On March 11, while exploring near the Jezero Crater's edge, NASA's Perseverance rover encountered a peculiar rock located at Broom Point. The oddly textured rock is covered with hundreds of millimeter-sized dark gray spheres, some featuring tiny pinholes.
The Jezero Crater has been a central focus of NASA's exploration efforts ever since Perseverance landed there in 2021. The ancient lakebed is considered a promising site for the search for signs of past life on Mars due to its rich geological layers.
The formations have drawn comparisons to Martian blueberries, a type of small, spherical rock formation first discovered by the Opportunity rover in 2004 in the Meridiani Planum region. The structures were associated with the prolonged action of water on sedimentary rocks. Some scientists propose that the spheres in St. Pauls Bay might have formed through a similar process, possibly hinting at past water activity on Mars.
The find at Broom Point led NASA to explore several hypotheses regarding the origins of these mysterious spheres. One possibility is that they could be concretions formed by the precipitation of minerals in the presence of water, where groundwater circulates through the pores of the rock over time. Other theories suggest that the spheres might have a volcanic origin, forming through rapid cooling of molten rock or lava during volcanic eruptions.
The classification of the finding as a float rock—indicating it is not in its original location and may have been transported by geological processes—complicates its study.
"What quirk of geology could produce these strange shapes?" wrote Alex Jones, a PhD candidate at Imperial College London, in a blog post for NASA Science.
The Perseverance Science Team is employing instruments such as the SuperCam spectrometer and the Raman laser to identify the chemical composition of these formations. The analysis aims to determine whether these spheres might connect to specific geological layers within the Jezero Crater.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.