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| (Did ‘Curiosity’ meet this guy on Mars?) |
Cor, ‘something‘ exciting is about to happen.
‘Something‘ has been discovered on Mars.
‘Something‘ that they are not going to announce for another week or so.
‘Something‘ they say is “Earthshatering”.
‘Something‘ they say is “gonna be one for the history books”.
Yep, it seems that the lovely ‘Curiosity’ on Mars has beamed back data that is so ‘out there’ that they are having to check and double check it.
John Grotzinger is the chief scientist in the ‘Curiosity’ team, and he has indicated that this ‘something‘ is ‘something‘ that has been discovered by the rover’s SAM unit (Sample Analysis at Mars), which has the capability to examine and identify organic compounds.
SAM can search for the building blocks of life as we know it.
One of the reasons for the delay in sharing this ‘something‘ is that it will be far more dramatic to reveal this ‘something‘ at the Autumn meeting of the American Geophysical Organisation in San Francisco scheduled for December 3rd.
The other reason is the bizarre and frustrating way that data is transferred back to Earth. The windows of opportunity are quite limited and restricted to bursts of communication a couple of times a day. To deal with this, ‘Curiosity’ is set-up to send ‘headlines’ up to a few days before it can then send a sketchy detail, and then eventually send the high quality data.
I guess this is a bit like announcing something on Twitter, restricted to 140 characters, but only being able to ‘tweet’ three tweets a day. Frustrating.
So, as the ‘Curiosity’ team on this planet gets all the back-up data over the next week, we are left twiddling our thumbs waiting for this thought-changing ‘something‘ to be shared.
Cool!
England's England 