MARS OUTCROP SOURCE OF TINY SPHERES

JPL ^ | sol 13, opportunity, mars | JPL

[poindexter]

I can't wait to get up there with my pan and shovel!

[ChadGore]

Am I the only one who notices a pattern here ?

:)

[FourtySeven]

LOL.....EXCELLENT!

[Alas Babylon!]

...Robert Dunham6 and Carroll Thomas,7...

Man, these are some smart kids!!!

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

For the unintiated, like me, go here:

Click here for enlightenment.

[COBOL2Java]

A Martian that lost his marbles?

We don't lose things, we just misplace them!!!

[John H K]

footnote superscripts that didn't paste, of course :-)

[ZOOKER]

IIRC there are frequent dust storms on Mars. Could it be that particles rolled along the ground by a strong wind eventually wore down into a spherical shape?

Geodes are naturally occurring crystal formations within certain types of rock (on earth). They're not alive, and never were, but their shape is often spherical.

[blam]

Fossilized diatoms?

[doodad]

Spheres are a VERY rare thing to occur naturally in minerals. Crystal habits don't lend themselves to forming spheres. Nature has a few, but they aren't common here on Earth.

[John H K]

Diatoms are VERY small. Many orders of magnitude smaller than these.

[dead]

Is there some frickin' reason we can't get a color pic of this from NASA?

With the time difference between Mars and Earth, it's apparently about 1940 up there.

Uncle Miltie and Imogene Coco are going to do USO shows for the rovers.

[Frank_Discussion]

Hey, it could happen!

[doodad]

Hey good morning. Isn't this incredible? I am leaning very hard now on water and a concretionary source for this to occur. I can't think of any metamorphic state that would yield spheres unless it was a weird type of retrograde metamorphism affecting certain phenocrysts.

[FireTrack]

I wonder if they could some how scoop one of these spheres up with the arm, crack it open on top of a rock again using the arm and then do analysis and micro-imagery?

[John H K]

Yep, seems water had to have been involved.

So what do you think of the closeups of the outcrop rocks? That's some REALLY fine foliation.

Now that the pics are closer they look like they MIGHT be "crumbly"...I'm curious if they're really hard or if they'll crumble when the arm is put on them.

[doodad]

Obviously they are weathering differentially as the spheres are being left as the matrix breaks down. I also noticed that the spheres are in most cases larger than the layer they occupy, which would also indicate that they "grew." The only other thing I can think of would be infilling of gas bubbles by a solution. However, they mentioned that large amounts of olivine was present which does not exist with quartz, so they are not siliceous unless a long time gap occured and a change in source materials provided the silica.

[doodad]

I just noticed also that the spheres appear to have formed on the top of the layers. I don't see any that are wrapped or crossed by the layering.

[JohnG45]

You took the words right out of my mouth!

[blam]

"Diatoms are VERY small. Many orders of magnitude smaller than these."

Okay, thanks. (Next headline: Giant Diatom Fossils Found On Mars, lol)