Two years ago, a sensational picture, taken by the rover Opportunity, appeared on the Internet, on which a strange rock was fixed.
Soon, on the NASA website, it was possible to find out about the opinion of specialists who discovered that one side of the mysterious stone had clearly recently come off the dark rock with shiny white blotches and was not covered with the ubiquitous Martian dust. On the other hand, the dusty surface is clearly visible.
Different versions
Stephen Squires, the scientific leader of the Mars Exploration Rovers project, also joined the stormy virtual controversy, admitting that there is still no scientific explanation for the appearance of the "wandering" stone. Dr. Squiers cited spectrometric analysis data showing that the rock contains large amounts of sulfur and magnesium.
In addition, the stone has an abnormally high manganese content, twice the average level of Martian rocks. Squires himself is inclined to believe that either the stone fell as a result of the meteor shower, or the rover's wheels caught it, broke it out of the rock and dragged it along.
At the same time, it is known that the stone appeared in front of the rover during a period when it stood in one place for about a month without movement. And the one-sided dustiness of the stone means that it is not a meteorite.
Ufologists also did not pass by the mystery of the "wandering" stone. Recalling that the supporters of alien life - exobiologists - more than once predicted the existence of completely degenerated organisms, ufologists began vying with each other to build schemes of "Martian evolution". At the center of this purely hypothetical process could lie the degeneration of the most ancient bone-armored creatures, which still found the dense atmosphere and seas of Mars.
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Some stones of Mars have a structure, the bottom of the stone differs sharply from the top, the lower part of the stones may well be the "root" connecting the stone to the ground. Metabolism without the medium of liquid, only the transfer of dust and sand. Many stones resemble broken shells.
Pictures from Mars, which clearly show traces of the "movement of stones" on the ground
Apparent visibility
The branch of exobiology that deals with completely alien manifestations of life is called xenology. It must be said that it was the xenologists who suggested: the placers of mysterious dark blueberry peas discovered at the end of 2012 by Opportunity are representatives, if not of the Martian fauna, then certainly flora.
Martian blueberry
To their complete disappointment, it later turned out that the bubbles of the Martian "blueberry" are samples of brownish-black iron ore - hematite. Millimeter balls were formed during humid climates, when the Martian soil was saturated with such minerals. It is possible that not only water, but also the most ancient Martian microorganisms took part in their formation.
For a long time, ufologists and some astronomers considered Mars not only as an inhabited planet, but also as the cradle of the most ancient intelligent race. The famous popularizer of astronomy, Camille Flammarion, wrote about this. That is why individual "artifacts" discovered by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MR0) are attracting so much attention. For example, MRO using HiRISE high-resolution optics recorded a "monolith of aliens" in the form of a rectangular parallelepiped.
NASA experts quickly dashed the hopes of ufologists, showing that this natural phenomenon is only an approximately rectangular stone. The HiRISE camera, despite its very high resolution, does not allow detailed shape of small boulders. In addition, the camera optics, digitizing the image, slightly corrects it, and the curved lines become straight, and the height of the "monolith" is greatly exaggerated by the play of shadows from the low standing sun.
In addition to the MR0 probe, NASA's Odyssey and European Space Agency's Mars Express robotic interplanetary stations are in Mars orbit.
To date, they have obtained many thousands of high-quality images of the surface of the Red Planet, among which there are amazing curiosities like the "elephant head", on which you can see the trunk, eyes and mouth.
"Elephant head" is a typical case of pareidolia (visual illusions that are formed on the basis of real-life objects)
The study showed that this amazing formation was formed by lava flows that once flooded a vast territory, until some kind of "figured" obstacle met in their path.
The Elephant Head is one of the famous Martian illusions, many of which are easily explained by the psychological phenomenon that causes a person to see familiar images in an unfamiliar changing environment. This usually explains the visions of "Martian channels", which were allegedly observed by famous astronomers of the 19th century.
Conditions for the origin of life
Once the famous Russian planetary scientist Leonid Ksanfomality analyzed the photographs taken by the Soviet AMS Venera-9, Venera-10 in 1975 and Venera-13, Venera-14 in 1982. To his amazement, he discovered that some of the images show some moving objects that may have "properties of living things."
So in a respectable journal "Astronomical Bulletin" was published an article in which the scientist writes about "appearing, changing or disappearing objects of noticeable size, from decimeter to half a meter, the accidental appearance of images due to noise is difficult to explain."
Professor Ksanfomality notes that lately astronomers have discovered more than half a thousand planets in the "zone of life". This circumstellar region, sometimes called the "zone of Snow White" (according to the fairytale principle - no more, no less), should theoretically provide normal physical conditions. Only then, astrobiologists believe, at appropriate atmospheric pressure, temperature, chemical composition of the atmosphere and, of course, in the presence of water, the first protein molecules can appear.
Leonid Vasilyevich calls this a manifestation of "carbon chauvinism" and proves that various forms of life can arise under completely different exoplanetary conditions. The scientist writes that, despite the lack of reliable experimental data, the possibility of the existence of life in the absence of water and at high temperatures cannot be ruled out.
"Discs", "flaps" and "scorpions"
In the photographs available for study, Professor Ksanfomality distinguishes three varieties of Venusian creatures at once: "discs" that change their shape, "black patches" that appear and immediately disappear at the cone to measure the mechanical properties of the soil, and "scorpions", somewhat reminiscent of a kind of terrestrial arachnid insects.
Many experts in planetary science and exobiologists have critically apprehended the hypothesis of Professor Ksanfomality. Soon there were versions that the mysterious "disk" was only a protective cover of the camera lens, which fell off during landing and did not really move in the field of view.
The rest of the objects, such as the "black patch" and "scorpion", are TV-diotechnical noises. They could appear when copying a picture, enlarging its fragments and changing the encoding of the radio signal. At the same time, one can find explanations that in the early 1980s the technique of transmitting telemetry information strongly depended on the type of modulation used.
American radio engineer Donald Mitchell, who specializes in the history of the development of space communication systems, made the assumption that interference on the "picture" transmitted from the surface of Venus could arise from the simultaneous use of two different signal transmission systems.
A number of experts in communication systems support this reasoning and conclude that radio-television noises get lost in white spots that appear after the complete decoding of the signal transmitted by means of pulse-code modulation. Then it turns out that the "scorpion" Ksanfomality along with the "black patches" and "discs" is not in the image at all.
Despite the barrage of criticism, Professor Ksanfomality continues to actively defend his hypothesis about the "world of Venusian beings with a different vital metabolism." And he is skeptical about all attempts to draw his attention to the imperfections of space communication systems of that time, believing that “this is simply brain fogging with radio engineering terminology. Whichever modulation you use, the dot remains a dot."
Bacteria on Venus
Analyzing the data of the expeditions of the AMS "Venus", "Pioneer-Venus" and "Magellan", an international team of astrobiologists and planetary scientists put forward a hypothesis about the "layer-by-layer distribution of life" in the Venusian cloud cover. The researchers concluded that at altitudes with "earth" pressure, the temperature drops to several tens of degrees. From this it follows that the clouds of Venus can contain a fairly large amount of water in the form of vapor.
Lightning and solar radiation create a huge amount of carbon monoxide, carbon monoxide, but it is abnormally small in the atmosphere of Venus. One of the explanations can be the existence at altitudes of several tens of kilometers of microbial life forms with a unique metabolism that is completely different from everything known. How could the Venusian bacteria originate?
Astronomers studying the distant past of the solar system argue that billions of years ago, temperatures on Venus were colder. The young Sun emitted only two-thirds of today's energy, and sub-zero temperatures prevailed on Earth, with severe centigrade frosts in high latitudes. Today, a similar climate is observed on Mars.
It was then that the surface of Venus could be covered with vast seas and oceans, in which life was born. As time passed, the radiation of the Sun became more and more intense, evaporating Venusian reservoirs, and the first microorganisms migrated into the atmosphere along with streams of hot water vapor.
Apparently, the activity of our luminary grew very slowly, and this could allow the ancient smallest forms of Venusian life to adapt to existence in the cloud cover.
Oleg FAYG, magazine "Secrets of the XX century" №33 2016