Why We Send Probes to Mars

The NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s rover Curiosity landed on Mars on August 5, 2012. Since that time, the robot explorer has found no evidence of Nascar, beer, porn, ESPN, or even a single guy named Bubba saying “Y’all watch THIS!”
The resulting scientific consensus is startling:
men are not from Mars after all.

Photo: composite image looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp on Mars, taken 9 September 2015 by NASA/JPL’s Curiosity rover.

Note the colors were adjusted so that rocks look approximately as they would if they were on Earth, to help geologists interpret the rocks. This “white balancing” to adjust for the lighting on Mars overly compensates for the absence of blue on Mars, making the sky appear light blue and sometimes giving dark, black rocks a blue cast.

Loading

Comments and Nav are Below.


Randy Cassingham is best known as the creator of This is True, the oldest entertainment feature on the Internet: it has been running weekly by email subscription since early 1994. It is social commentary using weird news as its vehicle so it’s fun to read. Click here for a subscribe form — basic subscriptions are free.



Jump to Random Meme