New Mars Forums

With thanks to Wikipedia (or maybe I shouldn't say that and let everyone here think I can rattle this stuff off the top of my head!), with an approximate resolution of 29-30um we might actually be able to detect some types of microfossils, presuming there are some...

Bacteria, at around 0.5-5.0um, are beyond this tool's detection, as are the simplest prokaryotic cells, which are in the range of 1-10um. However, >eukaryotic< cells (fungi, for example, and more complex animals) could be well within this size range, between 10-100um.

So, there you go.  A definitive... maybe.   

This is a good point. Does anyone know whether the tools on board are powerful enough to detect microfossils? I know we've seen some very fine-grained soil particles, but could we detect unicellular fossils, if they're there? I can certainly imagine that, before the mission was launched, it would have seemed wildly optimistic to create a camera with the microscopic capabilities for this sort of work... but now...

Can't you just picture NASA exobiologists hopping up and down in agonising curiosity?

--Bev

Thanks for posting the pic (and the link to it!), Stu.  Does anyone else see those "layers" looking very much eroded in the style of sedimentary rock?

I live in an area perched on an enormous outcrop of what's called "Sydney sandstone" that was deposited on the ocean bed over aeons and is only lightly compressed. Whenever it's exposed at the surface some strata begin to crumble fairly easily, disappearing faster than other layers, in just the way Stu's "gateau" looks to be doing.  If this Martian stone is what is looks like to me: sedimentary, rather than volcanic... it's a pretty strong argument for water.

Any geologists/areologists on the board with professional opinions?

We HAVE to get over there and check out the composition of that bedrock!