With all due respect. Grey hematite is simply a form of iron oxide
Fe2O3 . It can form from water but it also can occur in volcanic rocks,
metamorphic rocks. It is not "mostly" formed in the presence of water.
Does anyone have a lit. reference of the geochemistry and kinetics for
the formation of hematite as masses of large crystals? Maybe the USGS
would be kind enough to provide one.

Now that one lander has identified one rock ("Adirondak") as an
olivine basalt, olivine has been detected locally in the soil and also
from orbiter. That rock is very anguylar and doesn't appear to polished
to a high luster by wind driven material.

With the presence of ubiquitous olivine and unweathered basalt, it is
unlikely that liquid water (as opposed to ice and vapor) has occurred on
the surface of mars for a long long time. Absent water, absent water
based life, and so no coal. The geomorphology of mars need not be
sculpted by water. Dry debris flows and avalanches can be just as
effective given time.

Before the Apollo program, NASA went through intricate gyrations to
"prove" (aided and abetted by the USGS) that most of the lunar craters
were of volcanic origin--a concept not seriously entertained since the
time of Barrelle. And NASA now still has an low level of imagination
being guided by the Geological Survey.


The mossbauer spec and other instruments shoud be able to detect
carbon. If coal dust covered the surface it should have been
detected. I know of no reason to suspect coal on mars. If it did, we
should have to radically revise our theories of the formation of the
planets. IMHO it would be more likely to find carbon dust on the
surface in the form of micro-diamonds.

Archimedes Plutonium wrote:

Gray hematite which is mostly a water sediment deposit is found on
much of Mars (funny how Mars could not be Mar but has to have an "s"
at the end of it-- I suppose like Paris)

Anyway, I wonder if this robot on Mars can detect tiny amounts of coal
dust that was scattered by a bolide impact over much of Mars?

I wonder if the Gray Hematite is a nice outline of where the Mars
Oceans used to exist when Mars was in a Earth orbit around the Sun and
when Earth was in Venus's place which lasted for about 2 billion
years.

I do not know how capable is this robot in detection of coal powder or
coal specks or coal signatures. Perhaps if these robots are so capable
of detection of gray-hematite then they are capable of detecting coal
dust.

Now, is there a hematite mineral that has coal impurities? Is there a
sedimentary rock that can have coal dust impurities?

Other than the robots luckily visiting a site where a lump of coal or
a coal seam is exposed, the best chance of running into coal is from
the meteor bolide impacts of coal seams that thrust the fine powder
over much of the surface.

Archimedes Plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies