Rover Finds Weird Green Rock on Mars!

Rover Finds Weird Green Rock on Mars!

  09 Apr 2021   , , ,

The Mars Rover, Perseverance has discovered something weird on the surface of the Red Planet – a strange, seemingly out of place “green rock.”

While scientists are going to have the amazing robot explore conduct some more tests of the unexpected find, for now, it has the team somewhat baffled. However, that has not stopped the science team from “trading lots of hypotheses,” but please don’t pick aliens, as one of them, the team’s Twitter feed says.

“Is it something weathered out of the local bedrock?” the Perseverance team tweeted March 31, when the rock was first discovered. “Is it a piece of Mars plopped into the area from a far-flung impact event? Is it a meteorite? Or something else?”

“It’s about 6 inches (15 cm) long,” added the tweet. “If you look closely, you might spot the row of laser marks where I zapped it to learn more.”

That team member was referring to the Perseverance’s “SuperCam” array. Scientists hope that over time, the laser will give us more information about the strange rock’s composition, which could tell scientists whether it formed in place or was transported there by some process. If it didn’t form at its current location, water may have carried it to Jezero Crater, or it could be a meteorite like the one that the Curiosity rover spotted in 2014.

Perseverance has seven science instruments onboard. SuperCam sits on top of the mast of Perseverance and can send laser shots to target rocks as far as 23 feet from the Rover. Each laser beam creates a cloud of vaporized rock, the composition of which can be analyzed by SuperCam’s cameras and spectrometers.

According to SPACE.com, SuperCam’s first activity on Mars was on March 2, when it fired on a target called Máaz, the Navajo word for Mars. The Perseverance team informally dubbed its region of Jezero the Canyon de Chelly, after a national monument on Navajo land in northeastern Arizona, and the Navajo Nation is working in consultation with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to select appropriate names to use on Mars. Since it can detect any evidence of organic compounds in the rocks it zaps, the SuperCam — with its ability to blast rocks and analyze the vaporized result — is one of the Rover’s primary tools to search for evidence of water and life on Mars.

Speaking of “Super,” given the green coloration of the bizarre rock, has anyone considered that it could be the infamous rocky weakness of a certain Man of Steel?

How cool would it be if NASA discovered Kryptonite on Mars!

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