Mars Curiosity Rover - Mission Progress

Curiosity has shown what is very similar to a river bed, with pebbles rounded by streaming water. This is what NASA scientists say.
Tullio
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I know that a radar on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, incidentally made in Italy, has found deposits of water ice under a gravel cover even at middle latitudes. So Mars once had water. It must have mostly evaporated, as you say, but maybe for a short period of time it was in liquid form.
Tullio
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Curiosity is a long range mission, thanks to its nuclear power. Did you see it has no solar panels?
Tullio
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The big thing about the pebbles seen by Curiosity is that the rounded erosion on the pebbles suggests that water flowed for a long time...


Keep searchin',
Martin

Hmmmmm..... i'm suspicious of that theory Martin.
Sand is very abrasive. Mars has lots of sand, and we have pictures of those mini dust devil type tornado's that blow around up there. I have seen the effects of sand blasting stone walls, builders use sand blasting machines, and it erodes away solid stone and leaves it with rounded edges. Any of the pictures i have seen from Mars could be accounted for by dust devil's sand blasting the stones.

Maybe water flowed there at some stage. But i think its unlikely.

John.

Heck with them round thangs. What's up with them Shiny things?

They say the shiny things are Martian, not debris from explorations.

There's Gold in them thar craters.

The DEMON...ella
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Yes, the tiny, shiny objects found at the bottom of a trench dug out by Curiosity's sample scooper are stirring up interest. They're apparently not fragments from the rover, as was the case with a shiny piece of plastic found a couple of weeks ago. They plan to use the X-ray diffraction instrument to learn what the the mysterious objects are made of. In the photo with the article linked below, the fragment pictured looks a bit like a tiny gold nugget to me. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/um-whats-that-bright-shiny-thing-curiosity-just-found-on-mars/263874

If that's soil all around that shiny object, then this soil gives the
impression that it's bonded together by moisture?

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The Kite Fliers

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Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

Titan has methane, why not Mars?


Mars rover working on new clues in methane mystery

I believe you'll find that methane is rare on relatively warm planets near the Sun. Methane is typically a gas on Earth and Mars, and easily destroyed by relatively strong ultraviolet rays from the Sun. At the distance of Saturn and Titan, it is commonly a liquid or solid, more stable forms, and is subject to only a small fraction of the ultraviolet light found at Earth.
As the lighter isotopes of methane are produced by living things, their predominance in Mars' atmosphere would indicate the current presence of life there. If found only sequestered in solid media, they would point to life only in the past.

Is it possible the shiny piece is a part of USSR's MARS 2 Lander or USSR's MARS 6 soft lander that was lost in the '70's during landing? I dont believe either of these have been located.

Mars 2 crashed at approximately 45 degrees South latitude, 30 degrees West longitude. Mars 6 crashed at about 23.9 degrees South, 19.4 West. Curiosity landed at 137.4 degrees East, 4.5 degrees South. The shiny objects (there are at least several of them) do not seem to be from either of the Russian landers. Its been pretty well established that whatever the objects are, they are native to Mars. They were found at the bottom of a trench dug by Curiosity, in what appeared to be previously undisturbed soil.