I saw this on Daily Kos. The image is startling.
In the middle of a field of black basalt rocks atop the red Martian sand, there sits an anomalously white boulder. There are no other similar rocks or outcroppings anywhere nearby. It looks as if some spaceship dropped it in the middle of a typical Martian scene, maybe as a prank to puzzle scientists from earth.
There are little chips of white rock elsewhere in the same image. Hard to tell if they’re the same material as the big one.
Oh man, I’ve been looking for that, I thought I lost it.
The colors of the image have apparently been fiddled with, but I doubt if the folks t JPL have falsified anything.
From the JPL site:
I had the same thought. In the absence of extraterrestrial pranksters it seems hard to come up with another way that boulder can be there, isolated from anything of comparable size and color.
Probably put there by the folks behind the mysterious monoliths here on earth.
Promise me, Red. If you ever get out…find that spot. At the base of that hill, you’ll find a rock that has no business in a Martian landscape. Piece of white granodiorite. There’s something buried under it I want you to have.
Stranger
^perfect
My first thought was that it was a glacial erratic, which is totally impossible. Looking at the close up, I see a very rough surface, which make me discount a water bourn deposit.
This is something new and unexpected.
Which rock uses sunscreen?
Meteorites are common on Mars.
https://geology.com/articles/mars-meteorites/
Maybe they’ve found their first lunar.
https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/education/diskdetails.cfm?disk=58&class=Anorthosite
My first thought was that it came from somewhere else on Mars and got there via meteor impact ejecta (of a different rock). Since that impact could be quite a ways off, where the debris landed would be seemingly random.
OTOH, you still have some splainin’ to do as to how this type of rock formed on Mars regardless of where it came from.
It’s also jagged-edged. I’d expect that any process that could transport a rock long distances would also tend to smooth it out some.
Some of those other rocks might not belong with the rest but they’re not white. Gray rocks never get picked first.
There’s nothing out of place about rock on Mars.
Isn’t the real question why a rock that is only 18" x 14" is being called a boulder? New Englanders built thousands of miles of rock walls out of stones that size.
We have some of these anomalies on earth.
It qualifies by definition:
Colloquially it usually does mean something much larger. Typically something a coyote can drop on a roadrunner from a projecting cliff if the cliff doesn’t collapse under the weight of the coyote and the ‘boulder’.
Depends what you mean by similar, and how close you mean by “nearby”. This isn’t the first unusual white rock found in Jezero Crater:
Also, I don’t know what that old geologist means by “simply shouldn’t be there” - granodiorite occurs in layered igneous complexes like the Bushveld on Earth, and Perseverance had already found other characteristic intrusive rocks of that sort of structure (cumulates) in Jezero previously:
Well, remember, Mars is only half the diameter of Earth, so all the boulders have to be scaled down, too.
Somebody forgot to tell that to Olympus Mons.