Palermo Project • Mars Exploration Rover
Rock Anomalies. Page 4.
The microimager on the Rovers are bringing back astounding close-up images of the martian surface. At the Opportunity site it is finding mysterious spheres in the martian soil. My first impression was that the round objects with a hole on one end reminded me of either diatoms or spores or pollen. I contacted a palynologist and she thought it was unlikely that the bigger spheres were pollen related because of their size, on earth they are much smaller. Unfortunately the microimager is not a microscope so we cannot get higher magnified samples. There is a planned Mars Sample return mission, maybe then the question of martian pollen can be investigated.
This leaves the other possibility..fossils of small sea life forms.
Mr. Brian Mason, a high school biology teacher emailed me the above example of a foraminifera and wrote..".. as a biology teacher, I notice particles which look incredibly similar to weathered coral or bryozoan skeletons on Earth (circled in yellow). Furthermore, the spheres resemble the skeletons of one-celled marine organisms called Foraminifera.."
While NASA/JPL are busy trying to find a geologic explantion for these microscopic features, maybe they should consider martian marine fossils.
An example of Planktonic foraminifera.
