NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered a meteorite on Mars.
The area’s rock is about 0. 3 meters wide and composed primarily of iron and nickel, Curiosity team members announced on Twitter Thursday, Feb. 2. And the meteorite has a name.
“We call it ‘Cacao,'” the Curiosity team wrote in the Twitter post (opens in new tab), which shows a photo of the rock.
Related: 15 Surprising Photos of Mars Taken with NASA’s Curiosity Rover
Car-sized Curiosity landed inside Mars’ 154-kilometer-wide (96-mile) Gale crater in August 2012 in an effort to determine whether the region may have harbored Earth-like life long ago.
The robot’s work over the past decade has answered this question in the affirmative, and it appears that Gale harbors a potentially habitable formula of lakes and streams in the ancient afterlife. Moreover, this basin likely persisted for millions of years in a row, perhaps allowing time for Martian microbes to rise.
Curiosity isn’t a life-hunting mission, so it’s not for the symptoms of those microbes, if they ever existed. But Curiosity’s cousin Perseverance, which landed in another crater on Mars in February 2021, is looking for life and is also collecting dozens of samples for a long journey back to Earth.
Since September 2014, Curiosity has been on the flanks of Mount Sharp, a massive massif that rises about 5. 5 kilometers into the sky from the center of Gale.
The rover recently reached an important milestone on this trek, achieving sulfate-rich deposits that formed in dry conditions. Curiosity’s observations of those rocks may help scientists better understand when and how Gale Crater, and the red planet as a whole, went from being a warm, wet location to the frigid desert it is today, project team members said.
News of liquid water on Mars suggests planet is geothermally active
— Stunning images of Mars taken via Curiosity rover show ancient climate changes
— Water on Mars would possibly have flowed for a billion years longer than expected
Curiosity has traveled 18. 31 miles (29. 47 km) on Mars so far, according to its project page (opens in new tab). Tweets with photos on Thursday.
“Here’s the meteorite I discovered in 2016. Se called ‘Egg Rock,’ aka the golf ball,” reads Thursday’s Twitter post (opens in new tab).
“And while my team calls this 7-foot-long meteorite ‘Lebanon,’ I call it THE BEAST,” reads a tweet Thursday (opens in new tab).
Curiosity discovered Lebanon, or the Beast, in May 2014, NASA did not release images of the big rock until July of that year. The Beast and two nearby stones were the first meteorites Curiosity discovered on the Red Planet.
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Michael Wall is a senior area at Space. com (opens in new window) and joined the team in 2010. It basically covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military areas, but is known for its interest in the rhythm of space art. His e-book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Prior to adapting to ScienceArray, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He holds a Ph. D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a Graduate Certificate in Scientific Writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what your most recent assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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