edwardspoonhands: This picture is mind blowing on a lot of levels. But most of all, what gets me is how familiar that bit of the Martian surface looks. Water is an all-powerful force here on Earth. It affects the look and feel of everything we see, from the shape of mountains to the size of dust particles. And so Mars, a landscape without water, looks foreign to us. The dust is too fine, the rocks are too evenly distributed, the colors are too uniform. But here, in a photograph of rocks that were just below the dust before a meteorite (or some other disturbance) thrust them up, we see something familiar. Rocks of varying color and varying size. Sedimentary composites, and, most exciting, pebbles with the roughness beaten out of them by quickly-flowing water.  Here in Montana, if you stick your head into a quickly flowing stream, you’ll hear a million little clacks. Those clacks are rocks and pebbles beating agains each other as they flow with the river. And each of those clacks rounds those pebbles and rocks a little more. To see a pebble just like one we might find on the side of a dry stream bed in Montana on Mars, it just melts me a bit.
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edwardspoonhands:

This picture is mind blowing on a lot of levels. But most of all, what gets me is how familiar that bit of the Martian surface looks. Water is an all-powerful force here on Earth. It affects the look and feel of everything we see, from the shape of mountains to the size of dust particles. And so Mars, a landscape without water, looks foreign to us. The dust is too fine, the rocks are too evenly distributed, the colors are too uniform.

But here, in a photograph of rocks that were just below the dust before a meteorite (or some other disturbance) thrust them up, we see something familiar. Rocks of varying color and varying size. Sedimentary composites, and, most exciting, pebbles with the roughness beaten out of them by quickly-flowing water. 

Here in Montana, if you stick your head into a quickly flowing stream, you’ll hear a million little clacks. Those clacks are rocks and pebbles beating agains each other as they flow with the river. And each of those clacks rounds those pebbles and rocks a little more. To see a pebble just like one we might find on the side of a dry stream bed in Montana on Mars, it just melts me a bit.

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