True mission objective
So there are already balls there, and now they're drilling holes and have had to negotiate sandy patches where they might get stuck?
This is just a plan to turn Mars into a golf resort isn't it?
Mars watchers have spotted another weird object on the surface of the Red Planet: images uploaded from the Curiosity rover feature a small, nearly perfect sphere that was photographed by the machine's MastCam. Mars ball Mars has a tiny ball (click to enlarge) The photo, which was snapped on September 11 and posted on …
It looks more like those spherical rocks that are formed through the process of wear by motion within a depression. See them on the rocky tidal beaches sometimes. The sphere's material is irrelevant; can be igneous or sedimentary. The original rock happens to end up in a depression in a larger boulder, and after a few years of tidal motion you'll find a sphere and a smooth depression in the bedrock. The ratio of the radius is about 10:1, until the sphere wears away enough, to become small and light enough to be dislodged.
On Mars, lacking tides and wave action, this sort of process would take aeons since the driving force of motion would be infrequent wind (dust devils) that are so weak and rare.
I doubt it's metamorphic "concretion".
It's negative manufacturing. Wear.
Unless this is somehow linked to Roswell, I don't see what Eisenhower has to do with this?
(He wasn't even listed on the "most salvageable persons list" in case the alien invasion would be going ahead before 1960, as everyone in the know expected, a plan nixed by the Council of Reticuleans uniformly in disgust once they discovered that humans had invented COBOL, a feat that indicated a new low for the Orion arm and earned this part of the galaxy a few additional demerit points.)
once the Red Planet lost internal volcanism, it then lost it's protective magnetosphere, and it took little time to strip the atmosphere and oceans away. Based on double wingspan of Jurassic flying reptiles and insects, Earth has had at least half of it's atmosphere stripped in the last 60 million years. Since wing area is a product function of wingspan, likely that there was a four fold increase in surface air pressure during the dino era, also solving the 'cold/warm blood' issue. This fact also refutes the linear extrapolation for 'proxy' data on previous conditions, see....
"Amazing ! New ! Wrongco Proxy Crock" in archive at Canada Free Press and at FSS site.
No, this fact doesn't necessarily refute proxy data such as rain fall patterns (which have shown consistent air pressures over the past 2.7 billion years). An alternative explanation is that the originator of the Thick Jurassic Atmosphere theory had poor grasp of aerodynamics. (And geology, considering the faulty logic about Earth's CO2 cycle, and a worse grasp of climatology.)
Still, I'll indulge this. Quadrupling atmospheric pressure with carbon dioxide (the culprit gas in the Thick Jurassic Atmosphere Theory) has a dramatic impact on global temperatures. Never mind hitting the magical 350ppm today, the Thick Jurassic Atmosphere calls for an atmosphere that 75% CO2 (3 bars CO2, 1 bar everything else). But the Jurassic was not the warmest era on record. Indeed, it is succeeded by periods of warmer temperatures despite (according to this theory) rapidly-thinning atmosphere, and was only modestly warmer than the current era by a few degrees C. Why was the Jurassic temperature so modest in a 4-bar, mostly-CO2 atmosphere?