust devil casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this stunning, late springtime image of Amazonis Planitia.
http://www.uahirise.org/images/2012/details/cut/ESP_026051_2160-2.jpg

The length of the shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than 800 meters, or half a mile, in height. The tail of the plume does not trace the path of the dust devil, which had been following a steady course towards the southeast and left a bright track behind it.

The delicate arc in the plume was produced by a westerly breeze at about a 250-meter height that blew the top of the plume towards the east. The westerly winds and the draw of warmth to the south combine to guide dust devils along southeast trending paths, as indicated by the tracks of many previous dust-devils. The dust plume itself is about 30 meters in diameter.

Numerous bright tracks trend from northwest to southeast. It is interesting to see that these tracks are bright, whereas dust-devil tracks elsewhere on Mars are usually dark. Dark tracks are believed to form where bright dust is lifted from the surface by dust devils, revealing a darker substrate.
http://www.uahirise.org/images/2012/details/cut/ESP_026051_2160-1.jpg

Here in Amazonis, the dust cover is too thick to be penetrated by such scouring. A blanket of bright dust was deposited over this region recently, just before the arrival of MRO, so the surface dust here can still be moved. Perhaps the bright tracks form when the settled dust is stirred up by the strong winds generated by the dust devils (tangential wind speeds of up to 70 miles per hour have been recorded in HiRISE images of other dust devils).

It’s also interesting that this image was taken during the time of year when Mars is farthest from the Sun. Just as on Earth, Martian winds are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun’s rays should be at a minimum during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time.

Written by: Paul Geissler (7 March 2012)

This is a stereo pair with ESP_025985_2160.
http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_025985_2160

– Credit HiRISE – NASA/JPL/University of Arizona –

Link – http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_026051_2160

Nice, huh?

Peace.

Mars Critter Shirt modeled by Jamie.
Nice, huh?

I’d like to thank Jamie for enthusiastically modeling my Mars Critter shirt. She is of course wearing the 3/4 sleeve raglan version which you can change the colors on or if you like put my little buddy on another style shirt, I’ve got tons, 70, I think – regular tees, “green” tees, basic tees, polos, spaghetti strap style, hoodies – all kinds and in a ton of colors.

The official blurb about the shirt Jamie has on:

Ladies 3/4 Sleeve Raglan (Fitted)

Cute and comfortable, this classic baseball jersey has been cut just for women. Made from 100% super-soft ring-spun cotton by Bella. Includes side-seams and double-needle stitched sleeve and bottom hems for lasting quality. NOTE: Sizes run extremely small. Order 1 to 2 sizes larger than normal. Imported.

You can personalize it, too, if you want; add text or pics to it, on the front or back… you can do that to all the gear.

My little Martian buddy can also be had on a Speck brand iPad Case, a variety of caps and coffee mugs, a key chain, greeting cards, post cards, a mousepad and a really nice quality print. If you might want it on something I have yet to make, like the little speakers that just got added, just let me know, no worries.


It’s really a lot of fun making all these images in Photoshop and Fireworks and Apophysis and then arranging them as nicely as I can on the clothes and the gear… keeps me out of trouble and puts a smile on my face… and gives me an excuse to peruse NASA images looking for weird stuff… and to think that it’s all for sale, that I could make a couple of dollars if some like-minded wacko should actually buy something… what could be better than that?

Ha! If it actually happened, maybe! It does sometimes, but…

Don’t think I get rich off of this particular endeavor… it’s been 6 years now and I’ve yet to get to even half a K… in all that time. Any person buying anything is pretty much a hero in my eyes. I wonder sometimes, though, as a colleague of mine in Australia actually makes a living at this!  WAAAH!  So prolific she is… just amazing! And talented. I really wish I could emulate that. Maybe someday I will figure it out… wish me luck!

Anyway, enjoy. There’s some strange stuff in my store that might trigger something inside you.

Peace.

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, but I am just well and truly shot, so, here it finally is. And I’ve got another one I’ve been meaning to post for ages, too. Sigh.

I used to spend many an hour totally absorbed in reading the discussions on and digesting the wonderful evidence contained within the fabulous forum on Charles Shults’ Xenotech Research website. That site went away during Shults’ time setting up his Spaceport America project.

Charles has told me that what once was will eventually again be, and indeed he has been posting his discoveries bit by bit onto his new site with linkage to the original science data. I sure hope that forum comes back.

Here’s a link to the original article that also has a very nice 7 minute video on it: Sir Charles ShultsCharles Shults presents his discoveries on WLTX-TV   April 29th, 2011

Winnsboro, SC (WLTX) — Charles Shults says there’s life on Mars, and he’s got the pictures he says proves it.

NASA announced the discovery of water on Mars in 2006, but Shults came to that conclusion in 2004.

“The date I was first certain was February 15, 2004,” Shults says.

Using the Freedom of information Act, Shults obtained more than 200,000 Mars images from NASA. After thousands of hours of reviewing the images, Shults came to a startling conclusion to some: not only is there water on Mars, but there are fossils too.

“Many of the things I’ve seen look clearly like the recent erosion, or presence of water on the surface, and many of the images show what appear to be fossil organisms, marine fossils,” Shults says. “Right now, the planet has extremely thin air, very tough living conditions, but it is wet on the surface in many areas, and it is covered with fossil remains from marine organisms.”

“Some of the fossils we found are seashells, and very clearly, they are identical to what we find on Earth,” he says. “There’s an absolute identical appearance to both of them.”

Shults’ research has the potential to change the way people think about the universe. He’s written numerous articles and books on the subject. The latest is A Fossil Hunter’s Guide to Mars.

Continue reading this article…

A broken helmet shell.

Don’t miss out on seeing some rather strange “rocks” on Mars, “rocks” bearing much, much more than a passing resemblance to Earthly marine fossils at Charles’ site: ShultsLaboratories.com

This effort is a fantabulous and an altogether proper thing to do. Being as readers are aware a full on Mars nut and an adherent to Mac’s theory, I can’t think of a better guy for an honor like this. Through Mac so many people were exposed to and enlightened by what IMHO is quite likely the way things really went down here in this quadrant so very, very long ago. And that is a wonderful gift to the world.

What follows is lifted from WATT friend Greg Bishop’s excellent and popular UFO Mystic blog…

Explore UFO Mystic with the following link.

Mac Tonnies Crater On Mars?

A man named Shepherd Johnson has started a motion to name a crater on Mars (preferably in the Cydonia region) after late author Mac Tonnies. As most of the readers of this site are aware, Mac died last year on October 18th, and was a friend of UFOmystic as well as a good personal friend of Nick and myself.

Mac’s second published book was entitled After The Martian Apocalypse, and examined the evidence for and against the idea that an ancient civilization existed on Mars in the distant past and may have been wiped out by some sort of global ecological disaster.

The USGS criteria for naming a geographical feature on the red planet includes the subset of “writers and others who have contributed to the lore of Mars” which certainly includes Tonnies’ work.

Johnson says, “I went ahead and submitted Mac’s name to the USGS contact person. Her name is Jennifer S. Blue, and she is very helpful. As I thought, we will have to wait a little over two years as honorees have to have been deceased for 3 years before their names can be considered.”

If you have a Facebook account, you can show your support in a sort of virtual petition by joining the group.

More info at the the Mac Tonnies memorial site, Macbot.

A sporty new video’s arrived from the boffins over at Lunar Explorer Italia − this one dealing with an interesting look at what is perhaps yet another fossil, a flat little round guy of a nice size this time, unfortunately broken. But, it’s “reconstructed” nicely… and shown to compare favorably with an Earthly organism called a Nummulite.

Nice little stream, too, or rather the remnant thereof… that looks, shall we say… recent!

Un flusso? Che cosa?

Sì, l’uomo!

Indeed, that got me going a bit more than the fossil did, as, well, there are tons of fossils. But rarely have I seen such close up, on the ground, positive indication of surface water. This is really great stuff.

Can’t you just see the water bubbling up from a spot under the Rover’s wheel… heading off down the slope… only to quickly get absorbed into the soil, all the while evaporating at the same time? Way cool, I say!

You know, having said that, the Rovers should really be giving us videos… maybe next time, as they’re so fond of saying. Yeah, right, that’ll happen.

Fantastico … godetevi lo spettacolo!

Following is the always interesting “description” that LEI attached to the video. Heady, these guys… :)

Channel Icon

What are we looking at? Will be the usual – wonderful! – Photomosaic in natural colors that shows us a piece of Mars?

No, this is more.

More.

Go and look at the EDM below …

We already know what they say and write in many :”… but what is it? E ‘a detail that you do not understand … is too small … … is undefined does not explain anything and does not prove anything. .. “.

Yes, certainly.
And you know why? Why the “people” (like the Anomaly Hunters Sunday …) wants to be surprised and, to believe, wants to see – or rather: MUST SEE! – Something big: a pyramid – or perhaps a group of Pyramids! -, An amphitheater, a Cosmodrome, a “face” that looks toward the sky or maybe a “parable” that points to nowhere …

Yes, it’s true: you try the “Big Test”, because it is “common thought” that only the “Big Test” AND ‘ “the smoking gun.”

It does not work that way.

Those seeking the “Cathedral” – and that we have already said and written until the nausea (more ours than your, believe it …) – in the end, does not want to see anything and even if he stumbles and falls on a simple but essential “Brick” … I do not see it!
Not consider.
I do not even understand.

LORD, that (in our humble but informed opinion) is the brick!

Look at him, Study him and if you’re really good, explain and spiegatecelo.

From a post a little while ago at Above Top Secret, we discover that… Researchers poring over the latest week’s batch of Mars photos from the reasonably spectacular HiRISE camera … (the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (operated by the University of Arizona) have located something that really is spectacular… another monolith!

Yippee!

The cool part is that this one, is not on tiny little Phobos, nope, this one’s on Mars itself. Indeed! Shades of Sir Arthur, even. He’d be pretty darn proud, I think.

A new monolith! HiRISE image, NASA/LPI

Now that is seriously monolith-y lookin’! … yet it could still be just an oddly placed rock that just happened to fall there and stick in the ground. This is, in fact, a possibility. Personally I think it’d have a heck of a time retaining it’s stand-up position in that eventuality, but hey, what do I know?

Noted with not much surprise, really, was that our pals at Lunar Explorer Italia had had several peeks already at this thing, shown below… at least it looks like the same object to me, judging from the anomalously disturbed ground at it’s base. What do you think?  Is it the same one?

It was suggested by a commentator that the disturbed ground might suggest that this is a crystalline form that got pushed up from beneath the ground, as happens here on Earth sometimes.

Maybe… there are somewhat siimilar features scattered about this relatively small area, but, they’re scattered about. I’d expect a crystal uprising to be more densely packed. Still possible though. It is actually at a pretty jaunty angle for a building. Not for an artwork, though… The romantic in me would prefer to speculate that said disturbed ground is eons of dirt covering a wonderfully wonderful base to the spire.

Newly discovered Martian monolith. Crop by an ATS member.

And then… they adjusted the curves… revealing data hidden within the overexposed but still viable pixels… and just look, my friends, at how wonderfully and uniformly thin it is!

Lunar Explorer Italia has a peek at the monolith.
Wow…

And, to cap it all off, as an adjunct to our last post, wherein our hero Buzz Aldrin revealed the Phobos monolith to the population-at-large; yet another image from those astronomical boffins over at Lunar Explorer Italia, namely Dr. M. Faccin, we have this fantabulous enhancement of our favorite mystery spire… nice job, Doc!

Phobos Monolith enhancement by Dr. M. Faccin, Lunar Explorer Italia.

Looks a bit short, as the last post quoted figures of 25 to 42 stories… but hey, maybe that’s just what it looks like!

Indeed, Sir, thank you for that inspiring bit of dialogue. That is exactly the kind of thing we need, as a country, to hear, and especially from a true American hero. What you said is old news to me and many of my colleagues, An animation of the monolith by it's discoverer, Efrain Palermo.it having been discovered by Efrain Palermo over 10 years ago now, but it’s most definitely not known to all, as two friends asked me for pictures of your monolith last night after watching this clip.

You do see how inspiring it all can be, the wonder, the intrigue, the mystery of just who put that there as you say. It could well cause a second generation of explorers in the spirit of those transformed by your deeds, Mr. Aldrin. And that, Sir, is huge. So again I say thanks!

The famous monolith is a stunning piece of work placed prominently on Phobos, the exceptionally strange ‘moonlet’ of Mars. There is no geological explanation for its presence. Statue in a Phobosian crater?It is also accompanied by a smaller version a short distance away, as well as at least six conical towers, a possible pyramid and something that looks quite like a complex of some sort. The nearby Baby MonolithFabulous stuff, indeed!

And yes, Sir, you may have started something big! Let us get our ducks in a row and our asses off our couches and finally go up there and see just exactly what the heck that thing is and find out exactly who put it there! Who’d need wars when we could go to Mars?! Sounds a bit more exciting to me, and, people would actually want to go.

Oh, and hey, Buzz, I do hope that the Aquila program is still going along just splendidly for you. Yes, dear Buzz, some of us know about those things… (ssshh!)

OhBTW: You might find it interesting to know that, in late ’99/early 2000 anomaly-friendly NASA imaging specialist Lan Fleming calculated the height of the object in question to be between 25 and 42 stories. Yes, that’s right. 25 and 42 stories.

Ah, here’s a nice blast from the past… the briefly notorious IEC Anomaly site 502… I was reminded of it by a post on ATS by Mahendra Singh, aka mikesingh. This came out long ago, when Martian madness was a new thing… and I remember it well. It could very well have been a hoax, but somehow, it always struck me as being most probably real, especially as the terrain matches so closely with the alleged radar contour map above, which is a crop by myself of the whole image, by the way, just click it to go to the site which was still up until Yahoo closed Geocities… since 2003 no less! Full size images were all there. :(

Actually, as it happens, after some very cursory examinations it was indeed determined to be “most likely a hoax” due solely to the straightness of the lines above and the oddly colorful labeling on the images, by the very same guy who popularized the “snake” I posted on a while ago. I don’t know, those things don’t really bother me… The unidentified individual known only as “The Nightstalker” did the most actual work on it and came up with an ESA launch called A 502… and the late Kent Steadman tried his hand, too, so… for me…

I tend to agree with the assessment, but… that launch is intriguing and info on it now seems gone, so, who knows. It was quite cool when it came out!

Data supporting the idea of extant extensive international space efforts and activities of a mining nature abounds and that may well mean we don’t have but an inkling as to what really goes on up there. This could be the real deal after all, an ancient Martian site that ‘they’ were checking out as an adjunct to their own works in progress. I am cautious, but I cannot dismiss it out of hand.

Site 502 in infrared.

Some images from the site. Above, an infrared view… below, visible light, which I tried to make look more realistic as the one on the site is really badly, even wickedly red-orange… NASA-style!

Those were good times… this is just a brief bit of reminiscence… thanks.

Site 502 in visible light, but very altered colors.

(Apologies to those who recently clicked the links in the pictures hoping to go to the website. It was up when I posted this. But Yahoo in it’s evilness has closed it’s Geocities hosting site; and without telling the site participants, I might add. Many great sites were on there… a sad loss for sure.)

site_A86_pcam_90_cyl-A231R1 copywMarvin will be well pleased. He was so excited when he found out he was needed in Hollywood that he forgot his teapot, and it was lost all those years, until a cute little robot landed and started driving around, and just happened to do so right where he left it.

Seriously, now, the picture on the right is a Mars Pathfinder mission image by the JPL team. It’s a very tight crop within the full image, which is a composite of several individual pictures. Spotted long ago by Tim Beech, one of the original investigators of Martian photographic anomalies, it shows an object that resembles for all the world the classic spout of an English teapot, ready to pour a little cheer into our lives. This particular teapot spout, however… I am currently thinking… is another in a series of Martian critters, yes, I’m talking an animal, coming out of it’s lair to scope out the surrounding area for a bit of a snack. This view is primarily based on its shape, its relationship to the “rock” immediately to its left and on the marked dissimilarity to anything else in the entire image.

site_A86_pcam_90_cyl-A231R1 Image NASA/JPLThe larger version on the right is a levels enhancement by myself, to make the scene appear more natural, lighting-wise, not that it doesn’t pop right out at you in the image above. [Levels refer to the reaction of the imaging software in displaying the brightness level of any particular pixel, i.e. a certain value in the original data is output at the same, a brighter, or a darker level. Therefore the overall image ratios remain the same, as long as there is image data in a given pixel.] Clicking either image will take you to the original composite shot.

Do you think a rock could have eroded into that shape? I don’t. As always, your comments are most welcome. I am highly opinionated, it’s true, but I am also highly open-minded. 

As for the “rock” immediately to the left, it could be a rock that it’s using as a shelter, or it could be a shell. The smaller triangular-roofed “shell” that’s just a touch closer to us could be a fellow creature’s lair, as it has the same shape as the object our pal is peeking out from.

I don’t know, but that’s what I think of this bit of evidence… you must decide for yourself what you think it might be. We all want to see life running around in these images from space… I posit that that’s exactly what we’re looking at here.

This, evidence suggests, is an animal. Image based on NASA/JPL 2N289093752EFFB074P1985L0M1

I’m very excited! On my regular visit to Mr. Skipper’s site, I was enticed by the title of the latest post, MARS MOVING EVIDENCE, and I was certainly not disappointed! I’d like you to go over there and read it, because what I’ve done here with my own photo work is only a portion of a quarter of the evidence presented, even within this section of his posting. For besides the other inexplicables…

This “rock” is what caught my eye. As Skipper intimates with his writing; and after looking so closely and so extensively into the wee hours… I am of the opinion that this rock… ain’t no rock. No, I think we’ve got a live one here. I really  do! Damn!

This is a sequence, (not all of them here) of the Rover’s views over a period of many days, from Sol 1830 to 1843. That’s a day shy of two weeks. Be aware that the rover is moving slightly to the left in relation to these images as the days go on, so there are some camera angle changes, but not enough, surely, to account for what we’re seeing.

Check out the general shape. There’s a frill or ridge on the thing’s “head.” That’s cool, but I’m in particular looking at the progression of the tentacular-looking appendage that’s at the little dude’s front. Note how it becomes more vertical in attitude and therefore appearing thinner along it’s length as the days go on. It appears as if it’s an arm of sorts to perhaps scoop food into reach. I mean, come on, just look at that thing! It clearly is not in the same orientation in the different timeframes. It’s possible as well that the whole being has moved in angular relation to us as well, with the “head” more towards us later on. Maybe not, but it seems so.

Okay, guys, I am well aware of simulacra and pareidolia… however… this evidence is pushing those two very human phenomena of the mind just a bit, don’t you think? Perhaps that’s what this really is, nevertheless it looks pretty well real to me at this point and I’m willing to risk a foray onto the limb. Especially when considered in concert with the other activity in this scene as revealed at Skipper’s site. These images are a crop of much, much less than 10% of the full frame and perhaps a quarter of the area where the other stuff happens.

Although these are merely stills and not many of them over the 13 days, there’s an impression in my mind that life’s a bit slow-paced up there… ah, wouldn’t it be fabulous if they’d put a video camera on our explorers? For that matter… why haven’t they? Seems so very odd within our video and television enmeshed culture. Maybe it’s because we the people would learn way too much, or that NASA would have way too much editing to do. I believe they’d get all the funding and popular enthusiasm they could ever want if they did that. [UPDATE: 6/08/09. Re: this paragraph. They had. See why they stopped! Go here. Then go here.]

Anyhow, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a dog’s age. Be sure to read Skipper’s post, as I mentioned there’s more going on in this scene than just this guy, and there are three other incidents there as well.

On Sol 1833, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took the above image… and on Sol 1836, it took the one below and the third on Sol 1843. Images by NASA/JPL with very  slight enhancement by myself.

Spirit, Navigation Camera, Sol 1836 - NASA/JPL 2N289363474EFFB0A1P1985R0M1

NASA/JPL 2N289976994EFFB0EOP0675L0M1 Sol 1843

LOL: From the JPL/NASA site: Back by popular demand: THEMIS ART IMAGE #73 These north polar dunes look odd -- like a plant, or fossil, or some alien creature. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/ASU

One of my all-time favorite Martian anomaly images, Mars Odyssey catalog number PIA08557… I’m confident you can sort out why on your own. What do the once-great Jet Propulsion Lab and the master of obfuscation have to say about it? As well as the Arizona State University folks who built and run the THEMIS instrument that snapped it back in 2001?

Firstly, they present it as an “Art Image.”  No trouble there, it’s pretty sweet, after all. But… remember now… to everyone involved in the shenanigans at an official level… literally everything on Mars… no matter what… is a sand dune. No matter what.

This is the comment on the JPL/NASA site:
Back by popular demand: THEMIS ART IMAGE #73 These north polar dunes look odd — like a plant, or fossil, or some alien creature. VIS instrument. Latitude 82.4N, Longitude 314.5E. 40 meter/pixel resolution. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/ASU.

Sand dunes. What else could it be? There are only sand dunes on Mars, right? Yeah, and I’m the Queen of the Nile. Ha! I find it most interesting that the majority of traffic at Xenotech Research and no doubt Skipper’s site as well is from NASA and its related contractors. Interesting, indeed. And telling.

It’s surely not a creature… surely… it’s immense… it put the widest bit at about 3 3/4 miles across. However, it could very well be a colony of lifeforms of the type that J.P.  Skipper’s been looking into and theorizing about. That’s entirely plausible. I would certainly like a reasonable explanation for it. This would not include sand dunes. That’s absurd. I’ll be zoomin’ in on this one…

A fascinating image with probable fossils and a possible lifeform. NASA/JPL/Cornell

Negotiating a path through the pretty blue fossils and rocks in this photo taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit’s PanCam on it’s 960th Martian day is a most unusual little critter. See it? Right between the “rock” that looks like a fish and the one that looks rather frog-like. What is that? A worm? A snake? What the…? Naturally the NASA dudes drove right on by, as is their custom… sigh.

Haven’t seen anything like that up there before! Haven’t seen many string-shaped rocks either… here or there. At first I thought the groove in the very lower right might be a track, but I now don’t think so, as there’s none right at the object’s location and it’s pretty deep. No way to know if it moved, there’s only a few shots, and only from this camera, so we’ll never know. Me? I’m rooting for lifeform while we wait until someone with a sense of inquiry goes up there and finds out…

The PanCam page for Sol 960 is where you’ll find all the pics from the day, and here’s the page for the original image, which is by NASA/JPL/Cornell. Clicking on the image will take you to the color version on the areo.info Rover page, which automatically creates, daily (when available), very close to true color images.

It was indeed… I think spring has finally sprung here… ooh, I can do the car… start on the yard… great… maybe more dudes’ll feel that warmth and find they need a web guy or an editor guy… anyway, Mars beckons, so…

I found a graph I was looking for… showing surface temps. It’s from the bolometer part of the USGS-operated TES instrument package on the Mars Global Surveyor way back in August of 2001.

MGS TES thermal data

Not too chilly, really, in spring, summer and fall. Much more than a bit nipply in winter, though, I admit… ha! In fact, instruments also reported in the same month that it can even be up to 30°C/86°F at the equator. Just like sunny California, eh? One can also see a thermal image here showing 0°C/32°F almost right down to the pole, which is itself very cold.

This mile-wide lake of snowmelt water would be a great place to fish, I think. It was found by Paul Mcleod on an MGS image of the south polar region in Martian spring. Probably catch some pretty odd stuff, eh? Hehe. Like that eel-looking critter that’s been popular of late, maybe. I think we should go up there and check it out… reels in hand. This isn’t my favorite lake, actually, (we’ll go there later), but it’s nice and was close at hand.

M09-01354. This 1 mile wide lake of snowmelt water was found by Paul Mcleod on an MGS image of the south polar region in Martian spring.

MGS info happily re-discovered via a long-overdue visit to Holger Isenberg’s site. He’s one of the original Mars investigators. Tons of cool stuff.

A Martian life form? image © Sir Charles W. Shults III, K.B.B.This image is the result of a photo test conducted at Xenotech Research. Without getting all geeky, it represents what changed between the two photos they were looking at.

The object of our affection here is the little blue segmented fellow near the Phoenix lander’s foot, cropped from the original.

True, it’s sort of worm-looking, you might say… but why did it catch the eye?

Well… 109 seconds after this shot was snapped, they took another… and… it was gone.

Yeah.

Seriously close examination revealed that it wasn’t really gone, but, just as intriguingly… it had changed color… and… it had moved. Moved. Think about it. We’re talking Mars here, lads ‘n lasses. That place that’s supposedly so very inhospitable.

Inhospitable… right. Bullshit.

That’s what I love about the dudes over at Xenotech… they do real science on the released data… they have the science chops to back it up… they don’t take any of the aforementioned bullshit… and they’re not afraid to tell NASA or whomever exactly what they think of them… much like me, (except for the chops bit)… so, hey! Check ’em out, man… fabulous forum goin’ on, too. They keep using Photobucket for forum pics, though, so old pics are gone pretty quick, but don’t let that stop ya!

(This article was originally published  on the Book of Thoth’s website, where it still appears.)

by Iggy Makarevich

Long has humankind wondered over our origins… how indeed did we come to be present upon this world? The possibilities seem endless, ranging from the view put forth by mainstream science that we evolved slowly as the final result of continual evolution tracing its beginning to the unicellular lifeforms which came into existence in the primordial pools of organic matter covering the ancient earth, to the faith-based religious view that we were created in the blink of an eye by the incomprehensible power of a deity to populate the world just created, to the more exotic view of our arrival here from a far distant world, a world perhaps no longer able to sustain further occupation by its residents.

This author has long favored the latter view, perhaps initially solely since it is more romantic, more exciting than the others. Of late, these perceptions and intuitions have become increasingly more forceful, in view of the gathering of information afforded us by our sciences, our space sciences in particular, information which seems on reflection and retrospection to reinforce the speculation that we may be from elsewhere.

Archaeologists have long realized that the pyramid complex at Giza in Egypt is a star map that closely follows the pattern form by the Pleiades star cluster and in the intervening years many other constructions made by our species have been found that also follow celestial patterns with remarkable accuracy. While in and of itself this merely shows a fascination with the sky, it may represent the manifestation of a deep memory, a longing for “home.”

The discovery of the famous Face on Mars opened up a new and exciting search for extraterrestrial archaeological discoveries. It is fascinating that throughout successive re-imaging efforts at higher and higher resolutions, and despite manipulative efforts at debunking, the Face structure still retains its symmetry and its remarkable resemblance to a face. A humanoid face. Research has shown that the other anomalous features discovered in the region of the Face and elsewhere show a geometric relationship to each other that is at the very least, quite provocative.

The thought that these features, while so individually unusual, have all managed to form from random geological processes into such precise relationships and alignments is perhaps even more anomalous than the conjecture that they were artificially built that way. The anomalies even continue under the surface, with infrared imaging turning up patterns that appear to our human perception as the foundations of buildings in citywide scale.

There are similarly anomalous formations across the Martian moon Phobos, (a peculiar object in it’s own right), and many more remarkably strange patterns and structures on our own Moon as well, formations that stretch the imagination and defy our knowledge of geological processes.

Combining these discoveries in space with the remarkable finds of out of place and especially out of time artifacts here on earth, such as patterns resembling footprints that are dated to hundreds of thousands of years, and similarly aged inexplicably formed objects from deep in mines and otherwise buried, to petroglyphs resembling dinosaurs in the American southwest and provocative formations that seem artificial deep under the sea lends an open mind to consider the possibility that indeed in time immemorial, a space faring people left a dying world to venture forth into space to locate a new home. Perhaps they colonized Mars at a time when its environment was suitable, and when whatever catastrophe befell that world resettled here or perhaps they settled both worlds simultaneously, only to continue on here, their journey long forgotten in the countless millennia since. Perhaps too their vehicle was our own Moon, itself an extraordinarily anomalous object, described by NASA scientists as being largely hollow as a conclusion of seismic testing and as being composed of materials older than our Earth.

How is it possible that all of these anomalies and the relationships that they hold to each other in form, pattern, placement and especially in concept be wholly natural? Such a conjecture seems difficult to grasp. Can “luck” be that pervasive, that thorough? It is the opinion of the author that all these things are intricately intertwined in a remarkable tale of extremely ancient events that led to the population of the Earth by humanity, a humanity that originates from somewhere else, somewhere that we may never know.

Liquid water on Mars.

Well, well, well… what’s all this then, eh? The three pictures shown above were snapped by the Phoenix Lander on the surface of Mars, the planet they’ve been telling us is colder than a witch’s tit and dry as a bone…

Of course we Mars loonies have been spotting liquid standing water for ages nowin lakes even… and our august agency’s own instrumentation regularly records temperatures conducive to a nice day out. They leave that last bit out, of course. (Hopefully I can find the link for it)

I’ve never been too strong on the idea of NASA ever really disclosing anything striking to us in a timely fashion… if ever… considering the sums they’ve invested since day 1 in airbrushing photos of anything of interest, halting radio and television transmissions, making the Mars photos red (which really ticks me off) and such… fortunately things get missed… but… if this keeps up, maybe it’s a sign that they really will let it all out someday.

We can only hope. I’m of the opinion that we come from there, ’round about the time when things got nasty up there… could that be why? I kind of doubt it, but there are strange, archaic policies in place, so it might be a consideration.

Anyhow, I think this a most wonderful development and look forward to more! Hey, do ya think they’re aimin’ to live down the epithet Never A Straight Answer? Ha!

Pic and below lifted from National Geographic

Liquid droplets seem to form and move on the leg of the Phoenix Mars lander, as seen in images taken on days 8, 31, and 44 (seen above from left to right) of the craft’s mission.

Scientists think the water could stay liquid even in the frigid Martian arctic because of its high concentration of perchlorates, salts that acts like antifreeze.

Images courtesy Image NASA/JPL-Caltech//University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute