If you have not taken the time to take a look at a cool rock right this moment, do not sweat it: we have you lined.
In actual fact, this explicit rock might even be one in all a sort. It was found by NASA’s Perseverance rover exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars, and we have by no means seen something prefer it up there on the pink planet.
To be truthful, there’s nonetheless lots of Mars we’re but to discover intimately. However, the zebra-striped chunk of rock is concurrently shocking, fascinating, and, sure, you guessed it, extraordinarily cool.
The rock was imaged on 13 September by Perseverance because it climbed the slope in the direction of the crater rim. Like different attention-grabbing formations on Mars, the bottom staff right here on Earth gave the rock a reputation: Freya Fort.
Freya Fort is not very giant; it is about 20 centimeters (8 inches) throughout, just a little bit bigger than the common size of an grownup male hand. And its putting, zebra-like sample of darkish and light-weight stripes poses an attention-grabbing thriller.
Perseverance used its Mastcam-Z to take a multispectral picture of the rock earlier than persevering with its journey up the slope. From these pictures, scientists have made a couple of guesses about what the rock is likely to be.
“Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes,” writes planetary scientist Athanasios Klidaras of Purdue College in a weblog put up for NASA.
“Since Freya Castle is a loose stone that is clearly different from the underlying bedrock, it has likely arrived here from someplace else, perhaps having rolled downhill from a source higher up. This possibility has us excited, and we hope that as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance will encounter an outcrop of this new rock type so that more detailed measurements can be acquired.”
For now, that is about as a lot as we find out about Freya Fort. However we additionally comprehend it will not be the final cool rock that NASA’s Mars rovers have to indicate us. Earlier this 12 months, Curiosity discovered pure sulfur simply hanging out within the Gale Crater.
And cheetah-like spots on a rock named Chevaya Falls are much like mineral patterns right here on Earth which are tied to organic exercise. Chevaya Falls’ sample is extra more likely to be non-biological, nevertheless it’s actually enjoyable to seek out one thing like that.
Here is hoping Perseverance finds Freya Fort’s mum or dad rock, so we are able to be taught extra about geological processes on a world so very completely different from our personal.
