The rust-red surface has earned Mars the nickname Red Planet. But now images sent to Earth by the ‘Perseverance’ rover have amazed researchers. The images show that thousands of bright rocks are also scattered across the Martian soil.
The images show more than 4,000 clear pebble-sized stones scattered throughout the crater floor. “These rocks are very unusual and we are trying to understand their origins,” Candice Bedford, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and a member of the Mars 2020 science team, said in mid-March at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Woodlands, U.S. Texas.
Analysis shows: Stones do not contain water
Initial analysis of the rock using instruments from NASA’s Perseverance rover showed it had dried out. The stones lack not only water, but also minerals such as iron, magnesium, calcium and sodium.
“These stones have been quite decimated in many ways,” says Bedford. She suspects that their dehydrated nature indicates that they were heated and altered by processes such as lava flows or asteroid impacts elsewhere on Mars before being deposited in the crater.
The research team is keen to understand the origins of these rocks to gain deeper insight into Mars’ past – including when water was still present in the Jezero crater, a former lake that is now an arid landscape.
Rover searches for microbial life on Mars
The rover, which was launched from Cape Canaveral in July 2020, landed in the Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021 in a risky maneuver that lasted several minutes. The rover, which will cost around €2.2 billion, will search for traces of ancient microbial life on Mars and investigate the planet’s climate and geology.
Camera software from Austria on board
The robot (photo), which weighs about 1,000 kilograms and is the size of a small car, has seven scientific instruments, 23 cameras and a laser on board. Research institutions from Graz and Vienna have provided software for one of the cameras. As a result, their images are assessed three-dimensionally in a completely new way.
Source: Krone
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