The Curiosity rover again pleased us with an interesting find – according to NASA, it may be an iron meteorite, which will be the third such rover find on Mars. The image was taken on January 12, while the rover was exploring the foot of Mount Sharp.
Apparently, this object is an iron-nickel meteorite, one of the few on the Red Planet. Three bright dots indicate that Curiosity has already attempted to study the object with the ChemCam laser, which uses a spectrometer to assess the composition of rocks.
If ChemCam's results show that the meteorite is mostly iron, this would support the theory that the object was once part of an asteroid's core. Thus, the meteorite will become one of the links in the chain of such fragments already discovered (five were found by the Opportunity rover, and two of the same potential meteorites were captured even earlier by the Spirit rover).
Oddly enough, all discovered objects were almost entirely composed of iron, while on Earth, 95 percent of meteorites are stones. Scientists suggest that such a difference lies in the discrepancy between the terrestrial and Martian environments, which affect these objects in different ways. In addition to this, there is a theory that against the background of the rocky landscape of Mars, it is much more difficult to detect any particular stone of alien origin than on Earth.
