Mars boffins: You fools! That's no CRATER – it's a SUPER VOLCANO Ancient Mars could have been home to a type of supervolcano that affected its atmosphere and was partly responsible for the barren red planet scientists are exploring today. Eden Patera basin and surrounding area Boffins from the Planetary Science Institute and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre have postulated that a vast …
Mars' surface has had a pretty turbulent past - and I'd always thought that "crater" did look more like a caldera than an impact site - and not just that region, either. Orcus Patera looks to me like an eroded rift caldera.
A lot of reports mention Yellowstone as being an ancient supervolcano. That is is, but don't presume that ancient means extinct. It's far from that, and by most measures it's overdue another eruption.
if we've dunked Oppy into what used to be a volcano is the data we get back going to be typical of the rest of Mars.
If it's not a Volcano, what if it's a massive impact site, and 'Mount Sharp' is the remains of the impactor rather than anything native to Mars.
well, you're talking about a sequence of ïf"s, but...
The caldera of that volcano, once cooled down a bit, would make a lovely depression where water would collect. It would also keep that water at quite a nice temperature and environment for a number of "extremophiles" that are quite typical for life in earth's early development. In fact, as long as liquid water was present, the ecological conditions would be close to indistinguishable from early-biotic earth, even while the rest of the planets' climate would be going to hell in a handbasket, and would stay that way for a long time.
If any form of life was already present, it would have concentrated there. If it (still) was not, the conditions there would have been ideal for the final stages of formation. Either way, if there is *any* chance of finding evidence for past life on Mars, that caldera would be a prime spot to look for evidence of it.
"Hey, you'll never believe this"
- "wah?"
"you know the old Death Star mark 2s?"
- "before my aeon"
"yes you do. It was before we even knew how to goose stars into nova so we sent a ship instead"
- " oh. Vaguely. Wasn't that the one where we spent loads yet it got blown up with one fighter?. Good job guys."
"No, that was the Mark 1. Just too small so a bit vulnerable. The DS2s were chunkier."
- "yeah, yeah. Is this going anywhere?"
"Oh yes. Sorry. Well they should have all been decommissioned at least a galactic turn ago. But we lost a few. One's just come online."
- "crikey! It's still working? Where is it?"
"it says it's in the Sol system. The manifest says it was put there in a failsafe tech-detect mode. Apparently they were worried that the pond scum on planet 3 was getting organised. We missed it because we thought it was a duplicate."
- "oh yes, I'd seen a report on them. Trilobites or something. Didn't the rock get on the blitz list for asteroid impacts though?"
"yes, looks like the tough little critters survived. Now they've landed on the DS with some tech. Which set off the alarm."
- "well, surely it's slagged them then?"
"nah. Shut down. Control system went offline. Lost the atmos buffer so the old girl's taken a pounding. As soon as the power goes you lose the big storm system over the primary weapon and the rest goes with it. Main armament seems to have overheated too. You know what that does."
- "oh. filled the dish with magma! Blimey. What are we going to do when the Trills discover it's not a real geology? We'll be sacked!!! Goose that star quick, I don't care that it's not on the schedule. This is worse than that Andromeda cock up."
"Oh, don't worry. I've got a big old DS3 next orbit out. they'll think that's a natural storm. That bad boy's hot and ready to cook. Let me just...."*click*
And across the universe, billions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced.
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