NASA discovers a strange 'zebra rock' on Mars

NASA discovers a strange ‘zebra rock’ on Mars

Martian exploration has produced an unprecedented image that has unleashed all kinds of speculation on the Internet in recent days. It is about an unusual rock with black and white stripes that the rover Perseverancein Mars since 2021, he has photographed with his camera Mastcam-Z left. When the POT received the image last week, Perseverance was no longer in the same area, but space agency scientists have studied it and explained it the possible origin of the striations of the ‘zebra rock’ in a post on the NASA blog.

Perseverance captured the image during its journey out of the crater Jezeroa journey that began just over a month ago. Although the beginning of Perseverance’s journey was slow due to the inclination it must ascend, NASA explains that the rover recently reached a stretch of flatter terrain which allowed him to move more easily. From this point of view, the rover’s imaging instruments can offer the Perseverance mission team a view not only of landmarks from the early stages of the mission, such as the Kodiak Mound, but also of a vast expanse of Martian terrain.

During a low resolution inspection with the navcamthe NASA team detected a strange visual pattern how far away they called ‘Freya’s Castle’in reference to a mountain located in the Grand Canyon. The team decided to use Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z to get an enhanced, multispectral view of the object before the rover continued its journey. The data that Perseverance sent back revealed that Freya Castle was a rock approximately 20 centimeters wide, with marked ‘zebra stripes’ running from top to bottom.

Although geological striations are abundant on Earth, They had never seen each other on Mars. With little information about its chemical composition, researchers believe that igneous or metamorphic processes —that is, processes that produce or change rocks through magma, heat, pressure, or chemical changes— could be behind the unusual markings from Freya Castle. There is even a possibility that the rock has rolled downhill from a higher elevationsince it is clearly a loose stone that does not match the terrain in which it was found.

‘The scientific team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any other seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps on all of Mars‘said NASA. ‘We hope that, as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance finds an outcrop of this new type of rock so that more detailed measurements can be obtained.’