The NASA Curiosity Rover on Mars

Well, I'm as strong a supporter of manned and unmanned space exploration as anyone, but I have to say that this just sounds like a silly idea. Who's listening?

No, it's songs being transmitted from Curiosity back to Earth.

I suppose they could say that they're just testing the data transfer mechanisms and any file of the right size would do - but it's more fun to have the file be something strange or interesting.

Ignoring "Life on Mars" is still inexcusable, though.

Should have been this, obviously.

Oh, so there isn't a little speaker on the outside of Curiosity blaring earth music to the martian landscape? Carry on, then.

The Martian empire has its finger on the button that launches their invasion fleet upon us. We shouldn't insult them with songs about war. (Or songs about mediocre, forgettable American pop musicians.)

Belgium!

It should have been ANYTHING but will i am.(which is s stupid name :/)

If I was David Bowie, I would feel very cheated right up to the moment that I remembered that I was David Bowie.

Hopefully the Martians won't mind that we arbitrarily removed their virginity with David Bowie's Area after the TV broadcast signals made it to Mars.

(There had to be some point in time where the planetary alignments made that possible. )

x5 But there should be Mars Needs Music!

Curiosity's myspace self-portrait shot◊

That was taken as NASA tests the rover's robotic arm and the camera it carries.

edited 10th Sep '12 9:22:11 PM by Gaunt88

He's got a kind of WALL-E thing going on there.

Yup, very much has got a Wall-E thing. OK, somebody on the engineering team. Own up. You did that deliberately...

edited 11th Sep '12 8:06:53 AM by Euodiachloris

Dunno, there are engineering principles at work with any elevated camera boom that will likely converge on a common formfactor. I doubt anyone was thinking, "Hey, as long as we're building this Mars rover thing, let's make it look like WALL-E!"

edited 11th Sep '12 8:10:54 AM by Fighteer

Tst, I were joking, and you know it! However, to actually use that coincidence? That screams deliberate.

Engineers are huge nerds.

Curiosity has discovered rocks made of gravel and sands that show signs of being formed in water. The rocks were formed billions of years ago in streams that lasted for thousands or possibly millions of years.

edited 27th Sep '12 3:45:53 PM by BestOf

Hmmmm... I wonder how being an often-Ice Ball might affect things? After all, Earth went through a few phases of that... And, Mars is a great deal cooler. I'd bet surface water did hang around for long periods. Just, frozen solid.

I hope they start turning up more evidence of glacial-style geology, as well as the continuing flowing stuff...

Mental image: Mars being life-sustaining like Earth, until it froze over.

Damnit all! Don't you people realise that this is how an Ice Warrior invasion begins?!

I'm fairly sure that this might've been said on this thread already, but if we do find life on Mars - not just residues, but extant life - there's a fair chance that it'll be a let-down for us.

Life emerged on Earth rather soon after the conditions were appropriate for it - the first couple of hundred million years of the Earth's history were marked by environments that couldn't have spawned life as we know it. After that, however, life arose some 3.5 billion years ago. It is quite surprising that it didn't take billions of years for life to get going, as would have to be the case if the series of events leading up to life was very complicated and thus unlikely.

There's a loophole in this, however: what if life came to Earth from outside? What if it landed here from somewhere where it had taken an "appropriate" time to develop? Is there such a place, and can life survive the journey?

The answer to the second question is "yes." As for the first one, the primary mission of Curiosity is to shed some light on that very question: was there ever a time when Mars could've supported life as we know it?

So if we do find life on Mars, it won't be as exciting as a wholly new kind of life would be, as there would be a relatively high chance that they're "just" our very distant cousins, which would rob us of a chance to observe a type of life that doesn't follow the rules and patterns of life on Earth.

Now, no one actually expects Curiosity to find life - not even fossils. That's not what it set out to do. So in a way this post is off-topic; but hopefully I've illuminated some of the discussion surrounding the search for life or conditions permitting life on Mars.

That seems kind of silly to me. Any life that is a common ancestor to Earth life would have diverged fairly early on given how Earth life started out as unicellular prokaryotes. When you look at all the different species that evolved on Earth from that first cluster of cells it's kind of hard to imagine that the Mars life would be at all like Earth life.

I think we're talking about different kinds of similarity here.

The primary measure of similarity between life-forms is the overlap of their genome. With all known life on Earth, the genome is composed of RNA or DNA, and in either case it's essentially a series of 4 types of molecule that interact with other molecules to build the organism and enable it to replicate. (I'm simplifying things here, but hopefully the use of the word "essentially" helps to highlight the relevant point.)

If the life we find on Mars has the same type of genome, and especially if it uses the same 4 nucleobases, we can't really say that it's a different type of life from that on Earth. Well, except if the content of their genome is entirely different; then you might have a case for claiming that they're not related to us.

Even if we find staggeringly beautiful or jaw-droppingly weird organisms on Mars, there's a good chance that the genes themselves are structurally surprise-free, and that would in my opinion be a downer compared to the prospect of finding some kind of life that is fundamentally different to us. If we find a double-helix that uses 6 different molecules to construct the sequence, or if it uses 4 nucleobases but not the same as us, then they're really alien.

Oh, you're talking about the DNA structure. I just meant appearance wise they'd be unlike anything we've seen.

For all we know DNA can't be made any way other than how it is on Earth.

edited 27th Sep '12 5:43:38 PM by Kostya