Latest Martian spherules Stories

PASADENA, Calif., Sept. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's long-lived rover Opportunity has returned an image of the Martian surface that is puzzling researchers. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) Spherical objects concentrated at an outcrop Opportunity reached last week differ in several ways from iron-rich spherules nicknamed "blueberries" the rover found at its landing site in early 2004 and at many other locations to date. Opportunity is...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA's veteran rover Opportunity has sent back an image of the Martian surface that is pretty alien compared to what researchers are used to seeing. The image taken by Opportunity's Microscopic Imager contains these spherical objects that measure as much as one-eighth of an inch in diameter. The objects are different from iron-rich spherules nicknamed "blueberries" that Opportunity has run across before. Preliminary analysis shows...

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com Researchers are reporting in the journal Nature that tiny "spherules" embedded in layers of rock have given them details about Earth's asteroid impacts. According to the team, the spherules were created when asteroids crashed into the Earth, vaporizing rock that expanded into space as a giant vapor plume. Small droplets of molten and vaporized rock in the plume then condensed and solidified, falling back to Earth as a thin layer.  These particles were...

One of NASA's two Mars rovers has recorded a compelling saga of environmental changes that occurred over billions of years at a Martian crater.The Mars rover, Opportunity, surveyed the rim and interior of Victoria Crater on the Red Planet from September 2006 through August 2008. Key findings from that work, reported in the May 22 edition of the journal Science, reinforce and expand what researchers learned from Opportunity's exploration of two smaller craters after landing on Mars in 2004.The...