Sometimes bad things lead to good things. Like how breaking up with my ex-girlfriend was what led to me meeting my wife. Or how needing an escape from my crummy dot-com job led me to found RoboGames. or how a jammed wheel on a Mars rover ends up digging up Silica on the martian soil:

The puzzle is what produced a patch of nearly pure silica — the main ingredient of window glass — that Spirit found last May. It could have come from either a hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic steam rises through cracks. On Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life.

“Whichever of those conditions produced it, this concentration of silica is probably the most significant discovery by Spirit for revealing a habitable niche that existed on Mars in the past,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the rovers’ science payload. “The evidence is pointing most strongly toward fumarolic conditions, like you might see in Hawaii and in Iceland. Compared with deposits formed at hot springs, we know less about how well fumarolic deposits can preserve microbial fossils. That’s something needing more study here on Earth.”

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20071210a.html

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