Joe Bauman wrote:
Very cool, Patrick. I was out on a story -- what did the say about the tiny spheres? Thanks, Joe
Their current guess is that they are much harder than the rock they are falling out of. That's to say, as the rock is eroded away by sand blasting, the "sphereals" (spherical granules) fall out. As an analogy, they compared them to "blueberries in a muffin." As for how the "blueberries" were formed, they don't know but the three current theories are: Lapilly: Put a lot of suspended volcanic ash in the air and individual grains will agglomerate into balls and fall to the ground. Second idea has molten rock thrown in the air and spherical droplets form, cool, harden and fall to the ground. Third is concretions which has each sphereal forming when a fluid (water?) carrying dissolved stuff diffuses through a rock and precipitates around a nucleus (kind of like how rain drops form around condensation nuclei). But regardless of how they form, they are later mixed up in the matrix (the "muffin") and still later are eroded out. One false color image showed the ground littered with the things. Alas, I don't think that image has been posted yet. On another matter I just noticed that ISS is scheduled to transit the Sun on Thursday, 19 Feb at 14:09:39 MST as seen from the Great Salt Lake marina. At that time the Sun will be about 34 degrees above the horizon and ISS will be a bit over 600 km away. Of course that's based on today's ISS orbit. I'd be willing to bet the ground track will change several kilometers, probably to the south, over the next week. More on this later. Oh, and then to Chuck's comment: LOL! That's rich! Chuck Hards wrote:
So essentially, NASA is losing it's marbles?
You said it, I didn't!
--- Patrick Wiggins <paw@trilobyte.net> wrote:
"B. Bettilyon" wrote:
Please explain.
Kind of like when playing marbles. The more marbles you loose the more protective you are of the ones you still have.