Someone sent me a link to the following site. It’s supposedly a pic form the Mars Global Surveyor. I know periodically that things like this are hoaxes that go around, but I can’t seem to figure out if this is legitimate. The image I’m referring to is on the right. If you click on th image you get a blow up, and you’ll see a weird, well something. So anyone got an opinion? Is it legit? What is it?
Check it out:
OK, I viewed the image but I still have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Care to fill us in?
Looks normal to me too (Mars Global Surveyor photo). What’s weird about it? Are you talking about that white rectangular outline? That’s the outline of the image on the left. Or has the link changed since you last saw it?
Are you talking about the one labelled “MOC red wide-angle context image M04-00292”? It looks pretty normal to me. So what’s wrong with it? You’re not talking about the craters or the surface markings, are you? If so, then realize that it’s a negative they’re showing here, and if you invert the colors, it looks a lot more normal.
if you look closely you can see a house with people standing in the front yard waving up at the camera but they look like perfectly normal folk to me…
I think I see what the OP is referring to. If you click on the smaller image on the right, and look at the crevasse in the lower right, you’ll see an odd looking feature that looks like a giant segmented worm. Don’t know what it is, though.
I dunno… looks like some fissures and craters on the Martian surface. I’ve studied it for a minute or two now, and nothing jumps out at me as particularly interesting, never mind unusual
Chief Wahoo, saw what I meant here’s a better image
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/mediummaps/M0400291.jpg
But yeah it looks like a worm, but that can’t be right it’s way too large, at least I think it is. Btw, soory about the delay, for some reason the boards been a little quirky today.
OK. Substitute the word ‘Left’ in each case in the above post for the word ‘Right’. And substitute the word ‘Dumb Ass’ for ‘ChiefWahoo’
Someone call Paul Atreides… we’ve found the Spice Worms…
Seriously, an active immagination could make this out as a giant nightcrawler, but I see little there that couldn’t be a natural geologic formation. Definately weird, but no less so than other natural formations on earth (The Old Man in The Mountain for one) where a natural formation DOES bear a striking resemblance to something else.
I’ll take a shameless stab at it. It is a crevasse created by a lava flow. It has flown several times in the past. One of the first times, one of those wormhole-like lava tunnel thingies was created, originally underground. Later lava flows went over, around, and underneath the wormhole thingie, but because of the original heating and cooling of the rock surrounding the wormhole-cavern thingie, it wore away at a slower rate than the surrounding rock and sand. What you are seeing is the exterior of the cavern.
I hope my terminology wasn’t too technical.
It looks a lot like Slimey, Oscar the Grouch’s pet worm. I think I remember a few Sesame Street episodes where Slimey was the first worm astronaut, maybe he made it to Mars?
Okay now we’re getting somewhere but Im still not satisfied. Btw, I said it lookds worm like but don’t really know and I haven’t the geological background to figure if it’s naturally occurring. But Sofa King, while I do like your answer, I have a problem with you assesment. If you look closely you can see regularly space “ridges” for lack of a better term, would a lava flow produce these and can you show me an example, basiccally is that normal geological behavior. And shouldn’t there be more?
I know earth has underwater volcanoes (this pic is of an ancient sea bed) so your answer is the best I’ve seen so far.
Here’s the interior of a lava tube, which is the highly technical term used to describe my much more eloquent description above. Notice the ridge-like interior.
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/vwlessons/havo_land/part9.html
And at the bottom of this page is a bad picture of a really worn out tube. With the luxury of a virtual vacuum and one-third the gravity, I don’t consider it out of the question that a lava tube on Mars might survive in a more recognizable shape.
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/Parks/el_malpais/el_malpais.html
Quick! Somebody get some geologists on this before I make us all look like asses!
I think SofaKing’s explanation is better, but I’ll present my first guess.
The segmented worm is actually a river bed. It flowed steeply down a mountain and eroded the underlying sediment layers. You’ve seen sediment layers in pictures of canyon walls, right? Well, this is a top view. The river cut diagonally through the layers and unearthed each layer lying atop the next. Then it dried up / boiled away / sublimated and left us this view, like a diagonal cut throught a layer cake.
Problems with this hypothesis are pretty thick on the ground. First, why is each layer the same shade of gray, bounded by borders which are a different but consistent shade of gray?
Second, I think all the free-flowing water has been gone from Mars for a really long time. Could be wrong though.
Third, the worm’s segments are equally wide, indicating uniform thickness for each sediment layer. Not bloody likely.
Anyway, I’d bet on SofaKing’s lava-tube explanation, which sort of reminds me of what I learned about pillow lava in college geology.
Ah, now I see it. That is interesting. It does look like the bottom of a canyon so it could be lava-related or water/sedimentation-related. I’m curious about the scale/resolution of the photo. The MGS is sending back TONS of images daily and a lot have not been analyzed yet. You’ll notice a bit more of that segmentation off to the lower right of the main strip.
BorisB - one of the findings of the MGS program is that liquid water may have been present a lot more recently than once thought. For example, if Mars is still (or was recently) volcanically active, it could temporarily melt frozen water that resides underground (causing a small flood or some small flow/erosion).
There’s still a lot to be learned from the MGS photos. Maybe there’s a contact address on that website where we could ask about it.
Is there a geologist in the house?