While scooping its first samples
of Martian soil, NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the image above, [enlarged further below...] which
shows what seems to be a small, seemingly metallic sliver or chip of… something…
resting on the ground. Is it a piece of the rover? Or some other
discarded fleck of the MSL descent mechanisms? Or perhaps an exotic
Martian pebble of some sort? Nobody knows for sure yet, but needless to
say the soil samples have taken a back seat to this new finding for the
time being.
