Other worlds are in the news at the moment - but leave Titan alone for a moment, and look at this from Mars:
The resolution is not brilliant, I know, but what is that in the middle? To an Earth-biased observer, it looks like a puddle of water in a shallow depression in some sand, reflecting a cloudy sky. I imagine that’s not too likely on Mars, but what is it likely to be? I suppose it could be an anomalous area of very fine grains of sand, but why just here at the bottom of a hollow?
Any thoughts? Unfortunately I don’t have any more info on the scale, location etc; I just came across it on Usenet.
I’d be curious to know where on Mars this was taken. I’m pretty sure they’ve found water ice near the poles, so if this is near there it very well could be a small puddle (assuming they took this near the middle of the day when it would be warm enough to melt into liquid).
Doesn’t look like a puddle of water to me at all. If it were water, I’d expect the gravel or sand at the edge to be darker, since some some water would be drawn up by capillary action. Look at similar puddles here on Earth. To me it looks more like a section of rock exposed by wind.
Looks even more blurry, IMO, in color than it did in black and white, like it was seen through a wind blown drop of water (or hydraulic fluid, oil, or some other semi-clear liquid).
Neat pic, either way, I just don’t see what you all are seeing.
It sure looks like a smear to me, or some flaw on the film. Actually, it kind of looks Photoshopped. It doesn’t look like an object at the same distance as the background at all.
I’d want to know the image scale and the context and see the original FITS image before answering, but, tentatively I’d say it’s the nearly flat rock (or the flat top of a rock) that’s buried almost entirely by soil.
I doubt we’re looking at water in any from. The relief looks all wrong for a puddle, liquid water wouldn’t be stable, and there’s just not that much ice laying around at that latitude.
I have some friends who work on the rovers; I’ll see if I can catch them this afternoon and get an opinion.
Looking at the other images, it looks like there’s a depression where some of the soil has been removed (maybe by wind). To me, especially looking at the other filters, it looks like a flat rock that’s just barely revealed.
Oops, looks like my rock hypothesis was wrong. My friend pulled up the real images in all the different filters, made 3-D images, the whole nine yards, and examined them carefully. In his learned opinion, it’s a relatively fresh deposit of sand or dust at the bottom of a depression. Compare the red and blue images. In the red, the deposit is brighter than the surrounding soil, and in the blue it’s darker; that indicates that it’s redder than the soil around it, which is more characteristic of sand or dust than rock.
The actual images look a lot less weird than the JPEGs, which do funny things with the contrast in texture between the clumpy soil and the smooth deposit.
My friend thinks it’s a pretty cool picture, and thanks you for giving him a reason to goof around with something that is not his thesis for an hour, as do I. Also, I’m feeling rather nauseated from the 3D glasses, so I think I’m going to rest my head on the desk for a while. woozy
