Tag: Real Science

An annotated version of the image of “Cheyava Falls” indicates the markings akin to leopard spots, which have particularly captivated scientists, and the olivine in the rock. The image was captured by the WATSON instrument on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on July 18, 2024.

Way back in July 2024, Perseverance found a rock with spotted with little circular discolorings in an old riverbed. Spots akin to leopard spots, a shape, which if found on Earth would mean life, microbial life but life none-the-less. Finding existence of previous life on Mars would be a HUGE thing.

Until life is proved to at least occurred once elsewhere, humanity doesn’t know if Earth’s living biosphere is a one-off fluke, or part of a possible larger web across the cosmos.

You would think scientists would be shouting this evidence of possible life from the highest mountains, but Mars isn’t Earth and the circles could mean anything. The first thing is to figure if there is any other way the rock could be discolored in this manner. Any rock formation process. Any geological process. Any weather process. Scientists have spent a year investigating.

And found nothing to discount their sacred search for life.

But still, to declare “life” (or even “compelling potential biosignature”) without examining the actual source isn’t part of a rigorous scientific process. If only the scientists could examine the rock directly…

Perseverance took a sample of the rock and stored it away in a little rock collection to be picked up and returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return program. Such a diligent little Rover; its beautiful rock collection all packaged up to return in 2033.

By Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech, Attribution,
Core Sample #22 – “Sapphire Canyon” is the one with the “leopard spots” – second from right on the bottom

Well, life on Earth has changed and is changing. The plan to return a bunch of rocks isn’t flashy for politics, so the program is on the cutting board. All the work by Perseverance, a collection of dozens of small samples, waiting to be shown off to its parental-creators is likely to sit waiting, maybe forever. Plans change.

A leopard never changes its spots, but life does.

Bibliography

Holt, Cassian. “Mars leopard spots just popped up, and they resemble life signatures.” MSN.com. 5 January 2026. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mars-leopard-spots-just-popped-up-and-they-resemble-life-signatures/ar-AA1TCd5H – last viewed 1/15/2026.

Kuthunur, Sharmila. “’Poppy seeds’ and ‘leopard spots’ on Mars could hit at ancient microbial life.” Space.com. 14 March 2025. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/poppy-seeds-and-leopard-spots-on-mars-could-hint-at-ancient-microbial-life – last viewed 1/15/2026.

Morelle, Rebecca. “Life on Mars? ‘Leopard-spot’ rocks could be biggest clue yet.” BBC. 10 September 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd725pj0g9ro – last viewed 1/15/2026.

NASA/JPL-Caltech. “Perseverance Finds a Rock with ‘Leopard Spots.’” NASA. 25 July 2024. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/perseverance-finds-a-rock-with-leopard-spots/ – last viewed 1/15/2026.

Nye, Bill. “New Findings Underscore Why We Must Explore.” The Planetary Report: A magazine of the Planetary Society. December 2026 V. 45, N. 04.

Pearson, Ezzy. “These strange markings are the ‘clearest sign’ of aliens on Mars, say NASA.” BBC Science Focus. 21 September 2025. https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/leopard-spots-alien-life-mars – last viewed 1/15/2026.

Wikipedia. “NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return – last viewed 1/15/2026.

Pink Lady in the Negev Desert, credit to OEWF/AMADEE20.

Exploring space is challenging, especially on a budget, but the challenge can bring innovations. For example, instead of robots landing on Mars under a controlled descent, they now bounce some of them, saving fuel and materials, devoting the weight to better things. If you want to learn more about landings on Mars, check out Nasa’s article on “How We Land on Mars”. ( https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/programs/mars-exploration/mission-timeline/how-we-land-on-mars/ )

After landing, the next question is how to explore the planet. Ever present-telescopes and satellites provide a lot of information, but to really get to know a planet, you need to get in the dirt. The first Mars landers stayed in place. Next came the wonderfully determined rovers. Most recently humans have added drones, little hovercraft, atmosphere permitting – which Mars does have, as our eyes on planets far away. (9/21/2023 Geeking Science: Drone Ingenuity) Earlier this year, I talked about the development of wormlike rovers to explore ice planets (2/20/2025 Geeking Science: EELS) and a variation on space RVing, taking the laboratory with you. (4/23/2025 Geeking Science: T is for Toyota RV Lunar Life)

The most recent innovation – blowing in the wind. The “rover” is a tumbleweed with minor control having a weight encouraging the device to roll one way or the other in the wind. Instead of rovers measuring progress in inches a day, or even yards with the wonderful Ingenuity, these sixteen-foot spheres may average 0.22 miles per hour. Scientists say under optimal conditions, a tumbleweed rover may cover as much as 1,740 miles. (Mendenhall) Although, the expectation is to average 250 miles in the 100 sol life expectency.  To put this in perspective, hard-working Opportunity traveled 28.1 miles total (Beck).

Because of the small, light size of the design, the Tumbleweed Mission doesn’t plan to drop one or two rovers, but a swarm of ninety of them. (Kingsnorth) Some will be dropped randomly providing maps for future explorations and settlements. Some may be dropped in “hill country”, places where rovers can’t climb, but look like water has flowed. Plans are still being formed.

These designs have been in the works over fifteen years. (Discover) They have reached the concept testing point of wind tunnels and live tests (under Earth’s gravity and wind). Next trip out to Mars, funding permitting here in America or in one of the other National space agencies like EU or Japan or China, might scatter this wind-blown explorers.

Isn’t science amazing?

 

Bibliography 

Beck, Kellen. “Every rover, rankled by distance traveled on the moon and Mars.” Mashable.com. 2021 August 14. https://mashable.com/article/moon-mars-rover-distance-driven – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Cooper, Keith. “Tumbleweed-inspired Mars rovers could be blown across the Red Planet.” Space.com. 2025 September 30. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/mars-rovers/tumbleweed-inspired-mars-rovers-could-be-blown-across-the-red-planet – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Discover. “Tumbleweed Rovers Could Explore Mars.” 2010-ish (says 15 years ago). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JQyPKLCYPQ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Europlanet. “Press Release: Tumbleweed Rover Tests Demonstrate Transformative Technology for Low-Cost Mars Exploration.” https://www.europlanet.org/epsc-dps2025-tumbleweed-rover-tests-demonstrate-transformative-technology-for-low-cost-mars-exploration/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

JPL. “Tumbleweed Rover Concept for in situ Martian Exploration.” Nasa.gov. (undated) https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/tumbleweed-rover-concept-for-in-situ-martian-exploration/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Kingsnorth, James, et. al. “A Swarm of Wind-Driven Tumbleweed Rovers for in-situ Mapping of Radiation, Water‑Equivalent Hydrogen and Magnetic Fields on Mars.” Europlanet – Division for Planetary Sciences. https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPSC-DPS2025/EPSC-DPS2025-1779.html – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Mendenhall, Brooks. “The wind-driven future of Mars exploration.” MSN.com. 2o25 October. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-wind-driven-future-of-mars-exploration/ar-AA1NOXYu – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Nasa. “How We Land On Mars.” Nasa.gov. undated (likely updated after each new landing on Mars). https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/programs/mars-exploration/mission-timeline/how-we-land-on-mars/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Team Tumbleweed. “The Next Generation of Mars Exploration.” Website. https://www.teamtumbleweed.eu/mars/ – Last viewed 10/9/2025.

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Do you ever think about the Great Red Spot of Jupiter? About exactly what that storm represents?

It’s Geeking Cool!

Our brains are pretty hard-wired that planetary surface stay the same. It’s a planet right? Sure Jupiter is a gas giant and we take lots of pictures of the swirling gases, but that Great Red Spot reassures our instinctive assumption that planets are still fixed even when gaseous.

Except, no, it isn’t the case.

“The first record of the Great Red Spot is a drawing made in 1831 by German amateur astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe of the “Hollow” in which the spot sits.” (Britannica) And the spot has been continuously observed ever since 1878.

There was a storm recorded in 1665 by Italian astronomer Gian Domoenico Cassini, of which records stopped in 1713. Some scientist think it may have been the Great Red Spot, but more likely the “Permanent Spot” storm subsided and a new storm arose a hundred and sixty years later. Further supporting evidence of a new storm is the Great Red Spot is in the Southern Hemisphere and the drawn records of the Permanent Spot seem to place the phenomenon in the Northern Hemisphere.

Whether long-lived storms flowed over Jupiter’s surface before 1665 can only be speculation. Use of concave lenses to study the sky is recorded in the very early 1600 in Western Europe and spread to China within a decade. (Wikipedia: History, Wikipedia: Chinese) These solidified into telescopes by mid-1600s. Scientists long journaled and drew about the dance in the heavens, but telescopes took the images possible to a whole new level. Before then, while Jupiter is visible to the naked eye, details would not have been able to be picked out.

Having been visible 194 years at this point (oh, do you think we can have a 200-year anniversary in 2031?), the storm has started to shrink, presently a third of its largest size. A “mere” 16,000 kilometers long (still larger than Earth), down from 48,000 kilometers. (Ashford) Scientists are not sure if the storm is winding down, or just changing its shape.

On Earth, when large storms reduce in size over the ocean feeding them energy, the eye of the storm solidifies into hurricanes, the winds increase, and the damage once it makes landfall kicks up the ranking on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. On land, hurricanes are cut off from their energy and disperse – growing wider, weaker, until they fall apart.

The Great Red Spot is clearly the eye of a storm, a nearly 200-year-old hurricane the size of the Earth. But modeling it off of Earth weather gets weird because the planet’s atmosphere runs on liquid ammonia not liquid water, and doesn’t have solid ground reducing the power of storms. The mechanism of shrinking storms getting faster winds hasn’t proved to be the case based on data being gathered from satellites in Jupiter’s orbit. Instead, the Spot is deepening, like a swirling funnel cloud forming in green clouds, then lowering down through the atmosphere until it hits the ground as it gets smaller and faster. Jupiter has no ground; how far down can the Great Red Spot go?

Okay, I need a second to recover from the image of a tornado the size of Earth dropping a funnel cloud through layer after layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Don’t ask me why an Earth-sized tornado is scarier than an Earth-sized hurricane, but it just is.

I am curious to see if Jupiter’s Forever Storm will dissipate in my lifetime, like a tornado falling apart. If it does fall apart, is Jupiter in “hurricane season” and the atmospheric energy will make a new one or even a chain of new ones? In the meantime, will the deepening of the storm bring new materials from the lower atmospheric levels to the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere for us to study?

The Great Red Spot, so geeking cool.

Bibliography

Ashford, Ade. “Don’t miss Jupiter’s ‘unravelling’ Great Read Spot.” Astronomy Now. 2019 June 6. https://astronomynow.com/2019/06/06/observers-urged-to-monitor-jupiters-unravelling-great-red-spot/ last viewed 6/13/2025.

Britannica. “Great Read Spot.” (undated). https://www.britannica.com/place/Great-Red-Spot  last viewed 6/13/2025.

NASA Goddard. “Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Shrinks and Grow.” YouTube. 2018(?). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDi4IdtvDVE&t=126s last viewed 6/13/2025.

Wikipedia. “Chinese astronomy.” (undated). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_astronomy last viewed 6/13/2025.

Wikipedia. “History of the telescope.” (undated). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope last viewed 6/13/20256.