MARS OUTCROP SOURCE OF TINY SPHERES

JPL ^ | sol 13, opportunity, mars | JPL

[RightWingAtheist]

In Stanley Weinbaum's classic short story "A Martian Odyssey" (written in 1928!), the hero discovers some strange spheres on the Martian landscape. They turn out to be the eggs of a silicon-based life form (which also, incidentally, literaly $hits bricks).

[FireTrack]

Ping

[Fitzcarraldo]

Good find...they might be broken from a fall or when the rock was fractured at the impact of the meteorite that formed the crater. If a fracture line crossed a sphere, it would probably break as well, leaving other spheres in the rock intact.

Hard to make out the exact shape of your fragments but to me they look "shellish" instead of solid semispheres.

[doodad]

Volcanics are often very bubbly and the voids created are infilled with all sorts of solutions. The geodes in the pic above are good examples. What is interesting is if this is a sediment of some kind (which caused the layers) the conditions to create the spheres was present for quite awhile since the spheres are present in many layers.

[FireTrack]

If a fracture line crossed a sphere, it would probably break as well, leaving other spheres in the rock intact.

Good points, however they would have to be more attached or a part of the rock than they appear and also I think broken spheres would appear in a more random pattern rather than a few under an appropriate ledge?

It is hard to tell if they are shells are solids. A closeup image from the rover is in order! Surely we have some FR hackers who could seize control of Opportunity? LOL

[Phil V.]

If you'd like to be on or off this MARS ping list please FRail me

[Phil V.]

Here's a stereo set of the area . . .

[Fitzcarraldo]

I think i'm seeing two diffent shades in some of the broken spheres - there's a really large piece above the large rock - whitish circle with a chip in the top and mostly white except for a gray pattern that looks like a stylized "X" inside; looking at what might be smaller broken spheres I see a similar patterns with an X inside but with the two lines of the X crossing at different angles in some cases...

[Darksheare]

Horta eggs!!
/ joke.

Hematite, malachite both can have spherical shapes, but not like that.
Not sure what those might be.
Honestly would have to see one cut in half and thoroughly analyzed.

[Fitzcarraldo]

This is a stretch - in a fair number of spheres I can see the trademark 'dimple' or actual hole that we see in the soil micrograph spheres - of course we can see only one side of a sphere at a time - maybe this dimple is what remains of where a 'stalk' came out?

[Fitzcarraldo]

Honestly would have to see one cut in half and thoroughly analyzed.

there are some broken spheres laying around...I'm sure they'll be putting the microimager on them...it's going to be hard for these guys to leave this outcrop!

[mercy]

Sure looks like sedimentary rock to me. (the big piece)

[Ophiucus]

Pisoliths?

Not knowing is pisolithing me off! ;-)

[Fitzcarraldo]

The forward quarter on that big white rock looks well cracked ready to fall off...all it needs is a nudge...

[lepton]

I could be wrong but I'm noticing pairs of spheres that are so close together they might be joined.

I see one example of an equilateral triplet, and maybe 4-5 where there appear three together in irregular fashio. ...but lots of equal-sized pairs.

[Darksheare]

"Kids in a candy shop" comes to mind about the outcrop.
Those spheres are truly weird.
They bring to mind lumps of malachite and hematite, but here on earth such minerals are always lumped together in dense clumps.

Really weird.

[FireTrack]

In the large piece the shading appears to be caused by the different angles of the break reflecting differing amounts of light. I'm not convinced that this large piece is not a piece of rock instead of a sphere (does this sentence contain a double negative?). If it is a sphere, it's the economy size version. I can see the shading in the smaller pieces as you mentioned.

[Phil V.]

These really are intriguing pictures! The imagination is cut loose . . . fun is happening!

[Ophiucus]

An arrowhead and a scraper!

Umhmm...and at the bottom center is the skull of the critter killed by the arrow and whose hide was cleaned by the scraper. :-)

[FireTrack]

Take a look at the two stereo images posted by Phil V. You can see the 3-D by slightly crossing your eyes while staring at both. It's amazing how far the rock protrudes.