Hematite comes in several forms in fact. You saw from a lot of the ratted pictures a red dust everywhere. In a dust form hematite looks red. There's also what we call granular gray hematite. You see that in a lot of jewelry. In fact I'm wearing some in my necklace. So it does come in several forms and what we found are the concretions. We think they are. Those are the little spheres they're pretty small. Smaller than these beads in my necklace. We think that's where most of the hematite is that we were reading from orbit. It's an iron mineral and we think that it precipitated out.
Zoe Learner
Rover Science Team
Cornell University