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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has found a patch of bright-toned soil so rich in silica [Click to Zoom] that scientists propose water must have been involved in concentrating it.
The silica-rich patch, informally named "Gertrude Weise" after a player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, was exposed when Spirit drove over it during the 1,150th Martian day, or sol, of Spirit's Mars surface mission (March 29, 2007). One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. Most patches of disturbed, bright soil that Spirit had investigated previously are rich in sulfur, but this one has very little sulfur and is about 90 percent silica.
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