Robert, I admire your being a "pit bull on the pants leg" on the color of Mars issue. Thank-you for almost forgiving my "cartoon" crack. (it was not directed at anyone, BTW, just me being an eternal smart-ass) It's cool the way you brought the pancam colors into the MI composite.

The blue bothers me as much as it bothers Mr. Clark. It's making my head hurt, but for different reasons, I think. As soon as those raws came in I combined them using the "gold standard" and saw that gawd awful blue "paintball blast" surrounding the RAT hole and I laughed out loud. I removed filter seven, changed gammas on the violet end o' things, did some other ineffective things, then decided to await your cooking.

It's blue.

Running down an incomplete list o' minerals that could cause a blue powder (streak): (but the fresh is blue too, jms!)

Chlorite? A common hydrated clay mineral in mafic rocks. Color varies based upon the cations in the structure. Needs water. It's what causes the pale blues I see sometimes in rocks in the southwest desert.

Copper in minerals can do a blue thing.

Serpentines are green-blue and also common with mafic igneous rocks (Mg-phyllosilicate). Needs water: 2 Mg olivine + 3H2O = Serpentine + Mg(OH)2. More green than blue, but this too varies upon Mg/Fe ratios.

I'll have to wait for the data, again. Meanwhile I can speculate what to name this known unknown mineral. Roverite? Spiritite? Marsite?

But wait, there's this:

Many blue colored minerals are not born blue, but get there through irradiation. Amazonite is just boring old pink potassium feldspar unless expossed to radiation in the melt which turns it blue. Amethyst is just quartz without a good zapping. In fact, some dealers expose pale amethyst crystals to radiation to make the color a deeper blue. Clear glass bottles in the desert sun turn purple over the years. It's called a color center. An electron gets trapped into a hole in the crystal lattice and bounces around in there at the wavelength of blue. How long these rocks been zapped by that cosmic bombardment?

If this rock is obsidian, then it might be a good candidate for a radiation induced color center. A test might be to turn a blue rock over, see what it looks like when shaded for the last N-million years.

So weird.

The Jordie Metaphor is perfect: imagine seeing all of this at once, and more.