February 14, 2005

Naaa, they're just totally befuddled geologists.

Look at what is happening, Mars is turning out to
be much wetter than they even imagined when they
started this mission, then they found very little
evidence for water on the plains of Gusev, which
they thought should have been a huge sea at one
time from the orbital imagery, then they get into
the hills and find MASSIVE evidence of water, and
now they have to totally reevaluate what they
wrote up in August, and their whold idea of
emplaced basaltic lava flows for the hills is
dead in the water, so to speak, and everyone
else is coming up with biological theories
for berry formation at Meridiani, credible
extremophile evolutionary developments,
and suddenly they get up over the ridge
and discover themselves in a rock field
of staggering diversity and states of
total water alteration, with numerous
structural anomalies everywhere they look.

They are trying to slow things down to the
geologically slow pace that they are used to,
when the results themselves are spiralling
out of control. P205 off the scale, a model
of impact flow deposition that indicates that
the rocks are old, diverse, and loaded with
water and hydrates, salts, etc, and more rock types
than they can possible analyze, and the prospect
that they will probably wrap up the whole life
on Mars question in the next few weeks, while
they're still planning for missions five years
out. Then there is the problem of life on Mars,
and what it means for their pathetic VSE -
Visiting Space Expensively, that puts a
real wrench in the gears for Man on Mars.

Then, we have a faith based administration.

Finally, when all this blew up in their face,
the rover on the other side of Mars is suddenly
stopped in its tracks, while racing off on a several
kilometer trek, and they dig a hole in the ground
and start taking pictures of patterns of berries,
that if you really start looking at too closely,
you will literally go insane at what you are
seeing patterned out on the ground, at both
sites. We are talking major weirdness here.

You figure it out. I'm just the messenger.

I encourage you to study the photos carefully,
especially the ones that come out in the next
few days, if they are able to negotiate the rocks.

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net