NASA scientists are arguing about a 'jelly donut' rock they found on Mars

Remember NASA's Opportunity? It was a rover that NASA launched into space more than a decade ago. It's spent the past 10 years on the surface of Mars, taking pictures and sending them back to Earth.

Recently, though, inclement weather has had the rover trapped in the same spot. It's been sending pictures of that spot back to NASA for a while, now. So, it was incredibly surprising to find a new rock in one of those recent photographs.

Astronomers noticed the new rock had "appeared" without any explanation on an outcrop which had been empty just days earlier. The rover has been stuck photographing the same region of Mars for more than a month due to bad weather, with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California monitoring the images it sends.

Nasa issued a Mars status report entitled "encountering a surprise", and lead Mars Exploration rover scientist Steve Squyres told a JPL event it seems the planet literally "keeps throwing new things at us".

Essentially, the rock was either churned up out of Mars' surface by the rover's wheels or it was transplanted by nearby meteor activity. NASA's scientists are baffled and fighting. The rock also has the experts confused because of its composition. It's white around the edges and is sunken-in in its dark-red middle, "like a jelly donut." Also, it's high in sulfur, which is odd.

"It's like nothing we've ever seen before," he said. "It's very high in sulphur, it's very high in magnesium, it's got twice as much manganese as we've ever seen in anything on Mars.

"I don't know what any of this means. We're completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means)."  [Independent]