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NASA’s Perseverance rover took a view of the strange rock on March 28. If you look closely just to the right of center, you can see a series of tiny marks where the rover’s laser zapped it.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU
Mars is a meteorite paradise, and it’s always remarkable when a rover encounters one of these emissaries from space. Scientists scrutinize a rock with holes spotted by NASA’s Perseverance rover that looks like meteorites seen elsewhere.
NASA has yet to declare what the rock is, but the The Perseverance team tweeted on Wednesday, “As the helicopter prepares, I can’t help but check out the rocks nearby. This odd thing causes my science team to exchange a lot of hypotheses.
The rover team said the boulder was about six inches long and told space fans to take a close look at the image to “spot the row of laser marks where I zapped it to find out more. “.
Perseverance is equipped with a rock-zapping laser designed to help him collect data on the geology of Mars. You can hear the laser in action heard through a microphone. “Variations in the intensity of the zapping sounds will provide information about the physical structure of the targets, such as its relative hardness or the presence of aging coatings,” NASA said when it shared the laser audio earlier. in March.
Researchers are already launching ideas about the boulder, including that it may be a piece of weathered bedrock, a small piece of Mars from elsewhere that was thrown by an impact event or a meteorite.
The team made many different assumptions about this one – is it something that has been altered by the local bedrock? Is it a piece of Mars plunged into the region following a distant impact event? Is it a meteorite? Or something else?
– NASA’s Mars Rover Perseverance (@NASAPersevere) March 31, 2021
Perseverance is already all the rage for meteorites. There is a tiny slice of a Martian meteorite embedded in a calibration target used by the rover’s Sherloc (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument. NASA therefore returned a piece of Mars to Mars.
The rover took the time to investigate the rocks while in the Ingenuity helicopter deployment process so it can drop it to the surface before what NASA hopes will be the first powered and controlled flight to another planet.
Between rocks and choppers, it’s been an exciting week for the Perseverance mission.
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