The rocks indicate an ancient, iron-rich environment, but the rover wasn't able study details of the rock's composition.
The Perseverance rover has uncovered a compelling red rock on Mars that contains blobs of green, hinting at the stone’s composition., could not be interrogated to the fullest due to the rover’s instruments not having enough room to work in. But the features do hint at how they formed on an ancient, wetter Mars.. Mars is the only world in our solar system where space agencies have active landers driving around the planet’s surface, imaging and digging up evidence of its ancient past.
Though Mars has much more extreme temperature fluctuations than our planet, and is much more arid, scientists believe it had large lakes of liquid water on its surface billions of years ago. One of those lakes was in Jezero Crater, in which Perseverance landed three years ago.The basic idea behind Perseverance’s astrobiological search is that, if life existed on Mars, it would’ve looked like some of the earliest life on Earth: microbes that eked out existence in shallow water.
Now, Perseverance has investigated another compelling target: the red rock with green spots. Hardly a smoking-gun for alien life, the stone nevertheless provides a window into Mars’The rock’s redness is likely due to oxidized iron, but the Perseverance team wanted to take a closer look.
Given the possibilities, the green-splotched deposit warranted further investigation. But there wasn’t enough space around the rock sample for Perseverance to unfurl its instruments, so the rock’s composition couldn’t be studied in greater detail. Hopefully there are more rocks bearing similar features in Perseverance’s near-future. The rover is currently making its way up the rim of Jezero Crater, climbing out of its Martian cradle towards some loftier understanding of our arid next-door neighbor.Mars is generally regarded as a place that can't support life, but new research sheds light on how the Red Planet evolved into the barren, inhospitable world we see today.
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