Opportunity Sees Tiny Spheres in Martian Soil

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011

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Guy Webster (818) 354-5011 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Donald Savage (202) 358-1547 NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

NEWS RELEASE: 2004-051 February 4, 2004

Opportunity Sees Tiny Spheres in Martian Soil

NASA's Opportunity has examined its first patch of soil in the small crater where the rover landed on Mars and found strikingly spherical pebbles among the mix of particles there.

"There are features in this soil unlike anything ever seen on Mars before," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on the two Mars Exploration Rovers.

For better understanding of the soil, mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., plan to use Opportunity's wheels later this week to scoop a trench to expose deeper material. One front wheel will rotate to dig the hole while the other five wheels hold still.

The spherical particles appear in new pictures from Opportunity's microscopic imager, the last of 20 cameras to be used on the two rover missions. Other particles in the image have jagged shapes. "The variety of shapes and colors indicates we're having particles brought in from a variety of sources," said Dr. Ken Herkenhoff of the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Team, Flagstaff, Ariz.

The shapes by themselves don't reveal the particles' origin with certainty. "A number of straightforward geological processes can yield round shapes," said Dr. Hap McSween, a rover science team member from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They include accretion under water, but apparent pores in the particles make alternative possibilities of meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions more likely origins, he said.

A new mineral map of Opportunity's surroundings, the first ever done from the surface of another planet, shows that concentrations of coarse-grained hematite vary in different parts of the crater. The soil patch in the new microscopic images is in an area low in hematite. The map shows higher hematite concentrations inside the crater in a layer above an outcrop of bedrock and on the slope just under the outcrop.

Hematite usually forms in association with liquid water, so it holds special interest for the scientists trying to determine whether the rover landing sites ever had watery environments possibly suitable for sustaining life. The map uses data from Opportunity's miniature thermal emission spectrometer, which identifies rock types from a distance.

"We're seeing little bits and pieces of this mystery, but we haven't pieced all the clues together yet," Squyres said.

Opportunity's Moessbauer spectrometer, an instrument on the rover's robotic arm designed to identify the types of iron-bearing minerals in a target, found a strong signal in the soil patch for olivine. Olivine is a common ingredient in volcanic rocks. A few days of analysis may be needed to discern whether any fainter signals are from hematite, said Dr. Franz Renz, science team member from the University of Mainz, Germany.

To get a better look at the hematite closer to the outcrop, Opportunity will go there. It will begin by driving about 3 meters (10 feet) tomorrow, taking it about halfway to the outcrop. On Friday it will dig a trench with one of its front wheels, said JPL's Dr. Mark Adler, mission manager.

Opportunity's twin, Spirit, today is reformatting its flash memory, a preventive measure that had been planned for earlier in the week. "We spent the last four days in the testbed testing this," Adler said. "It's not an operation we do lightly. We've got to be sure it works right." Tomorrow, Spirit will resume examining a rock called Adirondack after a two-week interruption by computer memory problems. Controllers plan to tell Spirit to brush dust off of a rock and examine the cleaned surface tomorrow.

Each martian day, or "sol," lasts about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. Spirit begins its 33rd sol on Mars at 2:43 a.m. Thursday, Pacific Standard Time. Opportunity begins its 13th sol on Mars at

3:04 p.m. Thursday, PST.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at

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and from Cornell University at

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Reply to
Ron
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(Wild guess: fused iron and silica from electrical zaps like you get with 'crop circles') df.

Reply to
don findlay

Hint : Hap McSween, as in Harvey and McSween, the well known anti-mars-life geology crackpots.

Thomas Lee Elifritz

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Reply to
Thomas Lee Elifritz

Perhaps the silica was fused by the action of atmospheric oxygen on the primordial silicon emanating from a volcano. The pores remind me of pumice particles which may still harbor a few intact pumice bubbles containing the primordial constituents of the planetary interior. Higher than atmospheric concentration of neon in the particles would lend credence to this speculation. John Curtis

Reply to
John Curtis

Despite the fact that crop circles were a hoax perpetrated on the public by two English scientists?

Two Englishmen came clean about their nocturnal practices in 1991. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two men in their 60's at the time, claimed that they were responsible for the crop circles that everyone was talking about. Armed with planks of wood, garden rollers and string, the men would stomp and mark an area of a field, thus creating crop circles as we know them.

Reply to
George

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I will suggest this last origin - melted sediment from a meteor-impact. The pores could be trapped initial porosity of the sediment. The green color associates to a welth of green ironrich melts and minerals. There is not much likeness to the melted spheres in the volcanic ash I have seen - but I havn't seen much though!

Carsten

Reply to
Carsten Troelsgaard

Well, realize that this is a red herring in itself- crop circles have been reported all over the world and for centuries. I am certain that these two gentlemen did not make them all. Not to say that other people did not; that is the simplest explanation, certainly. But that is like soaping fountains around your town and then admitting it; then having everyone assume that all fountain soaping pranks were done by you.

Cheers!

Chip Shults

Reply to
Sir Charles W. Shults III

If a race of aliens had just traveled 100 trillion miles to our planet, chances are excellent they'd have something better to do than make pretty circles in our corn and wheat fields.

Rick

Reply to
Rick

Crop circles are the imprints left by invisible disguised rock-aliens. I thought *everyone* knew that! *|;-)

Reply to
Jo Schaper

So you're not a "croppie" then George? Next you'll be believing that the footprints on the 'Moon' were caused by two long-legged sheilas from Florida, stomping about - I don't know - somewhere...

Reply to
don findlay

______________________________

PS ....Besides, two clean Englishmen is a contradiction in terms. Everyone knows they never wash. Just on that point alone your claim is questionable.

Reply to
don findlay

PS. Like with those super willie willies taking the dust high in the atmosphere, and then shoot a charge through it, and it all falls like rain. How about that?

Reply to
don findlay

That's right. I'm not a "croppie, as you put it. Nor do I believe that the earth has been visited by "flying saucers". Neither do I believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, the Abominal Snowman, or an expanding earth. I do believe in the existence of Australians with male-pattern baldness who use wishful thinking as a substitute for science. I call it wishful thinking because the science is so bad, it doesn't even qualify as pseudo-science.

Reply to
George

As opposed to a certain Australian with male-pattern baldness who spends all of his waking moments trying to disprove Plate tectonics, even though he has admitted not knowing the first thing about the subject?

Reply to
George

The only problem with that idea is that lightning has never been observed on Mars, depsite the hundreds of thousands of photographs taken of the planet.

Reply to
George

Yes, they would have to be really stupid aliens. Or they have really cheap unleaded. Or their Nintendo is broken.

Cheers!

Chip Shults

Reply to
Sir Charles W. Shults III

If there were a lightning on Mars, we would not see it on a photograph of Mars Global Surveyor or Mars Express, execept maybe one single bright pixel, because these pictures are recorded line by line, and the time a lightning lasts is too short to be seen in more than one line. But lightnings could be easily detected by the radio waves they emit. I have no Idea if such observations have been carried out on Mars.

Reply to
Carla Schneider

They've never been detected.

Reply to
George

How about lots of other men or women, maybe younger, with more energy?

rj

Reply to
randyj

Now, you see? What we need is some lateral thinking here! Everyone wants to talk about the controversy but every is also missing the big chance to do something really cool! I'm talking about automated crop circle producing robots! And if we do a really great job on them, then we can take up a collection and send a few of them to Mars and really give them something to look at! Big geometric patterns dragged into the Martian dirt, complete with the imprinted plywood patterns. Or we could draw a whole body (a la Nazca lines) under the "face on Mars".

Cheers!

Chip Shults

Reply to
Sir Charles W. Shults III

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