Mars (Page 18)

There are lots of strange things on Mars. For instance, NASA’s Opportunity rover has spotted strange coatings on rocks beside a young Martian crater. Is this some kind of conspiracy or just more high strangeness? The crater is about 30 feet in diameter, and has dark rays coming out of it. Astronomers have observed lots of peppercorn-sized, iron-rich, dark spheres in similar craters that resemble berries in a muffin, which they’ve nicknamed “blueberries.” PhysOrg.com quotes astronomer Steve Squyres as saying, “There’s dark, grayish material coating faces of the rocks and filling fractures in them. At least part of it is composed of ‘blueberries’ jammed together as close as you could pack them. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
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Some unexplained images have been photographed on Mars. The latest is what appear to be “trees.” The images show what look like rows of dark trees sprouting from hills on the surface of the planet, but according to NASA, it’s an optical illusion: The sand dunes are coated with a thin layer of dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide), and are caused by trails of debris left by landslides as the ice melts in Mars’s spring.

In the January 13th edition of the Telegraph, Ben Leach quotes NASA’s Candy Hansen as saying, “The streaks are sand, dislodged as ice evaporates, which slide down the dune. At this time of the Martian year the whole scene is covered by CO2 frost.”
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Are crop circles coded messages from aliens? – Bulgaria says they are in touch with aliens who, in response to a set of 30 questions their scientists sent to them, have replied with a complex set of symbols that their experts are hard at work trying to decipher. And what are these “complex symbols?” Crop circles! (NOTE: Subscriberscan still listen to this show). Also, NASA believes there is life on Mars because of the bacteria-like fossil forms on a meteorite from Mars that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago.
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Do they destroy it too? – Robot landers that were sent to Mars to search for life may actually have destroyed it.

In New Scientist, David Shiga reports that NASA’s Phoenix lander found chemicals called perchlorates in the Martian soil. When heated, these release oxygen and thus cause nearby material to burn (which is why they are used in rocket fuel). The heat from the Mars lander may have heated the perchlorates in the soil and burned away any life forms there before the lander could detect them.
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