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posted by CoolHand on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the space-rocks-r-us dept.

Laser-zapping of a globular, golf-ball-size object on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover confirms that it is an iron-nickel meteorite fallen from the Red Planet's sky.

Iron-nickel meteorites are a common class of space rocks found on Earth, and previous examples have been seen on Mars, but this one, called "Egg Rock," is the first on Mars examined with a laser-firing spectrometer. To do so, the rover team used Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument.

Scientists of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) project, which operates the rover, first noticed the odd-looking rock in images taken by Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) at at a site the rover reached by an Oct. 27 drive.

"The dark, smooth and lustrous aspect of this target, and its sort of spherical shape attracted the attention of some MSL scientists when we received the Mastcam images at the new location," said ChemCam team member Pierre-Yves Meslin, at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP), of France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Toulouse, France.

ChemCam found iron, nickel and phosphorus, plus lesser ingredients, in concentrations still being determined through analysis of the spectrum of light produced from dozens of laser pulses at nine spots on the object. The enrichment in both nickel and phosphorus at some of the same points suggests the presence of an iron-nickel-phosphide mineral that is rare except in iron-nickel meteorites, Meslin said.

Looks a little bit like a Prothean hand grenade. Coincidence?


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  • (Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:38PM

    by bucc5062 (699) on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:38PM (#422230)

    What bugs me about this piece are the six white dots in what seems to be a very geometric formation. I'm liking the idea this is a piece of a alien bulkhead, the ship blown up near Mars millennium ago and this object only recently get sucked into mars's gravity well and melted entering the atmosphere. As to teh rest of the ship....can we say Ceres?

    It explains a lot

    ;-)

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  • (Score: 2) by pgc on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:48PM

    by pgc (1600) on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:48PM (#422237)

    Had the same thought. Maybe they are reflections of the laser?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Taibhsear on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:20PM

    by Taibhsear (1464) on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:20PM (#422251)

    ...it's in the caption right under the photo, dude.

    The grid of bright spots on the rock resulted from the laser pulses.