Summary A strange rock that looks like a jelly doughnut has appeared on Mars.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A strange rock that looks like a jelly doughnut has appeared on Mars, and scientists are closer to figuring out how it got there, a top NASA expert said Thursday.
The small, round object suddenly popped up in pictures taken 12 days apart by the US space agency's decade-old Opportunity rover.
On December 26, 2013, it was not there. On January 8, it was. But what is it?
"It looks like a jelly doughnut, white around the outside, red in the middle," said Steve Squyres, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rovers.
He described the tint as a "weird deep red color, not a Martian kind of red," which is more of a rusty hue.
One thing is for sure. This is not a fried, sugary pastry.
"We have looked at it with our microscope. It is clearly a rock," he told reporters in a briefing to mark 10 years since NASA's solar-powered Opportunity landed on the Red Planet.
But it is a kind of rock no Earthling has seen before.
Squyres said scientists believe the rock, named "Pinnacle Island," got there when the aging rover did a pirouette turn in the dusty Martian soil and knocked loose a chunk of bedrock that rolled a short distance downhill.
"We think that in the process of that wheel moving across the ground, we kind of flicked it, kind of tiddly winked it out of the ground and it moved to the location where we see it," Squyres said.
Still, scientists have not found the divet the rock would have left behind. They think it is hidden beneath one of the rover's solar arrays.
The Opportunity team plans to manuever the robotic vehicle around a bit more to see if they can find the spot from which the rock emerged.
