Mmmoooooooooo!!!
Hmm…
I see no divine bovine.
Bit of rotten luck with the dust storms though.
I had such high hopes considering the length of the Rover mission.
Makes you wonder why they don’t include a broom-bot to sweep the dust of the solar arrays and keep things going. What do I know …
They see white stuff on the ground and say it’s ice.
It could be salt, chalk, plain flour, sugar, borax, cocaine, dry ice, or a hundred and one things that manifest themselves as white powder.
Granted cocaine is unlikely, unless somebody carelessly stashed some about the rover…
Oh. I thought this was a thread about Phil Rizzuto doing Grapefruit League games.
… I think they took samples. The lander has digging equipment and a “lab in a teacup.”
The first ice was an interpretation - they scooped out a shallow trench, saw some stuff they thought was water ice in one photo, it was gone in the next photo, so they assumed it had evaporated.
What was really exciting was when the on-board analyses lab was used to investigate the soil samples collected from the surface, and that’s where the “Holly cow!” exclamation came from - where the mini-lab determined they were looking at cow poop.
djm
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, he writes a reasonably realistic future history of the terraforming and human habitation of mars. At the time he wrote it, the best science said that Mars was dry and that the white stuff at the poles was probably carbon dioxide (dry ice). He’s a hard-science writer and wanted to stick to the facts, but said that to make the book work he had to assume that there was a lot more water on Mars than had been found.
When the news hit from Phoenix, there was Robinson’s missing water…
What’s a festive Christmas bovine have to do with it?
Well, you can’t have Christmas without snow… or a Christ bovine. And weren’t those hoof prints that the lander espied in the distance? And besides, her sister was going out with the guy who painted the letters on the side of the mini-lab (not the big letters, the smaller ones on the side turned away from the cameras but you can almost see their reflection if the arm - not the main arm, but the backup arm - is bent at just the right angle first thing in the morning … the Martian morning at those latitudes … but still, I mean, like, Holy cow! - right?).
djm
I don’t really understand what this this image is all about but somehow I think it fits.
The four gospels of the new testament were associated with sacred animals: Mark with an ox, John with an eagle, Matthew with a lion, and Luke with a man.
djm
None of them were the cow though.