From mysterious purple-coated rocks to formations that look a bit like a doorway, our trusty Martian robot pals have made some cool and sometimes strange findings over the years.
Every now and then, they capture an image of a rock that looks completely out of place in the Martian landscape. This happened on September 13, when NASA’s Perseverance rover spotted a particularly unusual rock lying on top of otherwise unremarkable Martian terrain.
The rock drew attention online, likely because of how strange it looks compared to its surroundings.
The rock has also caught the attention of the Perseverance team, of course, who called it “unlike any seen on Mars before”. Perseverance is currently heading to Dox Castle, a part of the Jezero Crater that could have been created when the asteroid impact that created the crater sent rocks flying.
While slowly climbing the slopes to the crater’s rim earlier this month, team members spotted an unusual texture in the distance and decided to observe it using the Mastcam-Z camera. A few days later, after Perseverance had already left the area, NASA received the data and realized how strange the roughly 20-centimeter (8-inch) rock was.
“The science team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps all of Mars,” Perseverance team member and doctoral student at Purdue University, Athanasios Klidaras, explained in a NASA blog.
“Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes.”
While people have informally named it the “zebra rock“, the NASA team has dubbed it “Freya Castle”. The team believes that the rock has likely arrived at its current position from elsewhere given how different it is from the surrounding rock, perhaps having rolled downhill. This is good news, as the rover is headed uphill right now, so perhaps it will encounter more similar rocks in the coming weeks.
