Acid Fog Likely Dissolved Rocks on Mars
The acid fog on Mars appears to have created a gel on the rock surfaces that has essentially melted the neat crystalline texture of the rocks into a sort of messy rock soup.
“A lot of people have talked about weathering that would occur on Mars,” said planetary scientist Ralph Milliken of Brown University. And those researchers have developed models for such things as acid fogs eating away at Martian rocks over the eons, although evidence for such processes has been scarce. “This (new work) is consistent with some of these models.”
The new work is that of planetary scientist Shoshanna Cole, who has assembled a strong case for acidic vapors making a thin rock soup on the surfaces of Martian rocks in a 100-acre area on Husband Hill, in the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater. Cole integrated data from all the instruments on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit to reveal patterns that no single instrument could have detected. She presented her work on Monday in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
“I look at the geology with all of the instruments data sets,” said Cole, an assistant professor at Ithaca College who started working on the project for her Ph.D. thesis while she was at Cornell University. “Different instruments give different information.”
http://news.discovery.com/space/acid-fog-likely-dissolved-rocks-on-mars-151102.htm
Just for fun
this photo is from NASA JPL Mars Rover team
a photo of the Gale Crater region of Mars captured by a NASA Mars rover............ Raw data straight from NASA
mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00064/mcam/0064MR0285005000E1_DXXX.jpg
Rock Made By Acid Fog?
In another story about Mars NASA will announce new findings of Mars' atmosphere this Thursday
NASA will reveal new results about the atmosphere of Mars this Thursday (Nov. 5), and you can watch the action live.
The space agency is hosting a news conference on Thursday at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) to "announce new findings on [the] fate of Mars' atmosphere," according to a NASA media advisory. You can watch the news conference live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.
The list of speakers for Thursday's event makes clear that the press conference will report discoveries made by NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which has been studying the Red Planet from orbit since late 2014:
Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters
Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder
Jasper Halekas, MAVEN Solar Wind Ion Analyzer instrument lead at the University of Iowa
Yaxue Dong, MAVEN science team member at LASP
Dave Brain, MAVEN co-investigator at LASP
MAVEN's name is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution. The main goals of the $670 million mission involve determining how, why and when the Red Planet lost most of its atmosphere. (Mars' air was once thick enough to support large bodies of liquid surface water, but it's now just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth at sea level.)
http://www.space.com/31000-mars-atmosphere-maven-results-preview.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Red Lectroids want to know.
Where are John Smallberries and John Bigbooté when you need them?
Ohh, I thought is was an acid frog - my bad 
The thing is about the photo, its directly from JPL
in which the reader can try to enhance and magnify for themselves and decide what it is.
Anyway the NASA findings released Thursday on the ancient atmosphere
Warm & wet Mars stripped of atmosphere by solar winds – NASA
https://www.rt.com/usa/320948-nasa-mars-atmosphere-report/
NASA Confirms How Mars Transformed From Earth-like to a Cold Dry Planet
Evidence shows that Mars was once like Earth with an ocean of Water and a similar atmosphere to what we have on our planet today. NASA confirms today what caused the planet’s atmosphere to escape, leaving it vulnerable to radiation that transformed it into the cold dry world we have been exploring for half a century.
NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has been sampling Mars’ atmosphere to determine what caused Mars to lose its atmosphere
Unlike the previous rover missions such as Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity, MAVEN did not touch down on Mars but remained in orbit to study the planet’s atmospheric properties. NASA scientists designed MAVEN to determine why the atmosphere is so thin now and what happened to the planet’s moisture.
http://observer.com/2015/11/breaking-nasa-confirms-how-mars-transformed-from-earth-like-to-a-cold-dry-planet/
So Mars was either destroyed by a pissed off sun or some galactic empire.
