Showing posts with label perfectly round object on mars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perfectly round object on mars. Show all posts

Friday, September 26, 2014

Rover photographs perfectly round ball on Mars surface

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sent back a photo from Mars of a perfectly round object that looks like a ball.

But sad news for conspiracy theorists: No one has been playing golf on the Red Planet.

Instead, experts told Discovery.com they believe the ball is an example of a geological process called concretion — when a mass of minerals embeds in a "host" sedimentary rock.

NASA said the sphere, which was photographed Sept. 11, is likely one centimetre wide.

It's not the first time a rover has photographed a similar phenomenon on Mars. In 2004, the rover Opportunity relayed images of a small grouping of concretions that looked similar to blueberries. The existence of the spheres suggests that area of Mars had groundwater at one point, the scientists said in a paper in Nature in June 2004.