NASA’s Mars rover has noticed one thing out of this world — a mysterious, skull-shaped elevation – sitting on a slope the place star-gazers say it doesn’t belong.
The mysterious rock – dubbed “Cranium Hill” was found April 11 by the Perseverance rover whereas it was driving down a ridge known as Witch Hazel Hill.
The hill is a part of the Jezero Crater, an enormous 28-mile-wide basin that scientists consider as soon as held a lake.
What makes the rock so fascinating is that it seems nothing like the encompassing space.
Whereas many of the terrain is light-colored and dusty, Cranium Hill is darkish, angular, and coated in tiny pits — as if it had been dropped there from some other place, in accordance with Margaret Deahn, a Ph.D. scholar at Purdue College working with NASA.
That may truly be what occurred.
Along with this contact, the rover has encountered a wide range of neat rocks that will have originated from elsewhere and transported to their present location, also referred to as “float,” Deahn wrote in a weblog publish in regards to the discover.
The crew believes Cranium Hill might have moved from its unique location by erosion, an historic impression, or one other highly effective pure occasion.
At first look, it even seemed like a attainable meteorite.
However after utilizing Perseverance’s laser-powered SuperCam to test a close-by related rock’s chemistry, NASA scientists dominated that out — it didn’t have the excessive iron and nickel ranges typical of area rocks.
One other attainable principle is that Cranium Hill is an igneous rock fashioned when lava or magma cooled, presumably thousands and thousands or billions of years in the past.
“Fortunately for us, the rover has devices that may measure the chemical composition of rocks on Mars,” Deahn mentioned, signaling extra exams are more likely to come to find out the rock’s origins.
