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A rock analyzed by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has a
surprising and more varied composition that resembles rare rocks from
the bowels of our planet, the US space agency said.
“This rock is a close match in chemical composition to an unusual but
well-known type of igneous rock found in many volcanic provinces on
Earth,” Curiosity co-investigator Edward Stolper of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement, released on
Thursday.
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“With only one Martian rock of this type, it is difficult to know
whether the same processes were involved, but it is a reasonable place
to start thinking about its origin.”
On Earth, rocks with similar compositions usually come from “processes
in the planet’s mantle beneath the crust, from the crystallization of
relatively water-rich magna at elevated pressure,” according to the NASA
statement.
Curiosity, on the Red Planet since August 6, used two instruments to
study the football-sized rock, which is dubbed Jake Matijevic, or Jake
for short.
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One was the arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer — known as
APXS — and the other was the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument.
“Jake is kind of an odd Martian rock,” said APXS principal investigator
Ralf Gellert of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. “It’s high
in elements consistent with the mineral feldspar, and low in magnesium
and iron.”
NASA said the initial results were just a preview, noting that Curiosity
also carries analytical laboratories inside the rover.
Soon, it plans to analyze its first Martian soil sample.
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“We used Curiosity’s first perfectly scooped sample for cleaning the
interior surfaces of our 150-micron sample-processing chambers,” said
Chris Roumeliotis, lead turret rover planner at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. “It’s our version of a Martian car wash.”
NASA has also determined that a bright object observed on the ground
near the robot several days ago was just a bit of plastic that does not
jeopardize the rover’s operations.
Curiosity is on a two-year, $2.5 billion mission to investigate whether
it is possible to live on Mars and to learn whether conditions there
might have been able to support life in the past. |