I'm probably crazy, but I've been staring at the two images for five minutes and can't see anything in one that isn't in the other, unless it is obscured by the annoying "view related gallery"button.
EDIT: Ok, half the time I load the page, the page works and I see the rock, but the other half of the time, the image is shifted down, the top half of the display box is black, and the "rock" is off screen...
Psst. Discovery folks. You've got yourself a race condition. You're calculating a `margin-top` to center an image vertically irrespective of whether that image has loaded. You either need to explicitly set the width and height as attributes on the image (good for preventing reflow anyway) or hold off on calculating your dimensions until after the image has loaded. You could even just wait for window load (instead of DOMContentLoaded).
You're not crazy, they've discovered a Schrödinger's rock. With a ridiculously high Planck's constant, and conscious observation working backward in time through an imager and interplanetary transmitter to collapse the wave function. So, pretty big news.
"Only two options have so far been identified as the rock’s source: 1) The rover either “flipped” the object as it maneuvered or, 2) it landed there, right in front of the rover, after a nearby meteorite impact event."
So, you know, our leading theories are that either the rover did it somehow, or, approximately 8-10 orders of magnitude less likely, we just witnessed a meteor strike. Really, nothing in between those two?
Well the first thing that came to my mind when reading the title was the phenomena of moving rocks in Nevada [1]. It could be similar but unlike them this doesn't seem to leave any trails.
The likelihood of the rover being responsible is really something only the guys actually controlling it could estimate.
I wouldn't discard weather as the cause, and I'd consider weather long before meteorites. While the martian atmosphere is very thin, it packs a good punch speed-wise. Maybe in edge cases that could be enough to pick up small rocks and have them rain down somewhere else (similar phenomena exist on Earth).
Another hypothesis would be that the rock was ejected by a gas vent. I have no idea about the temperature conditions at the rover site, but a gaseous plume could carry solid material with it if the release was forceful enough - showering the surrounding area with rocky material.
That's how scientists work, they figure out the possibilities, and work with the evidence from there. It's not done by guessing what's more probable, and you don't eliminate a possibility immediately just because it's less likely.
Pic 1 shows an indentation where the jelly sits in Pic 2. What if the light is hitting the rock on a different angle creating this effect of a raised surface.. maybe?
You're close to what I was imagining. I was thinking it's martians having a good time at our expense! "Watch the silly earthlings study this rock I'll put in their picture, lol!"
Honestly its not like we have many real options. The rover flipped it or it fell there sound good too me. The area is pretty open there so it didn't crack off another rock, let alone the shape precludes that.
I think that's the unsaid part of the story, everyone secretly believes that some intelligent being placed that rock as a peace token (otherwise this kind of news won't make headlines)
When I look at both pictures, it seems as though the shape of the rock was there before it appeared ... almost as though it oozed up out of the surface.
(Note: I know this isn't at all likely or even possible and just think it's an interesting trick of the eye)
It has the potential to be huge. You never know what's just under the surface until you look. The NatGeo special, "Ten Years On Mars"[1] made a point to include how when a bad tire on Spirit dug a trench in the soft crust, an unexpected surprise revealed itself.
I've often wondered why they don't send a dragline digger to Mars, so they can dig a decent trench. When Spirit's wheel broke and they started dragging it along, digging a little trench, they made a nice discovery and that was with something not designed to dig at all.
If they could get a few feet down, who knows what they could find?!
The Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far.
It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a drill without contaminating the environment and with such a wide temperature variation?
Makes it harder to what compunds are indigenous and what you just brought yourself. No use shouting Eureka over some organic compound in a hole you just spilled oil in.
In general great effort is made to ensure that probes don't contain any biological contaminates so if we do discover signs of life we're very certain it wasn't a microbe that hitched a ride.
As far as contamination from drilling (due to lubricants or something else entirely) I imagine that the desire for general cleanliness is for much the same reason. If we're going to spend hundreds of millions of billions of dollars on a probe to another world we want to be really confident anything interesting we find is actually from that world and not Earth.
It may have been big, but curiosity has a scoop to scoop up dirt, a drill, and a laser that can vaporize rock to look inside of them. It's not like the rovers can only look at the surface.
It's worth noting for the record that the photos were not taken from the same vantage point. The parallax seems to indicate that the camera position was higher in elevation in the second photo. Just something to keep in mind when examining the photos closely for very small differences.
I find it interesting that there is no better word to describe "tiddlywinking", and that this obscure game has become part of our vocabulary for this very rare circumstance.
Perhaps the reigning champion could come forward to consult on surface hardness, body shape, concentrated mass, trajectory and wrist-action. Personally I cannot see that rock being tiddlywinked at all. Though I love the theory for coining a new verb.
Mars does have wind. In fact, dust storms have been known to last for weeks and encompass nearly the entire planet.
However, I don't think the wind is a likely culprit. If the wind was strong enough to knock over a rock, it would also be strong enough to blow a lot of dust around. That would be very noticeable to anyone watching the rover's feed, and would surely have been mentioned in the article.
"“So my best guess for this rock … is that it’s something that was nearby,” said Squyres. “I must stress that I’m guessing now, but I think it happened when the rover did a turn in place a meter or two from where this rock now lies.”
Opportunity’s front right steering actuator has stopped working, so Squyres identified that as the possible culprit behind the whole mystery."
Reading a lot of speculation, but this seems pretty plausible - without the need for anything crazy like aliens, subterranean oozing or a rock falling from space and just so happening to land in front of the rover... But, Hey! Perhaps it is martian-cow dung afterall!
Looking at the images, there appears to be a disturbed region above and to the left of the mystery rock, suggesting it (or something) might have impacted the ground there.
The question I've got is whether there's any sort of local slope down which the rock could have fallen on its own. That's hardly clear from the photos.
Article is very close to some tabloid IMHO. Not much actual theories, but a lot of bold statements like "Alien Robots That Left Their Mark on Mars" without much explanation.
Didn't this jelly doughnut appear a few days later? I thought that mars has an active environment i.e. dust storms and an atmosphere. So stuff is bound to move?
Do you see rocks the size of a donut blowing around on Earth as well? No. Sure we have more gravity, but also a thicker atmosphere. I don't think they blow around on Mars either.
How about the rocks that move in the death valley the size of 10 x donuts. Also vertical swirling column of air could move it. And we know those exist on Mars since those were responsible for cleaning Spirit's solar panels (rover).
EDIT: Ok, half the time I load the page, the page works and I see the rock, but the other half of the time, the image is shifted down, the top half of the display box is black, and the "rock" is off screen...