Mars rover makes surprising rock find
Mars rover makes surprising rock find
12Oct2012
WASHINGTON (AFP)
A rock analyzed by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has a surprising and more varied composition that resembles rare rocks from the bowels of our planet, the US space agency said.
"This rock is a close match in chemical composition to an unusual but well-known type of igneous rock found in many volcanic provinces on Earth," Curiosity co-investigator Edward Stolper of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement, released on Thursday.
"With only one Martian rock of this type, it is difficult to know whether the same processes were involved, but it is a reasonable place to start thinking about its origin."
On Earth, rocks with similar compositions usually come from "processes in the planet's mantle beneath the crust, from the crystallization of relatively water-rich magna at elevated pressure," according to the NASA statement.
Curiosity, on the Red Planet since August 6, used two instruments to study the football-sized rock, which is dubbed Jake Matijevic, or Jake for short.
One was the arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer -- known as APXS -- and the other was the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument.
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