| Spirit has many more findings now that show
Gusev's lower layers to be identical to Meridiani in many
ways- including geyser vents and what appear to be aquatic
fossils.
Circled in red in the upper right section of the image you
can see a strange convex curved object with a perfect lip
around the lower edge. This is identical to many sea
shells found here on Earth.
The circular feature at lower left of center is where the
instrument head was pressed against the soil
This is from Sol 843, panoramic imager. Some images
are not yet posted on the NASA/JPL site. The
original image is here at their site. |
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| This is a false color magnification of the image
using L2 and L7 data (not all images are on the NASA site
yet).
I have cropped this image and you can see the shell-like
object in the center. It stands out against the others
due to the curved lip. |
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| This object is not a rock. It is clearly
of biological origin. The lip is perfectly uniform in
both width and spacing. There are other features in the
images from Sol 843 that also look very suspiciously like
shells or shell fragments but this is the most striking of the
group.
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| From Sol 848 I have constructed this false color
stereo pair of the apparent shell, and it is consistent in all
manners with a fragment of something similar to a helmet or
harp shell.
Note at the bottom left end of the curved lip that it turn
back toward the body of the piece, exactly as the lip of a
helmet shell would. Original image data is here
at the NASA/JPL web site. |
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| Just above this object and in the same image
frame, we find this object which appears to be perhaps another
portion of the same shell. It is available in two views
and I have constructed this stereo image of it as a
consequence. Object is rotated on its side 90 degrees for the stereo
reconstruction.
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| This is a montage of some of the shell-like
objects in these two frames of image data taken by Spirit on
Sol 843. A single instance might be dismissed as
geology, but I have located and presented dozens of similar
objects.
Combined with the fact that Mars was an ocean planet at one
point in its history, we can safely conclude that these
objects could be fossilized sea shells.
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