Book Rock? NASA Curiosity Rover Finds Stone Over Martian Surface That Resembles Paperback Shape

On its 3,800th Martian day over the red planet's surface, the NASA Curiosity rover was able to take a snap of rock that resembles the shape of a book.

Terra Firme: the Martian Book Rock

According to SciTechDaily, the book rock over the Martian surface has been dubbed "Terra Firme." The book rock appears like a book's open pages and has a length of roughly one inch.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab reports that the Curiosity rover was able to snap it with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on its robotic arm's end. Weather.com also adds that NASA also unveiled an anaglyph image of it. This means that viewers can observe the figure in 3D if they have 3D glasses of their own.

It is common for unusually shaped rocks to be found across the Martian surface. The JPL notes that these rocks often result from water that had entered rock cracks long ago. The water then transports harder components with it. After being exposed to wind and sand blasts for eons, softer parts of the rock vanish, leaving the harder components to stay.

NASA Curiosity Rover

The Curiosity rover is part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission of NASA. Curiosity is currently the biggest and strongest rover that has been deployed to Mars. According to Brittanica, the rover is roughly 3-meters-long and 900-kilograms-heavy. The rover was launched back on November 26, 2011, and reached the red planet on August 5, 2012. This means that it has been more than a decade since the rover started exploring the red planet's surface.

Unlike other rovers, the landing of Curiosity was not eased by any air bags. Instead, it landed over the surface by three tethers from its body, also referred to as the sky crane. It reportedly landed on the Gale crater, which is a low-elevation area.

The Curiosity rover is on a mission to know if the red planet harbored conditions for supporting microbial life. During the early stages of its mission, some scientific tools of the rover were able to find mineral and chemical proof that there were areas across the Martian surface that used to be habitable. The rover keeps on looking into records of rock from a period when the planet could have housed microbial existence.

NASA adds that the Mars Science Laboratory mission is a vital step towards exploration of the red planet. This is because the mission has shown its capacity to land huge and heavy rovers, like Curiosity, to the Martian surface in a precise area. It has also demonstrated remote obility to look into diverse Martian surface and analyze samples from different environments.

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