ROCKS FROM MARS

for my masters project i'm playing with a bunch of martian meteorites. took shiny pictures of some thin sections today, thought they were pretty, so i decided to show you guys innit.

DIS SHITS FROM MUTHAFUKIN MARS NIGGА!

did you steal any?

Holy mother of all things IDM!

How big are these details?

do you have any idea what spring is like on jupiter and mars?

  On 10/14/2009 at 8:18 PM, gaarg said:

How big are these details?

ive got 3 thin section samples, theyre about 1cm across each. most of the groundmass crystals are 1/10mm across probably

  On 10/14/2009 at 7:38 PM, xxx said:

Wow. Are those color swaths from transition metals or something else? Martian blood? Maybe you're studying a murder weapon.

nah, the colouring is to do with how polarised light interferes with the structure of the crystal, and depends on the way the plane of the section cuts through the mineral structure too. boring crap like that. most of the minerals in those pictures have pretty much the same composition, colourful and non-colourful. mineralogy is fun.

this is fucking bullshit. Misleading thread title deluxe. Thought this was going to be about space crack but nooooo.....

lol i have to grind some mars rock samples up for x-ray flourescence analysis soon. you could probably snort that shit

yea, and then probably die

Yeah, well I've been there, beat that.

i live there

didn't you ever see The Andromeda Strain? now we're all dead! way to go Einstein.

i am confident that the rest of the course is more boring than this

Backscattered electron montage of whole Los Angeles sample. Pyroxenes are zoned, Mg>Ca>Fe centre to edge. Maskelynite has almost pure anorthite composition confirming it at shock-melted plagioclase. Pure end-member composition implies that plagioclase was not zoned prior to impact shock. Tonnes of apatite which i didn't pick up on before. FeTiO and FeS minerals indistinguishable in this view, but FeTiO is more common. Unsure as to actual mineralogy of either yet. Bunch of little fayalite, silica and K-spar glass inclusions in fractures, especially within FeTiO.

i got to use a Scanning Electron Microscope on my motherfucking mars rocks. was genuinely quite fun. zoom in to 17000x magnification, see all the fucked up tiny-scale structures, click on some point in a crystal, and it will tell you the elemental composition of that point in parts per million

minerals come out lighter with increasing heavy element composition. hence the white stuff is the iron- and titanium-rich shit

SCIENCE

17000x magnification on a rock from mars sounds loads more science fiction, exciting and loaded with amazing special effects than James Cameron's Avatar.

  On 10/14/2009 at 8:15 PM, Deepex said:

Holy mother of all things IDM!

^that fits with your avatar

  On 10/30/2009 at 11:11 AM, gaarg said:

17000x magnification on a rock from mars sounds loads more science fiction, exciting and loaded with amazing special effects than James Cameron's Avatar.

lol nice avatar

At least you can make faces out of the rock.

  On 10/14/2009 at 7:05 PM, ezkerraldean said:

DIS SHITS FROM MUTHAFUKIN MARS NIGGА!

that's like the most ballinest shit ever.

  On 10/30/2009 at 11:02 AM, ezkerraldean said:

 

 

Backscattered electron montage of whole Los Angeles sample. Pyroxenes are zoned, Mg>Ca>Fe centre to edge. Maskelynite has almost pure anorthite composition confirming it at shock-melted plagioclase. Pure end-member composition implies that plagioclase was not zoned prior to impact shock. Tonnes of apatite which i didn't pick up on before. FeTiO and FeS minerals indistinguishable in this view, but FeTiO is more common. Unsure as to actual mineralogy of either yet. Bunch of little fayalite, silica and K-spar glass inclusions in fractures, especially within FeTiO.

 

i got to use a Scanning Electron Microscope on my motherfucking mars rocks. was genuinely quite fun. zoom in to 17000x magnification, see all the fucked up tiny-scale structures, click on some point in a crystal, and it will tell you the elemental composition of that point in parts per million

 

minerals come out lighter with increasing heavy element composition. hence the white stuff is the iron- and titanium-rich shit

 

 

SCIENCE

Some interesting stuff man! Are you a graduate student or is this what you do? mineralogy is interesting, but tedious...

  ezkerraldean said:

i got to use a Scanning Electron Microscope on my motherfucking mars rocks.

  ezkerraldean said:

 

see all the fucked up tiny-scale structures

  ezkerraldean said:

the white stuff is the iron- and titanium-rich shit

  ezkerraldean said:

SCIENCE

  On 11/1/2009 at 3:38 AM, Hautlle said:

Some interesting stuff man! Are you a graduate student or is this what you do? mineralogy is interesting, but tedious...

4th year undergrad, actually. my course somehow involves me doing a masters without actually graduating with a batchelors. i'm playing with these martian fuckers for my masters project.

mineralogy tends to suck, but i'm enjoying it at the moment. especially since i've been independently discovering stuff myself, like how the glassy stuff in this sample (maskelynite) has an identical compisition to anorthite, and is therefore an impact-shocked polymorph of anorthite plagioclase. i guessed at that before reading it anywhere in published literature. go me!

That's awesome. As part of my program I have to do a semester of research, but I haven't decided what to do yet. I am considering trying to do something with my Oceanography professor to see if I can get an awesome trip out of it. He does a lot of work with coastal processes, he's been studying ooids because they require a very specific environment to form. They're only found in places like the Bahamas and some other regions (he last went to Aitutaki to study the ones there). The rest of my college career consists of geology and education courses.

It would be sick to go somewhere like this and study ocean precipitates

awesome shit. did a whole module on carbonate sedimentation last year. geologist are we?