We have been receiving a steady stream of updates from the Mars rover, Curiosity, ever since it left the Earth’s atmosphere and began it’s mission. However, one of the more recent updates, which is being called “earthshaking”, can not be shared at this time. So what in the world is going on? or to be more precise, what in the Martian world is going on?
One of Curiosity’s instruments, known as SAM, is able to determine what’s inside a particular sample by analyzing it and then letting us know what it’s made up of. John Grotzinger, who is part of the rover team, has mentioned that they have recently gathered a bit of soil to test with SAM and it has yielded some “Earthshaking”, results.
Unfortunately, we won’t find out exactly what these earthshaking results are until they have confirmed them beyond a shadow of a doubt. After all they don’t want to deliver big news only to have to take it back later and say they were wrong.
The funny thing about scientific discovery is that everybody interprets these sort of things differently. We could very well hear news that a never before seen gas has been found trapped in the soil sample, which would be interesting but not necessarily “earthshaking” to those of us outside the scientific community, with the exception being some of our fellow geeks of course. Either way we remain in state of suspense until we can find out more about whats going on out there. I can’t even begin to speculate myself.
There’s no doubt in my mind that these scientists are basically freaking out about not being able to tell us, and to make things worse, it may be several weeks before we can know. For now we will just have to wait and see what these earthshaking results are and hopefully we are in for a big suprise.
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