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by robertskmiles 4878 days ago
A human explorer probably wouldn't have seen it though; it's really tiny. The reason this was seen at all is that the high resolution images are being looked over by a large number of people on Earth. NASA themselves didn't even spot it.

(High resolution imagery + many many human eyes) > Human eyes

Never mind that Curiosity has now been operating for 6 months without food, water, or sleep, and is expected to continue doing so for years.
1 comments
waterlesscloud 4878 days ago
It's shiny, the odds are very high that a human would indeed have seen it. For one thing, a human's eyes are constantly processing the world as they move through it. Curiosity's eyes are not.

What Curiosity has done in 6 months could have been done in a couple of weeks by a human, sleep time included. Robots are vastly inferior to humans for this work, and will remain so for some time to come.

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