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Mystery Continues: Scientists Baffled by Spheres on Mars By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer - Space.com February 13, 2004 A new close-up image of the Martian surface reveals more of the tiny spherical objects that have been puzzling scientists for several days. Researchers reiterated that they don't know what process created the spheres but that they don't think biology is involved.  NASA and journalists had been getting questions from the public about whether the spherules, as they are called, might be fossils.  Each spherule is about the size of a BB. The Opportunity rover has photographed them on the sandy soil at the its landing site and embedded in rocks at a nearby ledge. The new images include a 3-D view. The landing site is covered with fine grains of sand, larger irregular-shaped grains that possibly have eroded from the rock ledge, and the "spectacular" spherules, said Mark Lemmon, science team member for the rovers at Texas A&M University.  "There's much more than meets the eye in these images," Lemmon said, but he couldn't say what that was.  Scientists would like to know if the spherules were created by water, or if they were instead born in volcanic eruptions. More observation will be needed to find out, assuming answers are forthcoming. "We haven't seen anything that leads us to conclude that water has to be involved," Lemmon cautioned at a press conference today. "Personally I'm really stumped" about the spherical objects, said Wendy Calvin, a geophysicist at the University of Nevada at Reno and member of the rover science team. "I have no idea how they got there." But she added that there was "no reason" to assume biology was involved.