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Scientists are baffled by the sudden appearance of a jelly doughnut-like rock that the Opportunity rover spotted in January 2014. These are images of the same location; the rock on the right was not there 12 days earlier. Researchers now believe the rover's wheels flicked the rock into its current spot.
NASA's twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have revealed many secrets of the Red Planet since landing on Mars in January 2004. Spirit stopped communicating in 2010, but Opportunity is still collecting data. This illustration depicts the identical look of both rovers.
This first color photo using Spirit's panoramic camera was the highest-resolution image ever taken on another planet's surface at the time.
Opportunity discovered the first meteorite identified on a planet other than Earth. The rover's panoramic camera photographed the basketball-size object mostly composed of iron and nickel on January 6, 2005.
said planetary scientist Ray Arvidson." border="0" height="360" id="articleGalleryPhoto005" width="640"/>The Opportunity rover has studied windblown ripples in an area called the Meridiani Planum. This image, taken on April 27, 2006, shows a field of rocks known as cobbles among ripples about 8 inches high. The windblown ripples are likely left from a time when wind patterns were different,said planetary scientist Ray Arvidson.
In February 2006, Spirit arrived at a geological feature called Home Plate, about 260 feet in diameter. It was so named because it looks like a baseball diamond's home plate from orbit. In this area, the rover found a material called opaline silica, a discovery important for understanding conditions that would have supported life on Mars. Scientists believe this material formed when water interacted with volcanic material known as with magma.
Spirit made another discovery linked to the possibility that Mars could have supported life. This photo is from that location -- an outcrop called Comanche -- in 2005. In 2010, scientists combined data from the rover's three spectrometers and suggested the composition of Comanche is about one-fourth magnesium iron carbonate. This finding indicates the environment was once wet and nonacidic and could have been favorable to life.
Soft soil was exposed when Spirit's wheels dug into a patch of ground dubbed Troy in 2009. While stationed there, the rover was able to show scientists that water, possibly in the form of snowmelt, had trickled into the subsurface relatively recently. Layers of soil with different compositions suggest that thin films of water may have gotten into the ground from frost or snow. Scientists believe Mars could have had cyclical climate changes when the planet was tilted farther on its axis.
Both Spirit and Opportunity examined the frequency and dynamics of dust devils, which help scientists understand how wind moves dust and sand in a thin atmosphere. Spirit saw dozens of dust devils, but Opportunity, located halfway around the planet, likely never encountered one until more than six years into its mission. An image from July 15, 2010, shows a column of swirling dust.
Opportunity found bright veins of a mineral that appeared to be gypsum. The vein shown here is informally called Homestake. The mineral is deposited by water. It and other deposits that look similar are in an area where sulfate-rich and volcanic bedrock meet -- at the rim of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is currently located.
A 2014 study with data from Opportunity suggests that water in the Endeavour Crater region would have been more favorable to microbial life before rather than after the crater formed. This rock is from an area known as Whitewater Lake, part of the crater's rim.
Another interesting formation that Opportunity has discovered is at an outcrop called Kirkwood. This image shows spherical objects that are as much as one-eighth of an inch in diameter.
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- Andy Weir finds it hard to break into science fiction, and works as a programmer instead
- He posted his book a chapter at a time; it finds audience, including scientists
- "The Martian," now a bestseller and optioned for a film, tells of an astronaut stranded on Mars
- Weir's book has gotten praise for technical accuracy and portrait of NASA bureaucracy
(CNN) -- Andy Weir had given up on writing as a career at the age of 26 after agents spurned his novel about a jewel heist involving aliens "on the Planet Sephalon."
After burning through severance checks from his layoff by AOL, he went back to work as a programmer in Silicon Valley.
Ten years later, in 2009, Weir decided to try writing again, but just as a hobby. Keeping his day job at a mobile phone software company, he started posting a new book on a personal website, chapter by chapter as he wrote it. This time, there were no aliens and no imaginary planet.
Instead he crafted a story, set a few decades in the future, about an astronaut who mistakenly gets left for dead on Mars when the other members of his crew are forced to make a quick escape from the effects of a devastating sandstorm.
This book found an audience. People starting following the story and it attracted scientists, including some who e-mailed Weir and offered suggestions to make the book's excursions into physics, chemistry and biology true to science.
Today Weir's "The Martian" is on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list and has been optioned by 20th Century Fox for a potential movie, raising the question: How does a space nerd with no track record as a writer craft a compelling work of science fiction?
Andy Weir posted his sci-fi book on the Web, a chapter at a time.
The book's hero, a cheeky astronaut named Mark Watney, possesses a self-reliance that enables him to jerry-rig NASA equipment in a suspenseful battle to eke out enough air, food and water to survive alone on Mars. In an interview with CNN, Weir said that his lead character is "smarter and braver than I am. The core personality that most people noticed -- that he's a massive smart ass -- that's basically my personality."
Watney finds ways to heal the injury that led his fellow astronauts to abandon him, thinking he was dead; to grow food in the "hab" module that is his home on Mars, to turn hydrogen and oxygen into water, to restore communication with NASA, and to drive his rover on the inhospitable Martian landscape far further than it was designed to go.
And yet critical life-support components keep failing, mishaps keep setting him back, and he keeps concluding that he's certainly about to die.
See what it's like to live on Mars
There's more than enough science and technology for the technically literate, and although he's never worked at NASA, Weir has gotten compliments for the accuracy of his portrait of an enormous bureaucracy's infighting as it struggles to save a man tens of millions of miles away. In the story, Watney's lonely struggle captures the attention of billions on Earth, even spawning a daily half-hour cable news program: "CNN's Mark Watney Report."
The book builds up the kind of narrative tension captured in the Oscar best-picture contender "Gravity," which Weir liked, even though it may have stretched the science. ("It doesn't have to be perfectly physically accurate to be entertaining. Nobody calls out the physics problems in 'Star Wars.'")
Yet accuracy is one of the things that gets cited in praise for Weir's book. Astronaut Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station, has said the book "has the very rare combination of a good, original story, interestingly real characters, and fascinating technical accuracy," according to Crown, the book's publisher.
Now 41, Weir is the son of a particle physicist -- his father double-checked much of the science in "The Martian" -- and an engineer. He got hooked on Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and other classic science fiction writers by plucking their paperbacks from his father's shelf.
Predictably, Weir is fascinated by manned spaceflight and intrigued by the idea of a manned mission to Mars. But he's no fan of Mars One, the nonprofit that has gotten 200,000 people to express interest in being selected for a one-way trip to Mars, to take place in 2025.
Weir thinks the budget envisioned for the project is far too small and, "it would be basically a death sentence for the people who are going." He thinks a government-funded mission to Mars is far more likely but not for a long time. The after-effects suffered by astronauts on the International Space Station show the dangers of long-term space flight, he says. "There are a lot of pieces of the puzzle that we need to invent" to make for safe travel to Mars. Near term, he looks forward to a Chinese manned mission to the moon.
As for NASA, Weir says he's "disappointed by the state of our manned spaceflight program," especially the lack of a vehicle to replace the space shuttle. Would Weir want to fly on a space mission? "I am not a brave man ...I do not have the right stuff. Astronauts are really a cut above."
As a computer programmer, the closest Weir got to fame was as a member of the team that worked on the hit game "WarCraft2."
At his current job in Mountain View, California, Weir's bosses know the score, he says.
"I'm working on a pitch for my next novel right now, and if I get an advance, I'm going to quit and be a full time writer, which is the culmination of my dream coming true. I think I have to go sit in a coffee shop when I do that. And wear a neckerchief."
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