NASA's Perseverance rover has stumbled upon a rock on Mars that's turning heads. The unusual rock, nicknamed Phippsaksla, was spotted in the Jezero Crater, and experts think it might be a rare iron-nickel meteorite, basically a piece of space that crash-landed on Mars.
What makes Phippsaksla so intriguing is how different it looks from everything around it. At about 80 centimeters wide, it has a smooth, shiny surface that caught the rover's cameras immediately. NASA's laser tool, the SuperCam, confirmed high levels of iron and nickel, meaning this rock didn't grow on Mars, it came from somewhere else in space.
While meteorites aren't new to Mars, this is the first time Perseverance has found one that's metal-rich, possibly from the core of a long-ago asteroid. Scientists are excited because rocks like this act as time capsules, offering clues about the violent collisions that shaped our solar system billions of years ago.
Phippsaksla could even be on the "VIP list" for NASA's upcoming Mars Sample Return mission, which aims to bring Martian rocks back to Earth. Even after more than five years exploring the Red Planet, Perseverance is still surprising scientists, proving that Mars is full of secrets just waiting to be discovered, and sometimes, they come in the shape of a shiny, weird-looking rock.
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