A website called UFOSightingsDaily, is making claims that the Curiosity rover spotted skeletal remains on Mars in what can only be called a wild claim.
NASA hasn’t commented on the unlikely “find” of a “Martian King”
The website is not being very restrained its claims. To the contrary, its claims are way out there.
“This is enough evidence to rock the paleontology world off its high horse,” the site claims. “These skeletal remains of a living creature on Mars was found by Paranormal Crucible of Youtube. It could be an intelligent species, one of the creatures that controlled this planet. An extraordinary and unusual find that should change how we see Mars forever.”
This “evidence” comes from a photo taken by Curiosity in late June, and must be said, does seems to resemble a parts of a skeleton. (But you stare at clouds long enough, or smoke enough weed, you’re going to start seeing things). It’s quite likely that the photo in question was not a skeleton in a rock formation but a rock formation that simply resembled a skeleton.
The find came before Curiosity unexpectedly and on its own, to enter into a standby or safe mode from July 2 to July 9.
NASA engineers were able to finally get Curiosity back to work and it is once again functioning as it should.
This is not the first time that Curiosity has “shut itself down” since its arrival on the Red Planet, rather this is the fourth time this has occurred owing to software glitches. The first three episodes all occurred in 2013.
Curiosity went into service after it landed Mars’ Gale Crater in August 2012 and nearly immediately found evidence of water once filling lakes and rivers on the Red Planet and could very well have supported microbial life about three billion years ago. Finds like these are the reason that NASA chose to extend funding for the operation of the rover last week that will see it in operation until at least Oct 1. 2018.
The funding will go to the Mars Science Laboratory Project which built and operates Curiosity.
In other Mars’ News
Presently, teams are looking at studies of and imagery of the “Bagnold Dunes” in an extensive and groundbreaking of sand dunes not found on Earth.
“Earth and Mars both have big sand dunes and small sand ripples, but on Mars, there’s something in between that we don’t have on Earth,” said Mathieu Lapotre, a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Lapotre was the lead author of a study published in Science, to start the month of July.
“As Curiosity was approaching the Bagnold Dunes, we started seeing that the crest lines of the meter-scale ripples are sinuous,” Lapotre said. “That is not like impact ripples, but it is just like sand ripples that form under moving water on Earth. And we saw that superimposed on the surfaces of these larger ripples were ripples the same size and shape as impact ripples on Earth.”
“The size of these ripples is related to the density of the fluid moving the grains, and that fluid is the Martian atmosphere,” he said. “We think Mars had a thicker atmosphere in the past that might have formed smaller wind-drag ripples or even have prevented their formation altogether. Thus, the size of preserved wind-drag ripples, where found in Martian sandstones, may have recorded the thinning of the atmosphere.”
