'Curiosity' rover discovers weird ball-shape meteorite on Mars
On 30 October, a strange thing stumbled right the very eyes of the scientists who worked at NASA. The Mars rover "Curiosity" has spotted a golf-ball size object which has a dark shade of grey. The ball looked like the prototype red-orange rocks that were usually seen in Mars.
To accurately know what the bizarre rock was and where it originated, NASA Mars rover Curiosity used its on-board zapping laser. The laser could analyze the chemical composition of a rock. It was disclosed that the weird rock fell from a Martian sky was an iron-nickel meteorite. The science team of Curiosity had then dubbed it as "Egg Rock", according to Space News.
It has discovered that these types of rocks in the past were found on Earth and Mars. However, for the Curiosity's laser-firing spectrometer nod as ChemCam, it was the first time that it has been utilized to study the mechanisms of the rock.
In addition,the laser ChemCam, functioned through firing laser pulses to such object of interest. Once the laser struck the object, it would let the electrons of the atoms get excited, Fox News cited.
Then, it would emit light of different wavelengths of colors which depend on the zapped element. Curiosity would analyzed the emitted light, by then what the object is composed of would be definitely determined.
Furthermore, as it was determined, it has been identified that the rock's elements were iron, nickel, phosphorous and some other elements that were traced. Through it composition, scientists conclude that it was a meteorite which was not an original distinctive property of the Red Planet. Moreover, these kinds of meteorites came from the molten cores of asteroids.
Horton Newsom, a team member of ChemCam said that iron meteorites supply records of various asteroids. It were broken up with fragments of their cores that ended on Earth and on Mars.
The Egg Rock was primarily noticed on 30 October, which was just a week before through a rover's Mast Camera called Mastcam. This rover was the focal point of the scientists who worked with Curiosity of whom NASA allocated $2.5 billion of the project dubbed as Mars Science Laboratory (MSL mission).
Pierre-Yves Meslin, stressed out that the dark, sleek and shiny properties of the rock and its ball-shape draw the attentions of some MSL scientists as soon as they received the images from the Mastcam in the new location.
In the lower Mount Sharp, which was called as the Murray formation lies the Egg Rock where the rover Curiosity has spotted. As a part of its extended mission, the rover would continue to explore the area.
It then would concentrate learning on how Mars would carry on its change in environment over a certain period of time. Apart from it, the rover would be monitoring the environment if it could have withhold life in the past.