Giant 'spiderwebs' on Mars contain tiny egg-like structures that scientists 'can't quite explain,' new photos reveal
NASA's Curiosity rover has snapped stunning new photos of giant "spiderwebs" zig-zagging across the surface of Mars. One of these images has revealed never-before-seen, egg-like spheroids covering the sprawling structures — and scientists are struggling to explain them.
Over the last 8 months, Curiosity has been closely examining a series of interconnected rocky ridges, dubbed "boxwork," on the slopes of Mount Sharp, in the Gale Crater. These ridges, which cover an area up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, were created billions of yars ago as ancient Martian groundwater seeped beneath the planet's surface. They were first spotted by orbital spacecraft in 2006, but they have remained largely unexplored until now.
The web-like structures should not be confused with the infamous "spiders on Mars" — a series of geological features that are created when carbon dioxide ice sublimates beneath the Red Planet's surface and look like swarming arachnids when viewed from above. (These faux spiders were also recently recreated on Earth, while a similar "wall demon" was also spotted on Jupiter's moon Europa.)
NASA released Curiosity's first boxwork photos in June 2025, shortly after reaching the rocky ridges. But on Monday (Feb. 23), the agency released two more snaps, which showed the structures in much greater detail.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/giant-spiderwebs-mars-contain-tiny-160535292.html
Didn't David Bowie sing about the "Spiders from Mars"?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Are they little things or are they large enough that human sized creatures could inhabit them?
Take it from us Monster Spiders, we'll gladly change from what we have now... 
Similar nodules are formed on Earth from metallic salts. Here's a manganese nodule, for instance:
(Its resemblance to a truffle is mere coincidence.)
Another non-organic possibility is a concretion effect, and either possibility might be more evidence of plentiful water on Mars in the past.
This is where a sense of scale would come in handy.
Concretions in Torysh, Western Kazakhstan
On the other hand, given the historical existence of water on Mars, they could be evidence of ancient lifeforms, maybe fossilized caviar from the now-extinct (?) Martian Lumpfish.
There are many links to this news online, but they all seem to rehash the JPL press release.
They do identify the ridges as being 2-3 meters tall, in some articles. I guess the nodules are smaller than that. Apparently, nodules have been found previously on Mars so they're "old news", thus less deserving of details.
PS: "Truffle" was not the thing that first leapt to mind.
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But it’s aliens.
As wonderful as his music and acting was in the show, I can almost believe he might have been from Mars!
The boxwork formations look like giant spiderwebs when viewed from space. To explain the shapes, scientists have proposed that groundwater once flowed through large fractures in the bedrock, leaving behind minerals. Those minerals then strengthened the areas that became ridges while other portions without mineral reinforcement were eventually hollowed out by wind.
~snip~
Although Earth also has boxwork ridges, they’re rarely taller than a few centimeters and are usually found in caves or in dry, sandy environments. The Curiosity team wanted to get a close look at the Martian formations and gather more data. This posed a real challenge for rover drivers: They needed to send instructions to Curiosity, an SUV-size vehicle that weighs nearly a ton (899 kilograms), so that it could roll across the tops of ridges not much wider than the rover itself.
“It almost feels like a highway we can drive on. But then we have to go down into the hollows, where you need to be mindful of Curiosity’s wheels slipping or having trouble turning in the sand,” said operations systems engineer Ashley Stroupe of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Curiosity and leads the mission. “There’s always a solution. It just takes trying different paths.”
very cool
