Let it be said: for a supposedly ‘dead’ planet, Mars keeps throwing out cool anomalies for us. From odd ‘lights’ to a buried robot, there’s hardly a dull day when it comes to looking for the strange. And here’s the Red Planet’s anomaly du jour: a perfect little sphere, quietly sitting atop another, separate, piece of flat rock.
Relax folks, it’s totally explainable:
According to MSL scientists based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., the ball isn’t as big as it looks — it’s approximately one centimeter wide. Their explanation is that it is most likely something known as a “concretion.” Other examples of concretions have been found on the Martian surface before — take, for example, the tiny haematite concretions, or “blueberries”, observed by Mars rover Opportunity in 2004 — and they were created during sedimentary rock formation when Mars was abundant in liquid water many millions of years ago.
Or, maybe it’s just the ripe fruit that seems to have fallen from the Martian ball tree at the left of this image…
(Thanks to Alienated for the heads-up)
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