MARS MYSTERY: Rover Finds Rock That Shouldn’t Be There

NASA’s Perseverance rover just stumbled across something that has scientists scratching their heads – a rock on Mars that has absolutely no business being where it is.

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The boulder sits near the edge of Jezero crater, this massive 28-mile-wide basin that researchers believe might have been filled with water billions of years ago. That makes it one of the prime spots to hunt for evidence that Mars once hosted life. Perseverance has been rolling around this ancient crater since February 2021, cataloging the geology and picking apart the planet’s history one rock at a time.

This particular find measures about 31 inches across, and right away it caught attention because of its weirdly sculpted appearance. The rover’s SuperCam instrument went to work on it, blasting a tiny section of the surface with a high-powered laser to analyze what the thing is actually made of. They named it Phippsaksla, and the results came back showing something nobody expected to see in Jezero crater.

The rock contains exceptionally high levels of iron and nickel. Dr. Candice Bedford, a geologist from Purdue University who works with the Perseverance team, explained in a NASA blog post that this particular elemental combination typically shows up in iron-nickel meteorites that form in the cores of large asteroids. In other words, this rock didn’t form on Mars at all. It came from somewhere else entirely in the solar system.

Perseverance had climbed up into an area called Vernodden, perched high on the crater’s rim, when it spotted Phippsaksla sitting there. Finding a meteorite on Mars isn’t exactly shocking news – Professor Gareth Collins from Imperial College London points out that Mars gets pelted by meteors constantly. The entire Martian surface has been shaped by impacts over its history, and meteors are expected to hit Mars on a daily basis, though nobody knows the precise number. There should be plenty of them scattered around.

Most of the meteorites that fall on Mars are rocky. Only about one in twenty are rich in iron and nickel like Phippsaksla appears to be. These metallic meteorites typically get forged in the hearts of massive asteroids. During the early days of the solar system, when these asteroids were heated, the heavy minerals like iron and nickel sank toward the center while lighter materials stayed near the surface. When these asteroids get smashed apart by collisions, chunks of that metallic core can end up flying through space until they eventually crash into a planet.

Dr. Gareth Dorrian from the University of Birmingham suggests that Phippsaksla likely originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. These iron-nickel meteorites can withstand chemical weathering better than their rocky counterparts, which means they have a better shot at surviving the blazing journey through a planet’s atmosphere without completely burning up or breaking apart.

The thing is, even though these metallic meteorites are rarer than the rocky variety, Mars gets hit by so many space rocks that every rover we’ve sent there has eventually found some. NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered numerous iron-nickel meteorites while exploring Gale crater, including one massive specimen they dubbed Lebanon – that one measured 39 inches across. The Spirit rover found similar metallic meteorites during its mission too.

That’s what makes Phippsaksla particularly interesting. Dr. Bedford noted that it’s been somewhat unexplained that Perseverance hadn’t encountered any iron-nickel meteorites in Jezero crater until now. Gale crater and Jezero crater are roughly the same age, and Jezero is covered with smaller impact craters that prove meteorites have been falling there throughout Mars’ history. They should have spotted metallic space rocks before this.

Because Phippsaksla is such an unusual find for this location, NASA’s science team needs more time to analyze the data and confirm whether it truly is a meteorite. If they can verify it fell from space, then Perseverance will finally join the ranks of Mars rovers that have investigated these rare Martian visitors.

This isn’t the first time Perseverance has encountered something strange during its exploration of Jezero crater. Back in August, the rover photographed what looked like a bizarre helmet sitting on the Martian surface. When scientists examined it more closely, they discovered it was covered with small round formations called spherules. On Earth, these spherules form in one of two ways: either through the rapid cooling of molten rock droplets during volcanic eruptions, or through the condensation of rock that’s been vaporized by a meteorite impact. Finding them on Mars suggests this particular rock might have formed long ago when the planet’s surface was still dotted with active volcanoes, back when Mars was a very different world than the cold, barren desert it is today.

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SOURCES: Daily Mail

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.