Perseverance Finds Weird Green Rock on Mars, Can Scientists Identify It?

As Perseverance waits for the little Mars helicopter Ingenuity to make its first flights, one rock has caught her eye. Scientists are trying to find out where it came from.

The rover shows that it hit the rock with a laser and is still trying to learn more about it in a new tweet posted by the official Perseverance Twitter page. The rock itself has a peculiar look, with large pits spread around an otherwise smooth surface. What exactly is it, and where did it originate? Your guess appears to be on par with NASA's.

"It's about 6 inches (15 cm) long. If you look closely, you might spot the row of laser marks where I zapped it to learn more."

What Is This Weird Rock, Anyway?

We can see the rock sitting on the Martian soil in the picture, which is exceptionally crisp thanks to Perseverance's high-resolution cameras. The picture's soil is a pale dark brown to a light tan color, with smaller rocks strewn around the larger object. Dust that blows over the planet's surface all year caked the rock's pits. But none of this explains its source. Is this something weathered out of the local bedrock, as the team has hypothesized? Is it a piece of Mars that landed in the area as a result of a distant impact? Is it a meteorite or something else? Or is it anything else entirely?

That may not be especially exciting for science enthusiasts yet. It seems NASA is still putting together a list of potential theories before deciding on the most plausible one, but that is the essence of space exploration.

NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission is built on Perseverance. On February 18, the car-sized rover arrived on Mars and began searching Jezero Crater for evidence of ancient life.

The crater once had a deep lake and a river delta, which provided Perseverance with a variety of unique environments to explore. The rover would then save the best samples for a sample-return mission later in the decade, Space.com reports.

Perseverance is fitted with seven scientific instruments. SuperCam sits atop Perseverance's mast and can fire lasers at rocks as far away as 23 feet (7 meters) from the rover. SuperCam's cameras and spectrometers will analyze the composition of each vaporized rock cloud produced by each laser beam.

On March 2, SuperCam launched its first mission to Mars, firing on a target named Máaz, the Navajo word for Mars. The Perseverance team named Jezero's area the Canyon de Chelly, after a national monument on Navajo land in northeastern Arizona, and the Navajo Nation is collaborating with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to come up with suitable names for the region on Mars.

Check out more news and information on Space on Science Times.