Mars rover Spirit finds Pot of Gold

Mars rover Spirit, poking among the rocks at the foot of the Columbia Hills, has found an intriguing-looking rock that scientists dubbed Pot of Gold. This peculiar prize at the end of our rainbow is astonishing mision scientists.

It has nodules a few millimeters across attached to the ends of stalks of rock perhaps an inch long. Seen close-up by the rover's microscopic imager, the nodules are not round like the famed "blueberries" discovered by the other rover in Meridiani Planum. In fact, scientists are at a loss to explain Pot of Gold's nodules at all.

Pot of Gold appears heavily weathered and, as determined by the rover's Moessbauer spectrometer, it contains hematite. This is the iron mineral abundant in Mars' Meridiani Planum, where it was produced by the action of an ocean or lake on evaporite deposits rich in salts and sulfates. Gusev, however, has proven so far to be quite dry, with scientists finding only relatively minor effects of water on some rocks.

Read about the discovery at Astronomy.com:
Astronomy.com | Spirit hits the jackpot