Peak Oil News and Message Boards

File under WTF!??

http://www.iflscience.com/space/now-the ... spoon-mars

Floating Spoon Spotted on Mars

I can't see the spoon, but the terrain shows clear signs of there having water at some time in the past.
They look like sedimentary formations.

If you locate the center of the picture, the 'spoon' is about just below and a little to the left of the center. It is pointing to the left.

It is a shadow effect. Hopefully we won't go down the road of denying the moon landings again. Although that is massively entertaining.

I see it now, looks like some overzealous image enhancement has been applied there.

cog, What do you mean by 'shadow effect'? The shadow certainly does make it look like it is suspended off the ground (though attached at the 'handle'). Is there a well known (to others) phenomenon that creates the illusion of such shadows that I'm not aware of?

dolan wrote: "looks like some overzealous image enhancement has been applied there"

Could be, or it could be that there was a core of something that crystalized particularly hard in thin column like that, and the weaker material around it weathered away. Look at all the other weird protrusions making shadows in that shot. It seems to be common in that area, and this one just happens to be rather spoon shaped.

Is that baby Elvis being served by the spoon, though??

Two things to keep in mind, visit the desert southwest or the mountains in the Sahara and you will see some really fantastic erosion sculptures from what wind blown sand does to rock. On Mars those same wind dust storms blow hurricane force sand and can last for weeks at a time. Second factor, Mars has a gravity field of 0.38 that of the Earth, so embankments are steeper and stresses on rock formations are lower. IOW Spires that would snap off under their own weight on Earth are able to stand on Mars.

"Second factor, Mars has a gravity field of 0.38 that of the Earth, so embankments are steeper and stresses on rock formations are lower" Nice point. But that doesn't explain Elvis!!

If you blow up the area in question 400%, the illusion goes away...

It looks like those mesas in the western USA.

dohboi wrote:File under WTF!??

http://www.iflscience.com/space/now-the ... spoon-mars

Floating Spoon Spotted on Mars

There are two of them, one with the long handle and the other with a short handle on the middle right edge of the photo

The long-handle spoon is nifty it must have a thin stem under the main part on the left and is obviously still attached on the right. The wind pressure on Mars is very low (0.7 hPa surface pressure vs. 1013.25 hPa on Earth) so this super fragile structure is still standing.

Good points, dis.

Here's a composite of five images showing the transit of the Space Station across the sun's face:

joewp wrote:If you blow up the area in question 400%, the illusion goes away...

It looks like those mesas in the western USA.

i.e. if you zoom in so you can only see the spoon part (and not the handle) ... you can't see the handle of the spoon.

New Pluto pix and white spot on Ceres

Now we know what those spoons were for--ladling up all that Mars water!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015 ... sity-rover

Asteroids are on their way: http://www.iflscience.com/space/hallowe ... scaring-us

Nice alignment of Venus Jupiter and Mars in the morning sky recently.

http://documentarystorm.com/the-cross-of-the-moment/

This discussion of Fermi's Paradox by major scientists starts in discussions of earth's evolution in the solar system, but goes much further and deeper.

dohboi,

Leo Szilard replied to Fermi: "They are already here. They are called Hungarians."

dohboi wrote:http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/05/454594559/researchers-reveal-how-climate-change-killed-mars

CC Killed Mars

And there was me thinking that it was the cooling of the planet's core that caused its magnetic field to die and allow solar radiation to kill the planet.