A structure, said to be neither “rock nor mountain” nor “fabricated structure”, has been discovered on Mars by “armchair astronomer” David Martines, [who] discovered “a mysterious structure on the surface of the red planet - by looking on Google earth,” reports the Daily Mail:

David Martines, whose YouTube video of the ‘station’ has racked up over 200,000 hits so far, claims to have randomly uncovered the picture while scanning the surface of the planet one day.

Describing the ‘structure’ as a living quarters with red and blue stripes on it, to the untrained eye it looks nothing more than a white splodge on an otherwise unblemished red landscape.

He even lists the co-ordinates 49’19.73"N 29 33’06.53"W so others can go see the anomaly for themselves.

In a pre recorded ‘fly by’ video of the object, Mr Martines describes what he thinks the station might be. He said: ‘This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident.

‘I call it Bio-station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it.

It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders.

‘It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage - hope it’s not a weapon.

‘Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars.

‘It could be a way station for weary space travellers. It could also belong to NASA, I don’t know that they would admit that.

‘I don’t know if they could pull off such a project without all the people seeing all the material going up there. I sort of doubt NASA has anything to do with this.

‘I don’t know if NASA even knows about this.’

 

 
ksby.com reports:

Martines calls the apparent structure, Biostation Alpha but planetary geologist Alfred McEwen from the University of Arizona says not so fast. McEwen thinks Biostation Alpha is simply a glitch in the image caused by cosmic energy interfering with the camera.
McEwen says, “with space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it’s very common to see these cosmic ray hits.”

Martines says he’s not an astronomy expert and doesn’t know what the image is but isn’t sold on McEwen’s explanation.

“He says that it’s a glitch caused by the reflection of the sun, but even he doesn’t know what camera took the picture and even he doesn’t know where the raw data exists” says Martines.

While Reno Berkeley at technology.gather suggests more possible answers:

A man who believes he’s discovered proof of life on Mars has named the cylindrical structure he claims to have found on the planet as Bio Station Alpha. The video of his discovery, found via Google Mars, has received nearly a million views. But, is it really an artificial structure? Scientists say, ‘no.’

Martines, who uploaded his video to YouTube on May 28, pondered the supposed structure’s purpose. “It could be a power station,” he said in his video, “or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage—hope it’s not a weapon.” Oh, dear, please spare the world from idiotic alien invasion conspiracy theories!

Anyway, Alfred McEwen claims that the “bio station” is actually nothing more than a “linear streak artifact created by a cosmic ray.” McEwan is the lead scientist in the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is a powerful telescope orbiting Mars. The rays are energetic particles emanated by the sun and other stars. When orbiting telescopes take photos of Mars or other things in space, the images go through a compressing process in the camera, making the rays look as if they’re cylindrical. McEwan couldn’t tell which orbiting telescope took the photo, so he wasn’t sure what the raw data showed.

Clearly miffed at this, he said, “The people at Google need to document what the heck they’re doing. They should be able to identify what the source of their information is, and let people know so they can go back and look at the raw data.”

Another critic of Martines’ Bio Station Alpha theory is another YouTube user who goes by the name of buzzology1990. Buzzology1990 posted his own video of screen caps, showing how the image Martines claims is a structure is actually just a mineral or salt deposit. Others think it is a dry ice deposit, as this image is near one of the poles on Mars.

Whatever it is, David Martines and his YouTube video have generated a lot of interest and speculation about life on Mars and on other worlds.

On YouTube Martines writes:

This could be the most important discovery on Mars yet! This structure is 700’ x 150’, and is colored white with blue and red stripes against the red Martian soil.

This is not a rock or mountain. It is a manufactured structure. This is not something that I created, this is something that is currently on Google Mars. NASA wont talk to me about it. I’ve sent them a few emails, and no reply.

Go see for yourself.

The coordinates are: 71 49’19.73"N 29 33’06.53"W

 
In 1975, a year before NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft orbited Mars, Orson Welles presented Who’s Out There?, a NASA produced documentary examining the “likely existence of non-Earthly life in the universe.”

Thirty-six years on, this is a fascinating piece of archive, and rather timely with the news that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory is due to be launched in November in a bid to make the first precision landing on Mars in August 2012.

Starting with H G Wells novel, and his own infamous radio production of The War of the Worlds, Welles, together with Carl Sagan, George Wald, Richard Berendzen and Philip Morrison, explore what was then “the new view of extraterrestrial life now emerging from the results of probes to the planets,” and conclude that “other intelligent civilizations exist in the universe.”

Carl Sagan:  The most optimistic estimates, in the view of many, about the number of civilizations that there might be in the galaxy is of the order of a million, which means that only one in a few hundred thousand stars has such civilizations.
 
George Wald:  That would mean a billion such places just in our own galaxy that might contain life.
 
Philip Morrison:  As I believe there’s a society of these groups, not just one, there’re probably very many.  There’s only one, we have no hope of finding them; there’re probably thousands, maybe as many as a million.  They probably already have had long history of this same experience, of finding new ones and bringing them into the network.
 
Carl Sagan:  And I would imagine, an advanced civilization wanted to talk to us, they would say “Oh, look, those guys must be extremely backwards, go into some ancient museum and pull out one of those – what are they called – radio telescopes and beam it at them.”

In summation, Welles says:

In 1976 we’re going to be able to explore Mars for perhaps not so humble microorganisms.  Before and after that, we’ll be searching the planets and the galaxies for clues to fill in the new patterns we’re discovering, the evolution of evolutions that has produced us and the possible millions of other civilizations….
 
...The difference between the spacecrafts of NASA and the lurid flying saucery of that old radio War of the Worlds is the difference between science and science fiction and, yes, between war and peace.  It’s our own world which has turned out to be the interplanetary visitor; we’re the ones who are moving out there, not with death rays but with cameras, not to conquer but simply to learn. We are in fact behaving ourselves far better out there than we ever have back here at home on our own planet.

 
Bonus - Orson Welles directs The Mercury Theater’s radio production of The War of the Worlds
 

I have the cover story over at h+ magazine today, about the new artificial intelligence upgrades to the space program. (Jet Propulsion Labs has upgraded the Mars rover with artificial intelligence firmware… could intelligent AI nanoclouds be far off?) Read on at the link below for the rest of my reporting live from NASA’s labs.

Though we may not have found intelligent life on Mars, NASA has just beamed up its own.

As announced at the end of March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories has upgraded the Opportunity rover (already stationed on Mars) with artificial intelligence firmware, code-named AEGIS. Short for Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, AEGIS allows the Opportunity to identify high-value photography targets — making its own decisions about which Martian rocks to photograph and send back to Earth. As the rover has limited downlink capacity, this is expected to greatly increase its productivity, allowing it to retrieve more data in fewer trips across Mars’ surface. AEGIS isn’t the first artificial intelligence application developed for space, or even at Jet Propulsion Labs — JPL has been in the game as far back as the Deep Space 1 craft in 1998.

I visited JPL on a recent rainy afternoon. Nestled in the mountains near Pasadena, California, the NASA campus dates to the 1940s, and was an early stalwart of the United States’ rocketry and space programs. Beyond security checkpoints, rows of polished, glass-and-steel buildings house the facility’s various projects — major foci at the moment are the Mars rovers and Reconnaissance orbiter, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, and the Spitzer space telescope. Further up the hill is a simulated outdoor Martian landscape, with volcanic rocks resting in red sand. It’s an eerie thing to see through a gray LA fog.

(h+: Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

 
Is photosynthesis possible on Mars?  Scientists at the German Center for Aeronautics and Space Research (DLR) seem to think so.  They’re rigged up a hermetically sealed steel chest consisting of 95% carbon dioxide, set the thermostat to ?

 

 

 
From The Big Picture:

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)

Martian landscapes

 
Attention: Dangerous Mind readers in Europe.  Need a new “Plan B?”  Sure, all the cool kids are lighting out for Berlin or Costa Rica, but why not try Mars (by way of Russia)?

Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars.  In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission.  ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.

The participants are subjects in scientific investigations to assess the effect that isolation has on various psychological and physiological aspects, such as stress, hormone regulation and immunity, sleep quality, mood and the effectiveness of dietary supplements.  The crew will follow a program designed to simulate a 250-day journey to Mars, a 30-day surface exploration phase and 240 days traveling back to Earth.  For the ?