A Second Shiny Object Found By Mars Rover

**Jackie (Admin)** Fri Oct 19, 2012 9:35 am

From the article by By Elizabeth Landau, CNN:

"...Scientists have been seeing something unexpected in the soil where Curiosity is scooping: Small bright objects. At first, they looked man-made and out of place, Grotzinger said. But upon closer examination, these one-millimeter flecks – about the size of the granules in the soil – were not uniformly bright, and didn't appear to have come from the rover.

"The majority of the science team felt that this might be something that is actually indigenous to Mars," he said.

There are two prevailing theories about what these flecks might be. One is that certain classes of minerals, when broken along a cleavage plane, would have a flat surface that reflects sunlight. Or, perhaps they're part of a soil-forming process.

This is likely not connected to the object that Curiosity found last week, which NASA scientists believe was "a shred of plastic material, likely benign..." "

To read the entire article, please click on the following link:

http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/18/mars-rover-spots-shiny-objects/?hpt=hp_t1