MARS OUTCROP SOURCE OF TINY SPHERES

JPL ^ | sol 13, opportunity, mars | JPL

[Monty22]

"3 of the larger spheres appear to be unsupported from beneath by the sand. A clear shadow is underneath the edge. [stalk?]"

Any chance this could be a lifeform? Silica based even?

[doodad]

Google up concretions and you will see very rounded precipitated types of sedimentary rock.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Looks like NASA likes "our" rock:

13 New Pancam Images from Sol 14

Unfortunately, they didn't get the full set - they'll probably have the rest later...

[Bernard Marx]

Deal. If the color on my monitor's right they sure look like spessartine -- typical inclusions and all. They could also be hessonites or a pyrope-spessartine mix. I'm planning a trip to Salmon City, ID and a detour through Dillon will give me a chance to see some beloved rough country one more time. Who'd-a-thunk a person could go virtual field-tripping on Mars and in Montana simultaneously?

[djf]

There is a river near me that runs violently during the winter across some hard, but sandstone type of rock. Fossil maple leafs are common there. When the river is running low, the banks are full of holes, and if you reach down into a hole, you will always find a hard, igneous tyoe rock. When the river runs high, these rocks just roll around in these holes, and wear them down further.

It's very cool!

[Phil V.]

"A force of some kind has pushed one of them . . ."

Yes, Opportunity pressed on the soil as part of the range of tests thye are performing.

[doodad]

Yeah we go backpacking the mountains and see those swirl holes. We know a few that are large enough and situated right that we use them as jacuzzis after hiking.

[Salamander]

Hi there.
I'm not even remotely qualified to make guesses about these things *but* they look a lot like the coal "clinkers" that have been dumped around the back roads where I live.
A 200 hundred+ years ago there was an iron furnace nearby.
The roads near where it used to be are littered with little metallic/stone "spheres" that are hard but "pop" when hit hard enough. ( in addition to truckloads of wildly colored ore "slag glass" )
My house belonged to the local circa 1700s blacksmith and the same sort of "spheres" show up in the yard sometimes when we're digging or it rains really hard.
I have one I found and saved (somewhere) that is round enough to serve as a makeshift marble.
The rest are usually more irregularly shaped and they more often than not have holes in them (as mentioned in one of the other posts) that would work perfectly for "stringing" them together.

Also, my husband is a welder.
When he's cutting something with a torch or welding, thousands of little metallic "spheres" result.
( These also "pop" when smacked a good 'un )....:)
Could these "spheres" be the remnants of some intense heat/native mineral reaction type of event?

Pardon me if this is way off the geological mark but it's the first thing I thought of as soon as I saw them.

[Phil V.]

Your instincts are probably close to the mark. The real life processes that you cite are "reproduced" in volcanoes and meteor impacts . . . hot liquid blasts out, assumes spherical shape, cools . . . presto! You are probably headed toward the correct process.

[Salamander]

Wow.
I feared I was making a royal fool of myself with that particular "W.A.G.".....:))

I've loved rocks my whole life.
I may not have much scientific knowledge about them, per se, but someday somebody's gonna dig up my Dad's backyard and wonder how so many "geographically diverse specimens" wound up congregated there.

And now, years later, my own yard is full of "interesting" rocks I somehow managed to drag home out of the woods.....:)

[FireTrack]

"Hailstones"

Your statement has merit in that hailstones are formed while in suspension. A possibility here is that these objects were formed while in suspension in an ancient sea.

Given that they are eroding from the rock the above is possible and some type of frozen condensate isn't.

They seem evenly distributed as another poster suggested however and this suggests something else.

[FireTrack]

Why are the evenly dispersed ? Shouldn't they have rolled to the lowest point or been blown into crevices ?

Yep, maybe they are growing (which doesn't mean biologically) in the soil.

[FireTrack]

Ball bearings from the BEAGLE Lander??????

Too round! ;-)

[FireTrack]

Your suggestion could very well be correct in that these objects could have been formed by a similar process. The great thing about this is that we have something very unusual here and the possible means to discover the process that formed them.

[FireTrack]

Isn't this rock the one they call "snout"? If so they're headed over to take a much closer look. Hopefully we should then be able to discern if indeed at least some of the spheres are eroding from the outcrop.

[CJ Wolf]

You are not thinking of the gravity that's all. It's different, it will yield to different shapes. I think.

[BibChr]

LOL!

[FireTrack]

NASA really needs to take the arm, roll one of these things over and take a look at the bottom side!

[quantim]

Here is what is most fascinating to me.  Here is a zoom of the lower left corner.  There is an obvious ridge of harder material.  The spheres do not appear to be pushed in like a fossilized footprint because of the sharp ridges of these mini-craters.  I postulate that these spheres (while airborne) did form as a result of very high heat and gravity while they were liquid as a result of a meteoric blast.  Let us then assume that they came to rest a very short time later (minutes or less) in a very hot muddy viscous surface.  Consequent surface tensions as the surrounding crust cools it forces ridges as you see here over days, weeks or years.  The stratification of the surrounding large rocks could be easily explained if some form water rain over years or centuries covered these spheres and fossilized them, so to speak.  

As eons go by, the atmosphere dissipates and erosion slowly does its work.  Then these 'fossilized' spheres are exposed and pop out like Janet's boob at halftime.  

I gave a little color to what looks like mini-craters.  Note the one slightly to the right of center still in the crater.  One of two things is logically possible:  Either this sphere is in its original resting place or it is not.    It would be hard to argue that these mini-craters are not related to the spheres. 

[doodad]

Let us then assume that they came to rest a very short time later (minutes or less) in a very hot muddy viscous surface

That's a fine theory, but do consider, that because the spheres appear higher and lower in the layers, the event and conditions that created them occurred multiple times over an unknown amount of time. And each time the conditions were exactly right to yield the same perfect spheres. That is what must be assumed if you reason a sedimentary answer to these. Strains my thinking a bit. I sincerely do not believe the formation of the spheres and the layering are contemporaneous.