[ via Oliver Morton ] Planetologist Jeffrey Bell doesn’t think much of Mars. If the planetary science crowd gets excited over some feature, Bell harumphs from behind his desk at the University of Hawaii, and points to an analog he says he can find by walking around the campus or by asking a passing vulcanologist.
He calls his contrarian model Aloha Mars, and has elaborated it in two columns in Space Daily.
In the first, he thinks the warm, wet Mars advocates see running water when they should interpret it as frozen basalt.
The second column argues that the ‘blueberries’ found by the Opportunity rover are most likely frozen spheres of lava. The frozen lava and ash from a volcanic eruption fell on a permafrost deposit and the ensuing reactions yielded the landscape the rover dropped onto.
How will his unromantic theory hold up in light of today’s NASA press conference? His theory behind the blueberries isn’t contradicted by the press conference results, as they didn’t conclude the site was covered in water. Professor Bell will probably have another column ‘debunking’ the press conference real soon now.
