Posted on 01/13/2005 11:43:47 AM PST by Fitzcarraldo
NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has come across an interesting object -- perhaps a meteorite sitting out in the open at Meridiani Planum. Initial data taken by the robot’s Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) is suggestive that the odd-looking “rock” is made of metal.
The curious-looking object stands out in the parking-lot like landscape of Meridiani Planum.
“We're curious about it too. We have Mini-TES data on it now, and they suggest that it may actually be made of metal,” said Steve Squyres, lead scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover mission from Cornell University.
“So we are beginning to suspect that it may be a meteorite. I stress that this is very preliminary!”, Squyres told SPACE.com.
Opportunity has been busy at work inspecting entry debris -- hardware that fell to Mars during the robot’s entry, descent, and landing over a year ago.
Not too distant from the debris field, the odd-looking rock sits alone atop the sandy terrain.
Squyres cautioned that it is too early to identify the rock as a meteorite.
The next step by rover scientists is to carefully examine the object with Opportunity’s Instrument Deployment Device, or IDD. This robot arm is tipped with scientific instruments.
Once extended out to the object, the arm-mounted devices can study the object’s structure in great detail. The instruments on the IDD are the Microscopic Imager, the Mössbauer Spectrometer, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, and a Rock Abrasion Tool.
“We're going to look at it carefully with the IDD instruments next, and that should enable us to determine for sure what it is,” Squyres said.
Thanks! Definitely a meteorite. I'm more interested in the little spherical granules around it.
That's from when you were in Alaska right?
Mars rover comes across iron meteorite for the first time: [World News]: New York, Jan 15 :
The Mars rover "Opportunity" may have found an iron meteorite and NASA scientists believe it probably came from the core of a large asteroid, which broke up when it crashed into the red planet.
(Fusion crust, metal facets?)
(hope they didn't break the RAT on it!)
"It looks like nothing we've ever seen on Mars before," Steve Squyres, who leads NASA's Mars-rover science team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was quoting as saying by news@nature.Com. Today.
Opportunity spotted the odd-looking rock on January 10, the rover's 345th martian day on the planet, the report said.
The rover had previously spent six months inside Endurance crater, studying the layered rock outcrops there.
After carefully picking its way out of the crater, Opportunity trundled over to where its protective heat shield had landed after being ejected during the rover's descent.
Mission engineers, Nature reported, wanted to get a good look at the shield, now in two fragments, to see how it had stood up to the battering on the way down. "And right there next to the heat shield is a little rock,which we imaginatively 'Shield Rock'," Squyres said.
Infrared scans of the rock suggest that it is actually made of metal. "We believe we've found an iron meteorite," says Squyres. He revealed the discovery on January 12, during a presentation at the American Astronomical Society's conference in San Diego. PTI
It would depend a lot on the weight of the meteorite. A 17 ton iron meteorite landed on a farm in Africa leaving its top surface level with the ground. The farmer sold the meteorite for next to nothing. Smaller meteorites could land just leaving a dent in the ground. These were the source of much of the iron in the bronze age. Bigger meteorites could blow a crater in the ground. Really big meteorites could blow a crater in the ground and totally vaporize themselves.
Looks like the used the RAT on the upper(?) part.
Iron Meteorite on Mars
1/19/05
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found an iron meteorite on Mars, the first meteorite of any type ever identified on another planet. The pitted, basketball-size object is mostly made of iron and nickel. Readings from spectrometers on the rover determined that composition. Opportunity used its panoramic camera to take the images used in this approximately true-color composite on the rover's 339th martian day, or sol (Jan. 6, 2005). This composite combines images taken through the panoramic camera's 600-nanometer (red), 530-nanometer (green), and 480-nanometer (blue) filters.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell
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