Mars rover discovers mysterious 'blueberries'

But it's aliens.

fer sure

Good to see you back again.

But I'm still waiting for one of the rovers to dig up Romney's tax returns.

First, he hung them on a laundry line in his backyard and shot them through and through with his high-powered hunting rifle with a cartridge the size of Utah, and with his tax returns shattered into a million bits of paper stuck to a thousand melted, distorted spent bullets, one of his agents stuffed the tax return pellets into Curiosity's rocket (some months ago) and they fell on Mars in random fashion when Curiosity was tethered down to its landing site. You can see them in a NASA photo with a magnifying glass as they fall into upper atmosphere. It was only the damnedst bit of luck yet, in the space program, that they landed near Opportunity's site, half way round Mars, and now look like blueberries. It'll be centuries before they develop the technology to reconstruct them and read them.

I'm sure it represents something new, but it'd REALLY be something if they really had found blueberries.

Go over easy when rolling on by.

dropping their marbles

http://www.universetoday.com/9666/earth-has-blueberries-too/



Image credit: University of Utah
Even before marble-shaped pebbles nicknamed ?blueberries? were discovered on Mars by the Opportunity rover, University of Utah geologists studied similar rocks in Utah?s national parks and predicted such stones would be found on the Red Planet.

In a study published in the June 17 issue of the journal Nature, the Utah researchers suggest both the Martian and Utah rocks ? known as hematite concretions ? formed underground when minerals precipitated from flowing groundwater.

?We came up with the ?recipe? for blueberries,? says Marjorie Chan, chair and professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah. ?Before Opportunity landed, we thought there might be hematite concretions on Mars. That was based on our study of hematite-rich regions of southern Utah, where hematite balls are found in national parks and have long been a geological oddity that shows up in many rock shops.?

The round rocks are found in southern Utah in Zion and Capitol Reef national parks, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Snow Canyon State Park and the Moab area.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/9666/earth-has-blueberries-too/#ixzz26XVL0aFQ

1) They are "iron rain," droplets of molten iron and silicon ejected from an enormous impact by an iron-rich asteroid. The droplets solidified after minutes or hours of falling back to the surface;

2) They are ooids, not quite like the CaCO2 ooids that form around shell fragments in our oceans, but formed in a similar way, which suggests large bodies of open water and regular wave action.

I should add that I have barely any idea what I'm talking about, but I cannot help guessing anyway.

sound like you know exactly what you are talking about. I think you give yourself too little credit on this one.

I'd never even heard of ooids before. Damn, that is one FINE word for a Scrabble player to know!

Remnants of an ancient battle; via the use of phasers?

intelligent life anywhere.
Maybe even intelligent enough to govern by concensus...

man.

thought it was golob, it's kolob? I forgot . So much to remember. Magic underwear, golob/kolob, angel macaroni, how many wives j smith had , why granddad had to go to mexico. soooooo much, my head is going to explode. where are mitt-twits tax returns, why did I think america's racist-fascist-corporatist underbelly was gone. How stupid of me. So much to keep my eye on.

It's Kolob. It's a glob in the sky someplace.

but I do resent them sending their globules here to insult my intelligence.

if the martians had any human traits, those globs are probably spent bullets.

It turned out to be orange glass from a fire fountain billions of years ago.

... and a great tribute to the scientific value of robotic explorers.

hard to believe it has been going for eight years now.

I'm going with spilled "Boo Berry".

What else could they possibly be?