NASA’s Perseverance Rover snapped a view of this strange rock on March 28th. If you look just to the right of center, you can see a series of small marks where the Rover’s laser zapped it.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU
Mars is a refuge for meteorites, and it is always remarkable when a rover encounters one of these missionaries from space. Scientists are currently investigating a rock full of holes spotted by NASA’s Perseverance Rover. The rock looks like meteorites seen elsewhere.
NASA has not yet declared what the rock is, but the Perseverance team tweeted Wednesday“While the helicopter is ready, I can not help investigating rocks in the area. This stranger, my science team traded many hypotheses.”
The rover team said the rock is about 15 inches long and told the space fans to take a closer look at the picture to “locate the row of laser marks where I hacked it to learn more.”
Perseverance is equipped with a rock-zapping laser designed to help it collect data on Mars geology. You can listen to the laser in action as heard through a microphone. “Variations in the intensity of the zapping sounds will provide information about the physical structure of the targets, such as their relative hardness or the presence of weathering coatings,” NASA said when they shared the laser sound earlier in March.
Researchers are already tossing around a few ideas over the rock, including that it could be a weathered piece of rock, a small piece of Mars from elsewhere thrown by an impact event or a meteorite.
The team has formulated many different hypotheses about this one – is it something defensive from the local rock? Is it a piece of Mars that was plowed from a distant impact event in the area? Is it a meteorite? Or something else?
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) 31 March 2021
Perseverance is already hip for meteorites. There’s a small piece of Mars meteorite built into a calibration target used by the Rover’s instrument Sherloc (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals). So NASA sent a piece of Mars back to Mars.
The wanderer made time for the rock investigation while in the process to unfold the Ingenuity helicopter so that it can lay it on the surface before what NASA hopes will be the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.
Between rocks and hijackers, it was an exciting week for the Perseverance Mission.
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