Curiosity Finds an Iron Meteorite on the Red Planet
I’m just putting this picture out here for you to look at. Go ahead, check it out. I’ll wait.
For some reason, I find great beauty in looking at a piece of asteroid that landed on Mars, and that I can SEE it because of the Curiosity Mars rover. It never fails to amaze me that we have what amounts to a scientifically advanced Web cam on Mars, delivering up scenes like this pretty much every darned day!
This looks like a typical meteorite with a surface that has been changed (heated and pitted) by its trip from its parent asteroid to the surface of Mars. It’s very similar to the type of iron meteorites we find on Earth, right down to the way it is shaped and its gray-black luster that looks almost like a dull metal.
What you’re looking at here is a composite of several images taken (in the center, with circular rings around them) by the rover’s Remote Micro-imager, which is part of the rover’s Chemistry and Camera instrument (which helps planetary scientists study the chemical make up of materials) combined with images from the mast camera that helps the rover give us those wonderful distance shots on Mars.
This iron meteorite fell to Mars at some point in the past and, like meteorites that fall to Earth, it was shaped, grooved, and heated by its passage through the atmosphere. Areas on the rock that were not as heat-resistant as iron simply melted away, leaving behind rounded holes called regmaglypts. Planetary scientists are now debating just what caused some of the other cavities to form on the surface of this bit of space rock. One possibility is that the rock was somehow eroded along boundaries of the crystals in the rock. Did Mars weather place a role in shaping this rock after it survived its ride to the surface? No way to tell without picking it up and looking at it. Another theory is that the rock may have had embedded olivine crystals that formed inside the parent asteroid, close to the core. Something destroyed them, leaving behind some of the odder pits on this rock.
On Earth, if we found this type of meteorite, we’d hustle it off to a lab for more testing. But, since this thing fell to the Mars surface, Curiosity will have to tell us the tale, and astronomers will have to diagnose this from a distance. It’s a pretty cool discovery, and is actually the first for Curiosity. The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have each discovered meteorites, too. Mars appears to be a treasure trove of these space rocks!