Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA Mars rover has discovered an alien rock

By

While NASA’s newer Perseverance rover usually gets all the headlines, 11-year-old Curiosity continues to trundle across the surface of Mars in search of interesting discoveries. And it’s just made one.

Ashley Stroupe, mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is overseeing the Curiosity mission, said on JPL’s website last month that the rover had happened upon a 1-foot-wide rock that “seems to have come from elsewhere.”

Recommended Videos

Stroupe said that further investigations were needed to determine if the wonderful specimen was indeed a meteorite or simply a native rock that had been altered by Mars’ weather.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Fast forward a week and the results are in. It is indeed a meteorite.

Related

“Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. METEORITE!” a message on Curiosity’s Twitter account said on Thursday. “It’s not uncommon to find meteorites on Mars — in fact, I’ve done it a few times! But a change in scenery’s always nice.” Curiosity also confirmed that the rock, which the JPL team has named Cacao, is made of iron nickel.

Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. Rock. METEORITE!

It's not uncommon to find meteorites on Mars – in fact, I've done it a few times! (see 🧵) But a change in scenery's always nice.

This one's about a foot wide and made of iron-nickel. We're calling it "Cacao." pic.twitter.com/I37HiGjN2t

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) February 2, 2023

It’s not the first meteorite to have been found on the distant planet. Here’s one called “Egg Rock” that Curiosity came across in 2016:

The Egg Rock meteorite discovered on Mars.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

And check out this 7-foot whopper, nicknamed The Beast, discovered in 2014:

A meteorite found on Mars.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

In what turned out to be the biggest meteor strike ever recorded, NASA’s recently defunct InSight lander detected powerful seismic waves from a rock that struck Mars in December 2021.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter later captured images of a huge crater caused by the impact. Analysis of the data suggested the meteorite was between 16 and 39 feet wide, and created a crater almost 500 feet wide and 70 feet deep. Scientists say data from such strikes can help them to learn more about the structure of the red planet’s crust.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
A NASA Mars rover has a giant hole in one of its wheels
A damaged wheel on NASA's Mars Curiosity rover.

 

If the tire on your car fails, it’s either a case of changing it yourself or getting someone to do it for you. For rovers on Mars, neither option is available.

Read more
NASA’s axed moon rover could be resurrected by Intuitive Machines
An illustration of NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) on the lunar surface.

Lunar scientists were shocked and dismayed last month when NASA announced that it was canceling work on its moon rover, VIPER. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover was intended to search the moon's south pole for evidence of water there, but NASA said that it had to ax the project due to increasing costs.

This week, an open letter to Congress called the cancellation of the mission "unprecedented and indefensible," and questioned NASA's assertion that the cancellation of the mission would not affect plans to send humans to the moon. Scientists argued that the mission was fundamental to understanding the presence of water on the moon, which is a key resource for human exploration, as well as an issue of scientific interest.

Read more
Mars has ‘oceans’ worth’ of water – but it’s deep underground
More than 3 billion years ago, Mars was warm, wet, and had an atmosphere that could have supported life. This artist's rendering shows what the planet may have looked like with global oceans based on today's topography.

One of the key issues for getting humans to Mars is finding a way to get them water. Scientists know that millions of years ago, Mars was covered in oceans, but the planet lost its water over time and now has virtually no liquid water on its surface. Now, though, researchers have identified what they believe could be oceans' worth of water on Mars. There's just one snag: it's deep underground.

The research used data from NASA's now-retired InSight lander, which used a seismometer and other instruments to investigate the planet's interior. They found evidence of what appears to be a large underground reservoir of water, enough to cover the entire planet in about a mile of ocean. But it's inaccessible, being located between 7 to 13 miles beneath the planet's surface. The water is located in between cracks in a portion of the interior called the mid-crust, which sits beneath the dry upper crust that is drillable from the surface.

Read more