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NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
Scientists say that a "Martian flower," seen here in an image from the Curiosity rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, is a 2-millimeter-wide grain or pebble that's embedded in the surrounding rock. Another, darker-colored mineral grain can be seen above and to the left.
The scientists behind NASA's $2.5 billion Curiosity rover mission on Mars on Tuesday explained the nature of a tiny, gleaming "flower" embedded in Red Planet rock, and revealed where they'll be using the SUV-sized robot's drill for the first time.
Both those developments point to the same happy discovery: The place where the rover is working was almost certainly formed through the action of water — and seems likely to provide new insights into the planet's geological history. "This is something that we've waited patiently for," Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist, told journalists during a NASA teleconference.
The "Martian flower" made a splash on the Internet, in part because it looked so different from the surrounding rock in a microscopic-scale picture from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. Few people thought it was actually a flower, though it looked a bit like one. Was it a piece of plastic from the rover itself? An unusual type of mineral?
The Planetary Science Institute's R. Aileen Yingst, deputy principal investigator for the MAHLI team, delivered the expert verdict. It's a relatively large mineral grain, or "a pebble, if you wish," measuring about a tenth of an inch (2 millimeters) wide. "It could be a lot of things, but without some chemical information to back me up, I'd really hesitate to say what it is," she said.
She pointed out that a couple of similar, darker-colored grains could be seen embedded nearby. The important thing is what such rounded grains have to say about the scene's history. "They've been knocked around, they've been busted up. They've been rounded by some process," she said. That suggests that running water helped form the rock, which has been nicknamed Gillespie Lake.
Drill, rover, drill
Five months after its landing, the six-wheeled Curiosity rover is surrounded by plenty of additional evidence that water had a hand in shaping the landscape billions of years ago. That's why Grotzinger and his colleagues have decided to put the rover's heavy-duty drill to work for the first time on a flat spread of rock called "John Klein." The name pays tribute to John W. Klein, a former deputy project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory mission who died in 2011.
"John's leadership skill played a crucial role in making Curiosity a reality," Richard Cook, the mission's project manager, said in a news release.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
This image of an outcrop at the "Sheepbed" locality, taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover with its right MastCam on Dec. 13, show well-defined veins filled with whitish minerals, interpreted as calcium sulfate. These veins form when water circulates through fractures, depositing minerals along the sides of the fracture, to form a vein. This is Curiosity's first close look at minerals that formed within water that percolated within a subsurface environment.
Cook told reporters that the first drilling operation would probably take place in the next two weeks, after additional rounds of engineering tests and scientific study.
"The scientists have been let into the candy store," he said.
One of the most interesting characteristics of the site is that it's shot through with light-toned veins of calcium-rich material. "On Earth, forming veins like these requires water circulating in fractures," said Nicolas Mangold of the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes in France. Mangold is a member of the team behind Curiosity's laser-equipped Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam.
'A whole different world'
Grotzinger marveled at how different the terrain is from the spot where Curiosity landed, even though both are within Mars' 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) Gale Crater. The rover's current base of operations, nestled in a shallow depression called Yellowknife Bay, has a type of bedrock that cools more slowly each night than the surrounding terrain. "We don't know what's causing the change," Grotzinger said.
"It's like we entered a whole different world," he said.
The drill at the end of Curiosity's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm has not yet been used, but mission managers will command it to drill a series of holes going as deep as 2 inches (5 centimeters) into the rock. The first test holes will serve to clean off any leftover earthly contamination, Cook said. Grotzinger said the drill will eventually produce scientific samples to be fed into the rover's onboard chemical labs, known as CheMin and SAM.
"What we're hoping to do is sample both the vein-filling material as well as what we call the country rock around it," he said.
Before Curiosity's landing, NASA reported that small amounts of Teflon and other material from the drill might contaminate the rock samples. On Tuesday, Cook said the scientists "could work around" the contamination issue by accounting for the unwanted chemicals when they did their analysis.
Curiosity's two-year-long primary mission is aimed at determining whether Mars could have had the chemical building blocks required for life as we know it. Eventually, the 1-ton rover will make its way to a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in Gale Crater, but Grotzinger said scientists wanted to take ample time to investigate the mysteries they're finding along the way.
More about Curiosity's mission:
- Family gets back down to Earth after living on Mars time
- Rover gives Martian rock its first brushoff
- Curiosity studies a 'flower' on Mars
- Cosmic Log archive on Curiosity
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.
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Should have named the area "Flower" Lake. We'd know right where it was.
My first thought when I saw this was that it was some mineral chip embedded in a rock...maybe even from a meteor from somewhere else. But it looks like some kind of silver so of course Capitalistic minds will want to discover, and try to mine or find profit in it somehow. I don't believe the Universe is "ours" to exploit like we have the Earth. I hope its just part of a freak meteor from somewhere else.
calcium sulfate is what it is came from the vain of calcium sulfate
Looks kind of like mother-of-pearl deposit incorporated into an aggregate. I'm sure it is nothing though.
Uh....did anyone notice the footprints next to the rover in that last picture?
Well, the worms had better look out if the rover is going to start drilling. I think the "flower" is just calcified worm poop.
I still say....
There will be worms.
So you're right in front of two unknown Martian minerals in-bedded in a rock and you don't analyze them? Not sure of the logic in that one.
I could see some pretty high demand for something like that in jewlery if it is a mineral unique to Mars. How do I buy mineral rights on Mars?
DingleB,
Build a rocket, launch it, land on Mars, plant your flag, Mineral Rights!
I must have missed the drum beat ... is there a punch line here? or is there a collective brain-freeze at NASA? ... Hey, NASA, taxpayers have given you two and a half billions on a hardware and you do not analyze this?
Right there with you on that Jose. Seems this team of NASA will drag its feet for as long as they can in order to milk out as many paychecks as they possibly can. The American taxpayer deserves better.
Better than NASA? What would you prefer? Pay raises for Congress?
listen to clowns bellyaching that NASA didn't waste resources on a pretty rock
God forbid that 100 PhD's at NASA who have put a scientific instrument on the surface of Mars in one piece.....
Would know better how to utilize the technology than a bunch of losers dissing them on a blog.
It isn't like nasa hasn't placed half a dozen devices on the surface of mars since the 1970's now is it. Of course you want to get all wet in the pants over the excitement generated because they moved the rover 10 feet in a week.
Not to mention that with all the other equipment of equal or greater importance that they shoehorned into that rover, a mass spectrometer probably wouldn't have fit.
Gee … guess we hit a nerve here in pointing out the sloth-like pace NASA is carrying out this mission. The fact that we are facing dramatic lean years of fiscal cut-backs at proportional depths never seen before in our nation’s history surely has NOOO bearing whatsoever in the notable deliberately slow pace of this mission! … Some of us ARE researchers (and also work in industry) and we are keenly involved with the ever deicer Byzantine World of procurement of scarcer government and private funding. So please don’t assume we were born yesterday!
It's so tiny - I didn't realize that.
That's what my wife said to me on our honeymoon. :(
I'm pretty sure that "flower" is really a fragment from a sandworm egg... That's just my opinion, but I'm thinking that NASA knows more than what they are telling. :P
Muad'dib! Muad'dib!
Wait, sandworms don't come from eggs. They go directly to larval stage from the skin of the adult worm when it's exposed to a large pocket of water.
You, sir, are no true Fremen.
Ummm, well these are a more primitive species. Not as highly developed as the ones on Dune. (That's my story, and I'm stickin to it!)
I'm with you, Brisaber! Very quick to dismiss something like this, even though it takes weeks to move the rover 10 feet...
And how would a mineral be embedded in a sedimentary rock like this? Are they implying it isn't soluble?
As one example, volcanic glass wouldn't be soluble.
Well, if they do have sandworms on Mars, maybe we could get in on that lucrative Spice trade. That would be a pick-me-up for our economy, and no matter the cost, it would bring in at least 10x that in profit.
No comment on the verdict; I'm not qualified. (Though I've been an amateur geologist {rock hound} for over fifty years.)
My comment is on the use of "busted" in place of "broken" by a supposedly educated person. Busted is what a nicely shaped woman is.
Ummm, hey, all of you posting about this.... this 'flower' is the same picture NASA put out a few months ago of that they called a piece a shiedling of some type that fell of Curiosity when it landed.
I don't see any 'flower' here. I see the same plastic looking thing from the previous picture.
Can you post a link to the old picture if you have it? I remember the picture of the plastic that you are talking about, and while it looked similar, I don't believe it was the same picture.
Right, it wasn't the same object (or picture). When I first wrote about the "Martian flower," I was virtually certain it was another scrap of plastic, but NASA set me straight earlier in the day. Here are links to the two stories:
Piece of plastic:
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/09/14323399-weird-martian-object-traced-to-rover?lite
Martian "Flower":
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/03/16329185-curiosity-rover-studies-rocks-and-a-flower-on-mars?lite
Right Alan, the first one is probably a piece of kapton tape.
It's unobtainium.
It could also be a Tiberium crystal, which makes me wonder who will start fighting for being the first to mine for it, Global Defense Initiative (GDI) or the Brotherhood of NOD?
white tiberium?
Clearly it's dilithium. Once they figure that out, warp drive is just a bit further down the road...
Yeah right? Like turn the rover around so we can see what it's REALLY up there for... Give us nice view of a Martian settlement.
I know you're joking but the cameras turn to take pictures in all directions.
There is little doubt, unless we blow ourselves up, that one day we will make Mars a planet like earth. Supporting life and all that goes with it. So then will the God freaks see the light? A red hot rock like earth was, doesn't just all the sudden have order and life. Somebody is responsible. Who is the question? Maybe a race long dead, but their legacy lives on.
You and I seem to mean different things when we say "all of a sudden."
Why does "somebody" have to be responsible? Just because you cannot conceive of a thing just being doesn't mean that it has to be done by "God". Maybe it just is!
Really exciting stuff, too bad its all filtered thru NASA.
They are the agency that deals with space exploration. Why is this a problem?
Oh, I see. Are you a 'truther'?
This is actually Caltech's JPL mission, of course, not Nasa..
Nasa owns useless, dead-end boondogges like STS, ISS, Constellation, and the shameless unneeded earmarked pork SLS/Orion.
Drill baby , drill .
how long till they set casing & can start fracking? :P
Well, Mars lacks a moon which helps provide a tide, enabling currents, and the stability of life as we know it. While it lacks a center core mass heavy enough to maintain the proper warmth for atmosphere and circulation of the surface crust to renew essential materials, which is why that and water are gone now.
So getting Mars to maintain a new one and water will be tricky. Unless one invents energy sources to provide such things which don't require constant enormous artificial renewal.
Then again if we have progressed to the point we can terraform a planet, figure out how to introduce all the complex life forms down to microbes needed to become a self sustaining and enclosed ecosystem, that would be quite the miracle. It might make more sense, though, just to take care of the planet we happen to be on in the first place.
The idea of us surviving untold years down the road to create a new living planet on Mars is a lovely dream. If we ever discover how to live with each other in peace, then moving further out into space by creating new livable worlds just may be possible.Imagine all the resources devoted in the past two hundred years of wars, and then turning all that towards positive progress for mankind!
What about Phobos and Deimos?
Read your Asimov (The Martian Way) and just tow a few chunks of ice from Saturn's rings to drop onto Mars.
Phobos and Deimos are tiny compared to our moon.
For instance: Phobos has a mass of 1.072 X 10^16 Kg
Our moon has a mass of 7.3477 X 10^22 Kg
Our moon is nearly 7 million times the mass of Phobos and Phobos is almost 10 times the size of Deimos
Asimov's theory for bringing water to Mars may not work out. It's a long journey from Mars to Saturn's rings and equally far a return trip. Ice may be difficult to transport. The frozen material in Saturn's rings may not be H2O. The rings could be made up of everything but ice.
Here's hoping Isaac was right.
Mars' dynamo seized up long ago and it no longer has a protective magnetosphere. Without it, any thicker atmosphere developed by terraforming would slowly be stripped away by the solar 'wind'. As it is currently, surface radiation is pretty harsh. While I do believe Mars is our eventual 2nd home, it will require major work before it can become a sustainable 'living' planet--taking centuries.
Looking even farther down the road, the Earth and possibly Mars as well will be inside the surface of the sun a few billion years from now when our friendly little yellow star goes through its red giant phase.
Granted that humanity has quite a bit of lead time to prepare for it, but we don't just need a new planet, folks.
We need a new solar system.
Wow. Another rock.
We should just send a manned mission there already. Make it a world effort to cut costs.
The International Space Station is working toward that goal. Are you familiar with space events? It takes 3 months to get to Mars and three months to return. Once a manned mission arrives, we must be certain they're able to survive and return.
We have to make certain they could survive the trip. Deep space is pretty harsh, radiation wise.
Although, I do have some hope that meta-materials (like the "invisibility cloak" that's always in the news) can provide some protection from radiation in the future. Gotta get the lithography tech up to snuff first though.
They have an accurate laser, they could zap it and read its spectral signature. There many more questions to ask from past missions that are also unexplained like are the Martian Spherules, "blueberries" petrified fungus, see here Here is some movement of microbial-like life forms in the Phoenix Lander that is even more controversial than the "flower."
The Phoenix Lander Science team said that all the necessary nutrients to sustain life was found at the phoenix Landers site. In may 2012 an international team of scientist has claimed that the Viking Lander may have found "extent life," life still in existence, on Mars.
There are almost certainly vast amounts of water underground on Mars, given the evidence of surface water in the past. When Mars went geologically inactive this water ceased to be pushed to the surface. We need to try and find underground caverns on Mars which we can exploit for human occupation one day, and then we can eventually drill for this underground water on Mars. But first we need to develop these technologies right here on our own Earth's Moon, by creating a permanent (self supporting) lunar colony there. The next step would thebe to establish a permanent manned colony on one of the Martian moons, before eventually creating a permanent manned colony on Mars. - RC
Looks like a dilithium crystal to me.
Quick!! Somebody notify Commander Scott!
Why doesn't this rover on wheels move about a mile from the landing site, so it doesn't have to worry whether anything found could be from the lander itself? And stop calling objects by earthly sounding nomenclature, like flower, so people don't get excited about some fantastic discovery? Unless they actually found a flower on Mars, stop saying they found one.
Terran language is always used in the exploration of other planets, BP. Otherwise saying 'the rover found a foon' would be incomprehensible here on the planet of the rover's origin.
it is quite obvious that mars is dead. but for humans it is a boom because if we can get people up there its is a geologists dream with all kinds of minerals that are being depleted on earth and yes gold and diamonds and platinum silver tatanium the list is endless all virgin to. just got to get people up there and a way to haul it back. great movie about this called outland but they supposedly were on ios which we all know to be impossible now. lol
It's not a boom, but a boon and only if there is sufficient water there.
They can explore Mars further just send like 10 shipments like they did the rover's size, they can have a dome the size of a 1200 square foot house send scientists "astronauts", make their own oxygen there is ice so then there is water, filter it and other things IDK of but what ever they need to survive send a return ship (comon SpaceX whats taking you) technology is here use it. Mars is no dead it's just rejuvenating it.
"It was like we entered a whole different world," he said. HUH?
It's quartz crystal.
If I said I found an odd looking corn kettle in someone else's poo would it make the news? Come on people we don't even know shiht about shiht!
I'm pretty sure it's a dilithium crystal. Looks just like the one I found when I beamed down with Mr. Spock.
I hope I live long enough to see the first Martian fossil. I think it's only a matter of time before fossilized organic remains are found. If there was water, there was life.
Amen to Ironmule!! Earth to Earth... we have a problem. Flip it 90 degrees clockwise and zoom in. It's a pretty rough looking clear plastic frog bait like the ones my kids use for bass fishing. Not to mention the Martian rock looks very similar to the hunk of concrete aggregate I yanked out of my yard a few weeks back. Only much cleaner and does show some evidence of erosion - human garden hose type erosion. They gotta give us something better than this! The NatGeo BS on Mermaids was better than this stuff. Wait! What was that? Did you hear it? That was a Squatch!
Thanks for the entertainment and creative stimulation... books almost done, and it's all about you!
Dr. Mathew Johnson: "DAISY IS IN THE BOX" UPDATE!!!
http:// www mid-americabigfoot.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8038
"Posted by Rob Gaudet on December 28, 2012 at 2:30pmView Blog
As everyone is well aware, there is lots of recent buzz about the potential capture of a Sasquatch. ..."