Why do you think NASA is hiding the truth? If they found anything interesting they would publicise it to the max to get more funding. The idea of 'hidden knowledge' about Mars is absurd.
I have no idea why they would hide the truth. But they certainly seem to be doing so.
A winged drone would need a runway, or possibly a catapult. Difficult to get a plane above stall speed there.
This I like; the smaller the better. A swarm of small frog-like robots, that can gather sunlight inbetween jumps.
Nonsense. I have looked at most of these Martian images too, and never seen anything that can't be explained by geology (areology?). What are you looking at that gives cause for concern?
Well...I've looked at images that have large items deliberately blurred out. Then there are one or two pictures of what looks like a pool of water (no comment by NASA). Then there are odd things, such as what looks like bones (the rover takes a close-up shot, so it's pretty clear - again, no comment by NASA).
I'd like to see one. Any blurring is likely to be an artefact of how the image was made. Ever tried to stitch several different space images into a usable texture for astronomical modelling purposes? I have, in an attempt to make models of asteroids and moons for Celestia - it's a nightmare, especially when the surface you are looking at isn't perfectly flat or spherical.
Water wouldn't persist on Mars as you very well know, so they are presumably ice or sand-filled depressions.
I too am suspicious of the info from Mars that is being shared with Joe Public. This is because when pictures of apparently tree-like structure first started appearing (early 21st C?), I was an active member of a local Astronomical Society, and we sometimes had visiting speakers come to talk to us about their work.
Or it could be a stain left by bacteria/mould/microscopic plant life?Arthur Clarke talked about the 'trees' when they were first discovered, and he thought they might be actual organic structures; at the time that seemed a real possibility.
But it seems that the procedure followed by Areologists (it really is called that, apparently) is to release the images without comment, then spend some months trying out different explanations. The current explanation for the trees Clarke was talking about is carbon dioxide escaping from underground, which causes meandering and branching channels in the largely homogenous regolith.
Yes, it could, and this is one of the conundrums in planetology of this kind. It would be easily possible to mistake a non-biological phenomenon on an unfamiliar planet for a biological one; this would be a false positive result. So far all the observations of life-like phenomena seem to be false positives.
The Allan Hills evidence is generally considered a false positive result, and I expect they were reluctant to publish this until their case was strong; it seems they were probably wrong about the strength of the evidence after all.
Thanks for that! Just been reading up on Hellas Planitia. With the presence of ice and high atmospheric pressure, that ought to be a prime site for exploration. Would love to see a close-up photo from the surface of one of those "trees" too!
Many years ago Arthur C Clarke wrote a story about exactly this - unfortunately cannot recall the title!
Lol! Officially one of the 100 worst movies of all time!
Concern for the contamination issue dates back farther than the current rovers. The two NASA Viking landers (mid-1970's) were sterilized and encapsulated after assembly to prevent contamination.
Ha ha, no...there's just enough oddness to lead me to the conclusion that they are holding back information.
Would carbon dioxide geysers create such wide and apparently static and stable structures though?Arthur Clarke talked about the 'trees' when they were first discovered, and he thought they might be actual organic structures; at the time that seemed a real possibility.
But it seems that the procedure followed by Areologists (it really is called that, apparently) is to release the images without comment, then spend some months trying out different explanations. The current explanation for the trees Clarke was talking about is carbon dioxide escaping from underground, which causes meandering and branching channels in the largely homogenous regolith.
