Green Blobs on a Red Planet: NASA Rover Spots ‘Enigmatic’ Rock

The Perseverance rover has uncovered a compelling reddish stone connected Mars that contains blobs of green, hinting astatine the stone’s composition.

The “enigmatic” rock, arsenic NASA described it successful a press release, could not beryllium interrogated to the fullest owed to the rover’s instruments not having capable country to enactment in. But the features bash hint astatine however they formed connected an ancient, wetter Mars.

Perseverance arrived connected Mars successful February 2021 with a cardinal goal: analyse a dried-up stream delta connected the borderline of a multi-billion-year-old water for signs of past microbial life. Mars is the lone satellite successful our star strategy wherever abstraction agencies person progressive landers driving astir the planet’s surface, imaging and digging up grounds of its past past.

Though Mars has overmuch much utmost somesthesia fluctuations than our planet, and is overmuch much arid, scientists judge it had ample lakes of liquid h2o connected its aboveground billions of years ago. One of those lakes was successful Jezero Crater, successful which Perseverance landed 3 years ago.

Since then, Perseverance has trekked crossed Jezero’s occidental edge, imaging the satellite and scooping up stone cores and some Martian atmosphere that volition yet beryllium shipped to Earth, pending a batch of funding—and adjacent much determination.

The basal thought down Perseverance’s astrobiological hunt is that, if beingness existed connected Mars, it would’ve looked similar immoderate of the earliest beingness connected Earth: microbes that eked retired beingness successful shallow water. These microbes signifier sedimentary concretions—layers of rock—as they spell astir their lives, which past fossilize successful warped, Sol Lewitt-like patterns. Those stone fossils are called stromatolites, and they still signifier connected Earth today. Earlier this year, a squad of researchers identified the oldest fossilized photosynthetic structures yet, successful 1.75-billion-year-old stone successful bluish Australia—the aforesaid cervix of the woods wherever even-more-ancient stromatolites form.

In July, Perseverance found “leopard spots” connected Mars successful bands of hematite and calcium sulfate, which NASA scientists judge could bespeak that the stone was erstwhile mud containing integrated compounds.

Now, Perseverance has investigated different compelling target: the reddish stone with greenish spots. Hardly a smoking-gun for alien life, the chromatic nevertheless provides a model into Mars’ ironic irony iron-rich past.

The rock’s redness is apt owed to oxidized iron, but the Perseverance squad wanted to instrumentality a person look. The rover chopped a 2-inch-wide (5-centimeter-wide) circular chunk of the rock’s aboveground utilizing an abrading instrumentality to spot the chromatic underneath, which has not been eroded oregon different changed by the windswept conditions connected the Martian surface.

The greenish spots successful the stone are “relatively common,” according to the NASA release. They hap erstwhile h2o permeates the iron-rich sediment earlier it turns into rock, oxidizing the metallic and turning it green. On Earth, microbes tin catalyze that reaction, though it tin besides hap owed to decaying integrated substance oregon interactions betwixt sulfur and iron. Whatever the cause, studying the stone would output accusation astir Mars’ watery past, imaginable beingness connected the planet, oregon however the satellite evolved.

Given the possibilities, the green-splotched deposit warranted further investigation. But determination wasn’t capable abstraction astir the stone illustration for Perseverance to unfurl its instruments, truthful the rock’s creation couldn’t beryllium studied successful greater detail.

Hopefully determination are much rocks bearing akin features successful Perseverance’s near-future. The rover is presently making its mode up the rim of Jezero Crater, climbing retired of its Martian cradle towards immoderate loftier knowing of our arid next-door neighbor.