Monday, January 21, 2013

Shiny Martian Rocks



The Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars since early August, and has taken many beautiful photos of the Martian landscape. In early October, Curiosity took its first scoop of Martian soil to be placed inside SAM, an instrument which analyzes the composition of Martian soil. With the scoop of soil in hand, curiosity photographed the area where the sample was taken, and stumbled upon a strange looking shiny object (center of above image).  At first, astronomers who analyzed the photograph thought the object was a small piece of shrapnel from when the rover landed.  This brought testing to a halt, because astronomers did not want to run a piece of sharp shrapnel through a very delicate machine meant to filter and analyze soil. About a week prior, Curiosity photographed a piece of plastic with ChemCam that likely broke off during it's descent, so it was very possible that this was another piece. Just to be safe, Curiosity dumped the soil. Upon closer inspection of this shiny rock, astronomers realized that this was not a piece of metal or plastic, but rather a strange rock of Martian origin. What these rocks are made of is still unclear, but Curiosity can now safely use SAM to analyze soil samples and hopefully find out the composition of these rocks!

Image credit:
 NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS