Curiosity Rover Photographs a Flower on Mars

To be precise it's a Mineral 'Flower' smaller than an American penny but a cool thing nonetheless.

The Curiosity rover took a picture of something pretty enticing this week on the surface of Mars. While the object in question looks like a tiny little flower or maybe even some type of organic feature, the rover team confirmed this object is a mineral formation, with delicate structures that formed by minerals precipitating from water.

Curiosity has actually seen these types of features before, which are called diagenetic crystal clusters. Diagenetic means the recombination or rearrangement of minerals, and these features consist of three-dimensional crystal clusters, likely made of a combination of minerals.

Curiosity deputy project scientist Abigail Fraeman said on Twitter that these features that were seen previously were made of salts called sulfates.
www.sciencealert.com...

About half way down the page on the link above is a 3-D model of the object that can be rotated and zoomed in on for the cutious.

Would that be like coral? or could it? that's awesome and fun to see.

originally posted by: MarlbBlack
Would that be like coral? or could it? that's awesome and fun to see.

It does look like some coral.

a reply to: MarlbBlack

It looks a lot like coral. Corals are build up by thousands of tiny animals i wonder if we could find life from this one-

a reply to: gortex

The minerals precipitated from water. I wonder how long ago there was liquid water there in amounts to allow this to form?

I guess in a way it is like coral except instead of being built up by tiny creatures it's built up by salts , tiny crystals.

originally posted by: gortex
I guess in a way it is like coral except instead of being built up by tiny creatures it's built up by salts , tiny crystals.

i suppose the 'salts' built up, layer by layer, because of the daily morning fog which carried the dissolved 'salts' was whisked away by either gentle winds/or dust-devils which accompanied the sun-rise

Mars past sounds vacation-ish

Only dove once in my life, was amazing.. Amount of life there was astronomical. Hard to believe it's just on earth..

It does look like a deep-sea coral or a sponge.

deep-sea sponge.

a reply to: gortex

Bait Click and waste of time.

a reply to: gortex

That is splendid! You find the coolest stuff

On Earth, this sort of formation might form in a cavern underground, or geothermal vent at the surface.

It is very interesting to see one on Mars, and to me, infers there may be an active hydrologic cycle going somewhere there.

a reply to: butcherguy

The idea of an ancient, warm and watery Mars is being replaced by the opposite idea: that Mars was even colder than it is now, and covered by glaciers, so that it looked more like Snowball Earth.

This is a conclusion of a new research paper titled "Valley formation on early Mars by subglacial and fluvial erosion" published in "Nature Geoscience". They found out that features that looked like they had been carved by surface runoff water had been made by water that runs under glaciers, as can happen on Earth.

"The warm, wet ancient Mars scenario has a few problems. The main one concerns the Sun. Billions of yrs. ago, early in the Solar System's history, the Sun was cooler than it is now, and Mars is further away than Earth. How could it have been warm and wet?"

originally posted by: MarlbBlack
Would that be like coral? or could it? that's awesome and fun to see.

I agree, it does look like a coral.

originally posted by: MarlbBlack
Would that be like coral? or could it? that's awesome and fun to see.

I agree, it does look like a coral.