U.S. Water News Online
PASADENA, Calif. -- The tiny, round ``blueberries'' found on Mars by NASA's Opportunity rover strongly support the theory that water once drenched the vast Meridiani Planum region the six-wheeled robot has been exploring, scientists said.
Analysis showed that the spheres are mostly hematite, which is typically formed in water and which a satellite in orbit around Mars has detected widely in the Oklahoma-sized area, science team members Andrew Knoll and Daniel Rodionov told a Jet Propulsion Laboratory news conference.
The ``blueberries'' studied so far were found at an outcropping of rock in the tiny crater in which Opportunity landed in January. The recent discovery about their composition has made scientists eager to send the rover out of the crater to see what lies beyond on the Meridiani plains.
``The hypothesis at this point is that we're going to find that those plains are just littered with blueberries,'' said Knoll, of Harvard University.
The finding was made at ``Berry Bowl,'' a depression where enough of the tiny spheres collected to allow the rover's Mossbauer spectrometer to distinguish the composition of the so-called berries from the background rock.
``This is the fingerprint of a hematite,'' said Rodionov, a graduate student from the University of Mainz in Germany and a member of the team running the Mossbauer, a device that identifies iron-bearing minerals such as hematite.
NASA announced earlier this month that geologic data from the Opportunity site indicated that water once percolated through the ground there and that those conditions would have been hospitable to life, although it remains unknown whether life ever did develop there.
The ``blueberries'' -- which are actually gray -- are believed to be mineral ``concretions'' that form within rocks due to water action and then fall out onto the Martian surface as rock weathers away.
Opportunity also found ``blueberries'' when it bored into rocks in the outcropping that have occupied its time since landing there in late January.
If the plains are covered with ``blueberries'' it would indicate that the rocks in which they formed had also weathered away on a vast scale, Knoll said.
Scientists have not been able to say if there was a body of surface water such as a lake or ocean.
Knoll noted it was possible that the sedimentary rock was not laid down in water, and that the minerals were put in place by water that later flowed through the ground over a long period of time rather than by ``a big thickness of liquid water on top of it.''
NASA sent Opportunity and the twin rover Spirit on their $820 million mission to explore the water history of the Red Planet.
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