This is just too cool, the fact that me are looking at microscopic images from the surface of another planet blows my mind! http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/press/SoilParticles.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/press/Sol017SiliconeMosaicComposite.html ^The scale bar in those pics is equal to one millimeter!
I knew it would be you D_C! Always bringing us this cool Mars news! Man, I wonder how much until we finally land on it!
Other than the fact we were able to take a microscopic image, what's so special about this? It's just dirt.
Seriously? It's martian dirt. That's what's so special about it. The fact that if anything in that dirt resembles life at all it will add to our knowledge in an instant. Not only life, but what it's made out of at the microscopic level will also tell us things about the planet that we previously didn't know.
Well, one interesting thing about it is that it is clumping together at a sub-millimeter level, just like mud, only it's too cold, and the atmospheric pressure is too low for liquid water to exist where the lander taking the pictures is presently.
