After Five Years on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Found Its First Meteorite (Photos)

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NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has found a possible meteorite on the surface of the Red Planet.

Endurance discovered an unusually “shaped, high-standing” rock nestled among “low-lying, flat and fragmented surrounding rocks” that immediately caught the attention of scientists, according to a Blog post Posted on November 13th on NASAThe website was written by Candice Bedford, a researcher at Purdue University. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory The rover discovered Phippsaksla on September 2, initially with the left Mastcam-Z camera high on the rover’s mast. September 2nd was Sol 1612 of the mission; A sol is a Martian day that is slightly longer than Earth’s.

Next, Perseverance used its laser instrument called SuperCam to show that the nearly three-foot (31 inches, or 81 centimeters) long rock is made of iron and nickel, consistent with what we know about the composition of large cores Asteroids in the solar system. If its origin is confirmed, it would be Perseverance’s first meteorite Found since arriving on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021.

Asteroids are large space rocks that are typically made of leftover material Solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago, before larger bodies like planets and moons came together. Meteoroids – smaller space rocks – are often fragments of asteroids, and if one of the meteoroids makes it to the surface of one planet or moon, these are called meteorites.

The Perseverance rover team nicknames its scientific targets and locations to allow easy identification for the public. The suspected meteorite was named “Phippsaksla,” a name that comes from an area in Svalbard, Norway. The location where the rock was found, “Vernodden”, also goes back to a location in Spitsbergen.

Although this is Perseverance’s first suspected meteorite find, it is far from the first space rock ever found on the Red Planet.

Perseverance’s predecessor rover curiositywhich has been active on the surface since 2012, has found several iron-nickel meteorites in the Gale Crater region and a mountain it climbs called Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp. Notable examples include the huge, 39 inch (1 meter) tall Meteorite “Lebanon”. Found in 2014, and another space stone Nickname “Cocoa”found in 2023.

The previous generation of NASA rovers was known as the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity (used on Mars from 2004 to 2018) and Spirit (2004-11). Since these robotic explorers also found several iron-nickel meteorites themselves, NASA officials had been surprised by Perseverance’s lack of space rock discoveries.

Perseverance has been cautious for about a year Examination of the rim its landing site, the Jezero Crater. Bedford noted that Jezero Crater should have more meteorites, “particularly given its similar age to Gale Crater and the number of smaller impact craters, suggesting that meteorites have fallen on the crater floor, delta, and crater rim over time.”

But meteorite hunting is just a side job for Perseverance. The rover landed on the floor of the 45 kilometer wide crater with the main task of searching for possible traces of the past Life on Mars and to Collect samples for a possible future return to Earth.

Just last month, NASA announced The rover found tantalizing chemical fingerprints that could provide clues to chemical reactions between sediment and organic material, but the rover’s limited range of instruments means the samples would have to be towed back to Earth before a final decision could be made.