Scientists are confirming that 15 pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July.

This is only the fifth time in history scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks weren’t discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December. [...]

Astronomers think millions of years ago something big smashed into Mars and sent rocks hurtling through the solar system. After a long journey through space, one of those rocks plunged through Earth’s atmosphere, breaking into smaller pieces.

Most other Martian meteorite samples sat around on Earth for millions of years — or at the very least, decades — before they were discovered, which makes them tainted with Earth materials and life. These new rocks, while still probably contaminated because they have been on Earth for months, are purer.

The last time a Martian meteorite fell and was found fresh was in 1962. All the known Martian rocks on Earth add up to less than 240 pounds.

Link -via io9 | Photo: Darryl Pitt

Obama wasn’t the only one making the otherworldly voyage. As “Barry Soetero,” the 19-year-old Obama was one of 10 youths selected to secretly teleport to and from Mars, forming a band of interplanetary Teen Titans. Regina Dugan, the director of Darpa, was another member.

Between 1981 and 1983, Obama is supposed to have visited Mars twice, by way of a teleportation chamber called a “jump room.” Basiago, a fellow chrononaut, told the website Exopolitics that he saw Obama “walk back to the jump room from across the Martian terrain.” To acknowledge his comrade, Obama is said to have told Basiago, “We’re here” — apparently, “with some sense of fatalism.”

It is not known what exactly Obama did on Mars. (Socializing Martian health care, perhaps? Building a birth-certificate printing press?) His mission was a perilous one, according to Basiago and Stillings. The CIA wished to “establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space” as well as a legal claim to “territorial sovereignty,” making Obama something of a Martian conquistador. Presumably, Obama’s CIA handlers needed him to “acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence” in order to secure the U.S.-Martian alliance. (We’ll bet you weren’t even aware of Martian animals.)

“Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten,” an elder chrononaut, retired Army Maj. Ed Dames, is alleged to have told a young Obama.

A spokesman for the National Security Council says that Obama has never been to Mars. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Arikia Millikan)

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A maze-like system of deep valleys in Mars called Noctis Labyrinthus ("the labyrinth of the night") may just be Martian life's last stand on the Red Planet:

Scientists have found water-bearing deposits on Mars that are out of step with what was happening elsewhere on the planet, raising the prospect that the sites could have hosted Martian life's last stand.

The deposits are a type of clay called smectites, which contain a blend of silica with aluminum, iron or magnesium. They form in the presence of water. [...] The Noctis Labyrinthus smectites are believed to have formed around 2 to 3 billion years ago, possibly providing a haven for life when the rest of the planet dried out.

"It was a surprise to see such young clays that must have formed in a persistent water under neutral conditions," Weitz said. "If there's life on Mars, if it had persisted, this would be a nice place for it, because it does indicate that there was water in this location on the surface at that relatively young age."

Read the rest at Discovery News: Link

The Opportunity rover sent back a few “postcards” from The Red Planet this weekend. The photos which were taken using the rover’s panoramic camera show the edge of the Endeavor crater. Amazing that these photos are from another planet, look as though they could be taken somewhere in the western US.  See more great photos from mars at the link.

Link

Back in 2009 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) discovered that the older, clay-bearing rocks along Endeavour’s rim represented a totally new rock-type — one that could give us a glimpse of life (or lack thereof) on ancient Mars.

“The clays [we found] are not only indicative of abundant water, but also a watery environment more suitable for life,” said Steve Squyres, professor of astronomy at Cornell University and the principal investigator for the science payload on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers. Squyres and his colleagues believe this new rock-type may have once been more hospitable to life than any of the others encountered over the course Opportunity’s 7-year tenure on the surface of Mars.

Link

Celestial Buddies

Do you dream of snuggling up at night with a heavenly body? Well, now you can with the Celestial Buddies from the NeatoShop.  These fantastic plush toys are designed to look like the sun, earth, moon, and mars.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more loveable Plush Toys.

Link

Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.

“The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.

Some aspects of the observations still puzzle researchers, but flows of liquid brine fit the features’ characteristics better than alternate hypotheses. Saltiness lowers the freezing temperature of water. Sites with active flows get warm enough, even in the shallow subsurface, to sustain liquid water that is about as salty as Earth’s oceans, while pure water would freeze at the observed temperatures.

“These dark lineations are different from other types of features on Martian slopes,” said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Repeated observations show they extend ever farther downhill with time during the warm season.”

NASA has a multimedia presentation in which you can see how the images change over time. Link

NASA’s  Mars Science Laboratory hopes to answer the question  has Mars ever been able to sustain life. The new rover will have on-board equipment to experiment on soil samples testing for possible microbial life forms past or present. Watch full animation depicting the mission at the link.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a rover that will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet’s “habitability.” Scheduled to launch in November or December of this year, the Curiosity rover should land on Mars in August 2012. (Just before the apocalypse, yay!)

Link

The students created a 1,900-square-foot inflatable tent which is radiation-proof by layering radiation-shield materials like Demron. Demron is currently used in protective safety suits. In fact, the workers cleaning up Japan’s nuclear  Fukishima  plant are currently using them. The tent, which can house four to six astronauts, also uses a gold-metalicized film to reflect the UV rays. According to the university, it’s airtight material is made from a “polyurethane substrate” which keeps the air in, allowing for an atmosphere that the astronauts can breathe.

Link

Using Google Mars a viewer thinks he has uncovered a space station or power plant on the surface of the Red Planet. Watching the video at the link a blurred white object comes into view. What do you think the image is?

American armchair astronaut David Martines posted a clip of his trip to the surface of the planet on YouTube. He used the search giant’s maps of the astral body and his video has already clocked up a staggering 58,000 views. David explains how he found the ‘space station’ or possibly ‘power station’ quite by accident at coordinates 71 49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W.

Link

From its vantage point on the surface of Mars, NASA’s rover Opportunity relayed a spectacular series of images of a blue-hued sunset on the red planet. Scientists then stitched the pictures, taken over a period of 17 minutes, into a 30-second movie simulation.

The bluish glow around the sun is due to the same dust particles that make Mars’ sky appear red. The pictures were taken on Nov. 4 and Nov. 5 using three different filters on the rover’s panoramic camera.

See the video and other images of and from Mars at Discovery News. Link -via Holy Kaw!

Here’s a video clip of NASA’s All-Terrain, Hex-Limbed, Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (yes, with the clever acronym ATHLETE), a remote roverbot designed to explore Mars and the Moon, busting a move. Link [embedded YouTube clip]

When humans explore other planets, there’s a possibility we may overlook something important. This animation was produced by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham. -via Laughing Squid

It’s bad enough, it would seem from reality television, to spend a few weeks in the same house as only a few others, but imagine spending your time, with five others, for 520 days, in a shipping container with barely enough space to stretch your legs. This is the setup the European Space Agency has created to test the psychological and physiological effects of such isolation which would be required in a journey to Mars. Two crew members have already been chosen, and once four more are found, the ‘journey’ will begin.

There will be communication with the outside world via radio and email, but radio communications will be delayed a full 20 minutes as they would be on a real interplanetary mission and emails will take twice that time to get through. Both will be disrupted periodically, because what’s the point of locking six men in a container if you don’t mess with their heads a bit?

Link – via mentalfloss

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

The Mars Express recently made some historically close passes to Mars’ moon, Phobos, and managed to snap some detailed close-up shots. These are the closest views of the rock we’ve seen… or is it a rock?

The Mars Express flybys, which happen every five months, may also determine if Phobos is a fragile pile of rocky fragments stuck together — what planetary scientists refer to as a rubble pile — or solid through and through.

Some of the new images taken March 7 during one of several recent close flybys of the moon home in on the proposed landing site for a Russian mission, Phobos-Grunt (meaning Phobos soil), that is expected to touch down on the moon next year.

Link

NASA’s Spirit rover {wiki} landed on Mars in 2004. After its planned 90-day mission, the rover kept on working for another six years. Last May, it became stuck in soft soil and could no longer rove, but continued analyzing the Martian environment. Now NASA has decided to put the rover into hibernation mode at least until temperatures rise on Mars, which could be six months.

Despite the science that can be done at the site, the probable end of Spirit’s career as a mobile unit seemed discouraging to JPL rover driver, Ashley Stroupe. A week and a half ago, the rover team changed their approach to getting the rover unstuck and experienced much greater success.

“We had a tremendous amount of hope,” Stroupe said.

In the end, though, they ran out of time. Now, their main task is positioning the rover to capture the greatest amount of solar energy possible: The rover is currently tilted south, away from the sun in the northern sky. If they can reduce the tilt, Spirit may be able to periodically communicate with Earth throughout the winter. If they can’t, it will be a long, silent winter for the robot.

Link

The image above is a portion of a fitting tribute to Spirit at xkcd. Link

(YouTube Link)

Blasting a high-pitched noise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust from equipment, suits or vehicles, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Wired has the story.

Photo: Vincent Fournier

A photography exhibit detailing the training of American astronauts, along with spacefarers from China and Russia, was recently on display at the London Art Fair.  In addition to snazzy spacesuits and a mission control center that still looks like NASA’s old room, the participants (Like the one in the lower right of the photo above) are made to mobilize in a barren, Mars-like location at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.

Vincent Fournier’s Website, where you can see all of his work.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera recently revealed fascinating shots of a dune sea of sorts in a crater of the Hellas impact basin.  What has officials at NASA excited about the dunes is their symmetric nature.

The dunes here are linear, thought to be due to shifting wind directions. In places, each dune is remarkably similar to adjacent dunes, including a reddish (or dust-colored) band on northeast-facing slopes. Large angular boulders litter the floor between dunes.

The most extensive linear dune fields known in the solar system are on Saturn’s large moon Titan. Titan has a very different environment and composition, so at meter-scale resolution they probably are very different from Martian dunes.

Link.  See more stunning images (like frosted dunes) at the HiRISE site.

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy blog explains that the weird looking tendrils on Mars, as shown above in a photo taken by HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as:

In the Martian winter, carbon dioxide freezes out of the air (and you thought it was cold where you are). In the summer, that CO2 sublimates; that is, turns directly from a solid to a gas. When that happens the sand gets disturbed, and falls down the slopes in little channels, which spreads out when it hits the bottom. But this disturbs the red dust, too, which flows with the sand. When it’s all done, you get those feathery tendrils. Note that at the tendril tips, you see blotches of red; that’s probably from the lighter dust billowing a bit before settling down.

But we know better don’t we, fellow Neatoramanauts? It’s obvious that Mars is not a planet, it’s one giant lifeform waiting to invade Earth.

Link

The more massive and more compact your planet is, the harder it is to get off of. Something like the Moon, which is only about 1.2% of the mass of the Earth but 27% of the Earth’s radius, is way, way easier to escape from than the Earth. To escape from the Earth’s gravity, you need to reach a speed of 40,000 km/hr (25,000 mph) from the Earth’s surface. To escape from the Moon, on the other hand, you only need to reach 8,600 km/hr (5,400 mph).

This explains why it would be so much easier to travel to one of the moons of Mars than to Mars itself, due to the ease of traveling back home from those places. Link

Nasa hopes the mix of real data and fun will also inspire the planetary scientists of tomorrow.

“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions.

“And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.”

Link to story. Link to game. -via Metafilter

Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander. Photo via Wikipedia

I miss Carl Sagan. Sagan's enthusiasm for science and his knack for translating difficult scientific concepts into simple explanations that many can understand, made him a popular figure. He was an ambassador for science, if you will, as he had inspired many people to study science (yours truly included).

Today would've been his 75th birthday, so in honor of the great astronomer, scientist and author, Neatorama presents 10 Neat Facts About Carl Sagan:

1. Carl Sagan's First Book About Stars

When Carl was five years old, he wondered about the stars: what were they? Unsatisfied with the answers he got from his friends and from adults he knew, Carl went to the library and asked for a book about stars. The librarian handed him ... a book on celebrities! In Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life, Carl explained how his fascination with the cosmos began:

I gave it back to her and said, "This wasn't the kind of stars I had in mind." She thought this was hilarious, which humiliated me further. She then went and got the right kind of book. I took it—a simple kid's book. I sat down on a little chair—a pint-sized chair—and turned the pages until I came to the answer.

And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... And while I didn't know the [inverse] square law of light propagation or anything like that, still, it was clear to me that you would have to move that Sun enormously far away, further away than Brooklyn [for the stars to appears as dots of light]....

The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. [It was] kind of a religious experience. [There] was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

2. Sagan vs. Apple

In 1994, Apple chose the internal codename "Carl Sagan" for its PowerMac 7100. Though it was meant as an homage to Carl (and an in-joke that the computer would make Apple "billions and billions" of dollars), they also used the codenames "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion" for the Power Mac 6100 and 8100, respectively. When Carl found out that he was being put alongside scientific hoaxes, he sued Apple. Though Apple won the suit, the codename was changed to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) ... which prompted yet another lawsuit from the p.o.'d astronomer! Apple won again, but their lawyers demanded the engineers change the codename one more time, which they did. The PowerMac 7100 was known by its final codename LAW, which stood for "Lawyers Are Wimps."

3. Spaced Out ... On Pot!

In 1969, Carl Sagan wrote under the Pseudonym "Mr. X" about the virtues of cannabis. Harvard Medical School Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry Lester Grinspoon has the article in his website Marijuana Uses:

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . .

4. The Politics of Science

Anyone who has ever worked in a university or an academic institution would know this, but most people assume that because science relies on logic and careful reasoning, scientists would behave in a clinical and dispassionate way. Nothing is farther from the truth.

Carl's popularity had backfired on him not once but twice. In 1967, he was denied tenure at Harvard because his colleagues bristled at "what they perceived as self-aggrandizement and pandering to the public."

In 1992, Carl was again disappointed when his application for membership at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences was denied. Ironically, he received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the Academy for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare."

In both instances, Carl persevered and succeeded to overcome setbacks resulting from the politics of science.

5. Billions and Billions

Carl Sagan actually never used the term "billions and billions." His exact words on the series Cosmos were "billions upon billions" (which, for all practical purpose, is pretty much the same thing).

So how did "billions and billions" came to be? We can blame Johnny Carson:

[YouTube Clip]

Carl was a good sport - his final book, titled Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of the catch phrase and noted that Johnny Carson himself was an amateur astronomer.

6. The Sagan Unit

A sagan is defined as at least 4 billion (the smallest amount in "billions" is two billion, so "billions and billions" equal 4 billion). It is estimated that the Milky Way galaxy has 100 sagan (400,000,000,000) stars.

Previously on Neatorama: Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements

7. Pioneer Plaques

Many people know that Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecrafts carry metal plaques that carry a message from mankind. But not many know that it was Carl Sagan, together with Frank Drake (yes, the man who came up with the Drake Equation that attempts to estimate the number of alien civilization in our galaxy), that designed the plaque. The controversial artwork, which featured a nude man and woman, was drawn by Sagan's then-wife Linda Salzman Sagan.

After the Pioneer Program, NASA put a Golden Record aboard the two Voyager spacecrafts, which included a greeting "Hello from the children of planet Earth." That was recorded by then six-year-old Nick Sagan, Carl's son.

8. Carl Sagan Memorial Station ... on Mars!

Nick Sagan grew up to become a novelist and screenwriter. He wrote an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise titled "Terra Prime," which included a CGI of Carl Sagan Memorial Station plaque on Mars.

Image via Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki

The plaque above is fictional - but the Carl Sagan Memorial Station is real. It's the formal name of the NASA Mars Pathfinder lander, which delivered the Sojourner rover that explored the Red Planet.

9. Sagan Asteroid

Just in case a unit of measurement and a memorial station on Mars aren't enough, Carl had another thing named after him: a small asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was named the 2709 Sagan.

10. Sagan's Last Interview

In 1996, not long before his death, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose, in which he discussed the rise of pseudoscience in the United States. He looked gaunt in the interview, but as you can see, he remained as sharp as ever:

[Google Video]

Bonus: Carl Sagan A Glorious Dawn Auto-Tune

This has been on Neatorama before, but it's so good that we just have to feature it again for those of you who might've missed it. Behold, Carl Sagan's A Glorious Dawn auto-tuned:

[YouTube Clip]

__________

I'll be the first to acknowledge that this is a woefully inadequate post about one of the most brilliant scientists who ever lived. We didn't talk about Cosmos (because it's so popular, I opted for the more obscure Sagan trivia), his books and Pulitzer Prize, Carl Sagan Day and so on. If you have a Sagan story, please share it in the comments.

Alan Taylor’s excellent photoblog The Big Picture over at Boston.com has a really nifty collection of images of the Martian landscape:

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real.

Link

Photo: NASA

Going to Mars is costly.  The conventional thinking of round-trip missions is losing more and more ground to an idea made public last year.  Theoretical physicist/cosmologist Paul Davies addressed the NASA Astrobiology Science Conference, and laid out a solid (and sometimes humorous) case for the One Way Ticket plan.

He points out the commercial angle, saying that not only would a patent trade emerge from discoveries, but televised coverage of the pioneers would be lucrative as well.  And those pioneers?  He says our planet is full of risk-takers seeking adventure that would fill the role nicely.

By comparison, a one-way trip to Mars would not be so risky. But it does need a spirit of adventure of the sort that the early explorers had, in particular the people who opened up Antarctica. These people often went knowing that there was a high probability that they would not come back, and that if they didn’t come back, they were going to their deaths. I’m not suggesting that going to Mars necessarily means an instant death, but it may mean a premature death, it may mean your life expectancy is shortened by a little bit. But as I said, people attempt that risk in all sorts of other walks of life.

And what I have in mind is not just four miserable people sitting around on the martian surface waiting to die, (laughter) but that they would actually be doing useful job work.

You wouldn’t be going there as tourists, you wouldn’t be going there for fun. You’d be going there to do science, and emailing all this stuff back. Your publication record would be sensational. (laughter) You would no doubt have all sort of honors heaped on you.

But you wouldn’t be coming home.

Link.   Previously on Neatorama: Chart of Missions to Mars

Image: Bryan Christie

Illustrator Bryan Christie specializes in transforming “complex ideas into compelling images”, especially scientific or technological ideas. One of his recent works is this chart of the human exploration of Mars, organized by country, date, type, and successfulness. Click the link for a larger view.

Link via Fast Company | Artist’s Website

The new findings confirm suspicions that water once shaped the Martian landscape on a regional scale instead of forming isolated oases, said rover project leader Steven Squyres of Cornell University in New York State.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sunnyspeaks.

Continuing today’s special theme: Expedia has announced affordable trips to mars. It’s now cheaper to vacation on Mars than to visit Las Vegas!

That’s right! Expedia has dropped all booking fees—including fees on flights to Mars. Right now you can save over $3 trillion on a Mars vacation—and in this economy, you can’t afford NOT to go!

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MatthewInman.

Claymation has never been this good: Link [embedded YouTube clip, quite risque yet oh-so-funny. You've been warned ...]

Here’s some good news for all the space buffs out there: NASA’s Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars. Photographs appear to show water droplets that splashed onto the craft’s leg during landing.

“The controversial observation could be explained by the mission’s previous discovery of perchlorate salts in the soil, since the salts can keep water liquid at sub-zero temperatures. Researchers say this antifreeze effect makes it possible for liquid water to be widespread just below the surface of Mars, but point out that even if it is there, it may be too salty to support life as we know it.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Its hard to believe these little things can even fly. They are about as small as a quarter and are simply cool.

Ilan Kroo and his colleagues at Stanford hope to use them for Mars exploration or atmospheric research one day!

Link – via djowtlaw

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by slowboy.

Mars Rover was rovin’ along the Red Planet where it snapped a picture of what looks like … a log of wood? The photo immediately a conspiracy theory rush in the blogosphere:

The unusual image was featured in a NASA press release in 2004, although the space agency made no mention of the timber-like object captured on the spacecraft’s 115th day on Mars.

But one website insists it is a leaked image that ‘could get someone killed.’ A writer from TheCrit.com said NASA’s claims Mars was a desert world were ‘lies’ and that ‘there are vast forests on Mars, ones that are kept from the public.’

They go on to speculate the ‘wood’ was brought to its present position by a flood of water that must have happened within 40 years ‘because the wood is intact.’

Link

This fantastic discovery, of course, is in a long list of strange objects (humanoid, skull, doorway, cave) already found.