Curiosity rover is crushing it: Ran over a rock and found pure sulfur The Curiosity rover has found something surprising: rocks made of pure sulfur. NASA revealed the find in a post last week, recounting how the rover was trundling up the Gediz Vallis channel – a formation it's thought was carved by a river around three billion years ago. The channel is of interest as the ridges offer a good …
Curiosity: After literally an hour’s ceaseless searching, I have succeeded in creating gold. PURE GOLD!
Mission Control: Are you sure?
C: Yes, My Lord! Behold!
MC: Curiosity, it’s yellow.
C: That’s right, My Lord.
MC: Yes, Curiosity, I don’t want to be pedantic or anything, but the colour of gold is gold — that’s why it’s called gold. What you have discovered, if it has a name, is some yellow.
C: Oh, Mission Control, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal grip, a nugget of purest yellow?
MC: Indeed you do, Curiosity, except, of course, it’s not only a nugget as it is more of a splat.
C: Well, yes, a splat today, but tomorrow, who knows? or dares to dream!
(With thanks and apologies to Messrs. Curtis and Elton.)
Might be my monitor, but that sulfur looks decidedly green*, are we sure it's not a facehugger about to spring upon an unwary explorer?
[recalling buggered up experiments of my youth, I do appreciate the allotropic properties of said element can make it deviate from "Sulfur Yellow" presentation]
I pasted it into GIMP and switched to CIE LCh.
For the brighter sections, the hue was 80°-100°. For some of the darker sections, the angle rotated into the green. (I got up to ~180° - for #010605...)
So I'd go with your monitor, or the disposition of cones in your mark 1 eyeball.
That's Total Recall fucked for me now. Every scene now I'm going to be under the assumption that it is just extremely stinky on Mars...and when Quaid switches on the reactor he's just activating a giant alien Febreze mechanism.
I fully expect a remake to reflect this new information. Quaid doesn't choose to be a secret agent, he chooses to be Barry Scott on a mission to clean Mars.
This could actually be quite significant. Sulfur deposits on earth occur near volcanos, from chemical processes, but also arise from microbial alteration of rocks. My geology isn't good enough to know if these can be distinguished but I'm sure boffins will be pondering the question!
Well, thank you very much Simon! for furthering yet again the wholly undeserved and inaccurate sulfurous reputation of "sultry redhead wench planet of lust" which we've had such a hard time to free ourselves from here on Mars! There are hard working green girls and people here you know, not just sex symbols!
Think about that carefully now as you unpack your curiosity drill and ponder a new hole in our larger mammoth lakes rocks or somesuch!
That is a monumental find, because sulfur, I believe, is one of the necessary components of life. It's in our farts. So, if this doesn't belong there than it came from space via meteorites, which further lends credence to the theory of how life began on Earth. meteorites from space depositing the building blocks of life on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago. Incredible find.
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