Opportunity finds new patch of 'berries' on Mars The Curiosity rover kept trundling away over the weekend, with NASA reporting the vehicle has now moved 142 meters. More exciting Martian action over the weekend took place at a spot NASA calls “an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater.” Ye Olde Opportunity rover is still hard …
Wouldn't go as far as that, but the likelyhood of life as a process having developed on mars seems increasingly probable, even though it would most likely never have progressed past what we would class as bacteria.
There's plenty of "extremofiles" here on earth whose ancestry (and internal chemistry) goes way past us young whippersnappers of eukaryotes, and would be quite happy to live under conditions that Old Mars would have had if there were sufficient bodies of water. (for less specifically boffin-rish inclined , think black smokers on our ocean floors, and the fact that those ecosystems run on chemotrophic bacteria)
Given that those energy schemes and cellular pathways developed well before even "snowball earth" happened, there's good hope on that front. It won't be little green men, but proof of *any* form of extraterrestrial life would be...well... a good thing.
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Which methods of creations are rather distinct and different. A lot of things depend on the substrate it is found on/in and a host of other variables, some of which the rover is not equipped to measure to begin with.
Pedantism aside, the *least* this find gives us is an indication of a logical landing site if we ever get people to go all the way there. There's Interesting Stuff there which needs Looking At.
Poor old Spirit (RIP) had quite a hard time. A bug in the software nearly killed it in the early days, but they patched it remotely. Even a stuck wheel couldn't stop Spirit from trekking on in search of interesting stuff. Then it was ordered to go mountaineering and eventually it got stuck in a patch of soft sand sloping away from the winter sun. It struggled on for a while in a new job as a stationary science outpost, but it was all too much for the old rover.
Opportunity landed pretty much right on a patch of "Blueberries", had the software patched before any problems appeared, found what looked like sedimentary rock, trundled over relatively easy terrain, and is still alive today.
Some rovers lead a charmed life. Lets hope Curiosity does too.
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