We should ignore it
mainly because doing so will drive the usual conspiracy theorists insane, thereby providing much entertainment.
Image analysis of shots taken by the Curiosity rover's MastCam last month appears to have revealed a shiny metal object sticking out of a rock on the Martian surface. Italian imaging specialist Elisabetta Bonora was going over Curiosity's latest photographs and found the object in a set of pictures taken by the rover on …
Unless it's a manufactured object - or even a crystalised former life form, the shape of the base on / into the rock is circular and it's radiused from the base, up into the shaft, and then there is the handle (like) bar on top....
On a big brown shit hole, with rocks, dust and sand... it's very "non typical" in every respect - like shape, colour, design etc....
While it COULD be some kind of crystal, or fossilised sea anenome, or kelp root, which may be totally feasable, it also happens to look much like an older style safe door handle.
Already has. Surprised Reg took so long to dig it up. Been on some nut sites for a week.
Many strange things found, almost nothing is ever explained. I understand NASA can't run off every time something strange pops up, but hopefully this will make it on a list of things to check out. the rover cant be far away, it doesn't move fast.
Somewhere in cuckoo land, Richard Hoagland just wet himself.
I like the idea of it being a piece of a crashed probe (there's not exactly a shortage of them), with the rest of the wreckage just out of view over the apparent drop behind it. Rocks are fun, but let's do a little artifact hunting too!
Looks like a twisted bit of metal to me, as though it was a vein in a rock and the surrounding rock has been eroded by dust, which has kept the finish on the metal looking bright and nickel-like.
Which is kinda cool when you think how long the thing must have been sat there for that to happen.
And I for one welcome our bent metal overlords....
Doesn't this look like something that should be found in abundance, but apparently it is not. To me something like this would almost always be found in a scatter plot type of pattern, but just 1? It looks all too settled in to be any debris from anything we have passed up in space in the last 100 years, but it does look like it is just a shard. No aliens :-(
Out of curiosity, what is the protocol for giving a go ahead on using the bot's laser? If it fired upon something like this, how do you rule out an explosive ending?
"I have no idea what this is.... it doesn't look natural in formation.... Maybe this is alien made....But the sample would be needed go to Earth for confirmation on such matter."
Well, if someone with no qualifications in xeno-geology thinks it's worth launching another multi-billion dollar mission to bring it back because they think it might be made by aliens, that's good enough for me, and should be good enough for NASA, too.
"Guessing is useless I think in this case."
Yeah, where's a multi-ton robot tank, dripping with analysis tools, lasers and cameras when you need one, huh? That'd be dead handy right now!
Nice! Immediatly yoinked to my hard drive as the desktop background for my second monitor.
I guess I was wrong about there being a drop behind it, so it's probably not a large piece of wreckage from a probe. On the other hand, that object to its right is pretty darn weird too. I'm sure it's pareidolia, but it looks like a metal rabbit to me.
"the image covers the path taken by Curiosity."
The old track was some 65 meters away from the rover's position when the photo was taken.
The camera elevation was -8.85deg, so unless the mast is 10m tall the spot covered by the photo is much closer to the rover than the old track (something between 10 and 20m away, depending on how high the mast is).
Does anyone know if NASA has released a better resolution picture of the same spot from the left camera as well?
The one I've found so far is 500something by 400something. I've made a stereopair anyway and it clearly shows something sticking out of the rock, but because of the poor resolution you can't see what it is.