What "Earth-Shaking" Discovery Has Curiosity Made on Mars?

Randym writes "NASA scientists have some exciting new results from one of the rover's instruments. On the one hand, they'd like to tell everybody what they found, but on the other, they have to wait because they want to make sure their results are not just some fluke or error in their instrument. The exciting results are coming from an instrument in the rover called SAM. 'We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting,' says John Grotzinger. He's the principal investigator for the rover mission. SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) is a suite of instruments onboard NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity. Grotzinger says they recently put a soil sample in SAM, and the analysis shows something Earth-shaking. 'This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good,' he says."

Aliens?

[Linsaran]

If so, let me be the first to say I welcome our new martian overlords. Just please don't be the wussy kind of martians that die easilyto earth's microbial organisms.

water

[Anonymous Coward]

We found something that looks like it could maybe be the remnants of something that would maybe only show up in an environment that had maybe been exposed to water!

 

Re:Obviously they are trying to build hype

[Anonymous Coward]

This is at least the 10th response related to food. You guys hungry or something?

Earth shattering?

[gmuslera]

Should be evidence of life, something not so surprising. But could be even more shattering to find that we are actually martians that come here very long ago escaping from the climate change that we caused on Mars (even that we Marsformed Earth back then).

Re:water

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I'd class Mars as either easy to get to or agreeable.

It's quite a long way away, and a minority of people would like the climate there.

Lets contrast then.
Venus: probes dissolve in less than 20 minutes
Mercury: probe melts before landing
Jupiter: a whole lot more distant and any probe aimed at the planet itself will face storms larger than all the rocky planets combined
Saturn: ever more distant, slightly smaller storms than Jupiter
Uranus: same trend
Neptune: very far, very cold storms

And for the classicalists:
Pluto: tiny rock, very far away, in an awkward 5 or so object mutual orbit arrangement

for the completionists:
Ceres: smaller than Pluto, but much closer, completely surrounded by other hazardous rocks
Quaoar: very far, pretty small
Sedna: very far, pretty small
Eris: very far, pretty small
Haumea: very far, very small
Makemake: very far, very small

Re:I really hope...

[Dekker3D]

No oxygen to burn it with. The biggest reason coal is so useful on Earth is because it reacts with the ever-abundant oxygen in the air to make warmth (which can be used for power with some more materials)