Despite what so many people would love to believe, NASA hasn’t discovered any evidence of past or present intelligent life on Mars. So, when the Curiosity rover stumbled upon what appeared to be a very suspicious chunk of something on the Red Planet’s surface, they were not only surprised but also a little bit worried.
The thin fragment was suspicious enough to warrant its own name, with NASA’s Curiosity rover team calling it the “Pettegrove Point Foreign Object Debris,” named for the location where it was discovered. With no idea what it was or where it came from, the rover’s handlers began to worry that it might actually be a chunk of the rover itself, suggesting some unseen damage or other issue with the robot. Thankfully, those concerns seem to have been unfounded.
In a new update from NASA the object has now been identified as a natural chunk of rock rather than a piece of any manmade craft or vehicle. The team analyzed the bizarre object with a tool called the ChemCam RMI. The instrument uses a laser to sniff out the makeup of anything it’s pointed at, and the results for this particular piece of debris revealed that it’s actually just a very thin piece of rock. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Mars is the most Earth-like planet in our Solar System. It’s rocky, it’s not too big or too small, and its temperature isn’t that far off from what we experience here on Earth, relative to the rest of the planets in our neighborhood. There’s still one big problem that would make life difficult for a human settlement on Mars, and that is its lack of atmosphere.
A very thin atmosphere still exists around the planet, but it’s less than one percent as dense as ours on Earth. One way to give the atmosphere a boost is by releasing more CO2, and scientists know that there’s some of that trapped in Martian ice and rock. Unfortunately, a new study has just revealed that one of the more, uh, interesting ways of unlocking that CO2 will probably not do us any good.
One of the proposed methods of pumping more CO2 into the Red Planet’s atmosphere is by bombing the planet’s poles. This would certainly release some more CO2 which is currently trapped in the ice caps on the planet’s poles, but new research published in Nature Astronomy reveals that the amount of CO2 it would release wouldn’t be nearly enough to increase the planet’s atmospheric pressure to an acceptable level.
According to the researchers, if we managed to release all the CO2 from the planet’s ice caps it would only increase the atmosphere to around 1.2 percent that of Earth. Furthermore, if mankind somehow invented a way to squeeze the CO2 from all the material on Mars (that’s essentially impossible), it would only boost the atmosphere to around 6.9 percent of Earth’s. – READ MORE
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