If you look at this Mars Vista brings back childhood memories of the song “One of these things is not like the others,” NASA the scientists are here with you.
Perseverance, a car-sized laboratory on six wheels, traveled to Neretva Vallis on the Red Planet last week. Although this area may look like a barren desert, it was once an ancient river channel that emptied into the Lake Crater billions of years ago.
As Perseverance passed through the bay, the rover encountered a boulder-covered hill, one of which in particular caught the science team’s attention: a light-spotted rock amid a sea of ​​dark lumps.
“Every once in a while you’ll see a strange thing in the Martian landscape and the team will say, ‘Oh, let’s go there,'” Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, told Mashable. “It was like the textbook definition of (chasing) a bright, shiny thing because it was so bright and white.”
The boulder is so special, scientists said it’s inside own league. Closer analysis using the rover’s instruments shows it’s likely anorthosite, a type of rock we’ve never seen in Mars exploration, Stack Morgan said, even though there are hints that such rocks should exist. Not even Curiosity Roverwho observed a greater variety in Gale Crater, saw one quite similar.
How scientists discovered a new type of Martian rock without a rock
The Perseverance rover found a rare rock on Mars that was thought to be anorthosite.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Although such anorthositic rocks are found on the Moon and in mountain ranges on Earth, they are generally considered rare in the Solar System. Real Martian examples elude researchers, even in our planet’s inventory Meteorites of the Red Planet which traveled space get here
The discovery could support the idea that the early crust of Mars was much more complex than once thought – and perhaps similar to Earth’s original crust. Understanding the ancient Martian crust could also help unlock secrets about Earth’s evolution and how life appeared there.
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“It was like the textbook definition of (chasing) the bright, shiny thing.”
The rover team named the special boulder, about 18 inches wide and 14 inches tall, “Atoco Point” after the landmark in the Grand Canyon.
Starting in 2021, Perseverance is exploring Crater Lake, an ancient dried-up delta on Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“Seeing a rock like Atoco Point is one of those indications that, yes, we do have anorthosites on Mars, and that may be a sample of material from the lower crust,” Stack Morgan said. “If we see it later in the context of other rocks, it can give us a sense of how the earliest crust of Mars formed.”
Anorthosites are made up mostly of feldspar, a mineral associated with lava flows. Felds are richer in silica than basalt and some of the last substances to crystallize from magma. On the other hand, basalts, dark volcanic rocks rich in iron and magnesium, are ubiquitous on the surface of Mars.
Many Perseverance scientists think that subsurface magma formed the minerals at Atoko Point, and that a giant impact on Mars may have hollowed out the rock to the surface, with a piece later falling from the rim of the crater to its current location. Others think the boulder was made somewhere far away and carried there by a gushing ancient river.
The NASA team hopes to discover many more rocks like Atoco Point in the months after Perseverance reaches the crater rim.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Whether scientists will ever get their hands on this or a similar stone remains to be seen. Persistence was collecting samples from Crater Lake as of 2021. The area, an ancient dried-up delta, is an area where scientists think microscopic organisms may have existed long ago. But the plan to fly rocks and dust grains to Earth, a complex mission called Mars Sample Return, is in jeopardy. Its rising costs led to layoffs and warnings to Congress about repeal. The agency is now producing a desperate plea for ideas to save the mission.
Perhaps surprisingly, the rover team decided to leave Atoco Point without even collecting a sample, despite its importance. That’s because the team hopes to discover many more like it in a few months when the rover reaches the rim of the crater. Finding examples from its original location could give scientists much more context.
“We said, ‘OK, let’s keep this rock in mind,'” Stack Morgan said. “Maybe we’ll come back here if we can’t find it elsewhere in the crater rim.