The Rover struck sub-soil oil!
/ wishful thinking.
/ wishful thinking.
Maybe not so far-fetched as you might think. I learned right here on FR some months ago about a theory by the physicist Thomas Gold, of pulsar fame, that says something like: petroleum may not be the decomposed remnants of prehistoric dinosaurs, as most people believe, but a more fundamental byproduct of the breakdown of heavy elements like uranium, with the help of some unknown biological process. When uranium decays, some of the nucleus of the uranium atom comes off in pieces larger than a single hydrogen atom, which is a single proton and an electron. The pieces might be multiple protons and neutrons, which are essentially heavier elements like helium and carbon. Carbon and hydrogen combine to form methane, which is basically natural gas. (Did you know that commercial helium for balloons and such comes from natural gas sources?) Well, with the help of the heretofor unknown biological process, the methane is combined with other methane and hydrogen to form more complex hydrocarbons, what we call petroleum.
To take the line of thinking a little further, since the earth has heavy elements within the crust, then it is likely that mars also has heavy elements within its crust. The same physical processes would occur, meaning that methane is very probably present in the martian crust somewhere. My first thought on reading the original post was "oil." How much would you bet that Dr. Gold is not contemplating the same thing right now?