JAKARTA – Rock containing the mineral Olivine has been collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, and this is the third rock sample the robot has brought from Mars.
The report was first announced by NASA via a post on Twitter @NASAPersevere with the tweet, “a little piece of Mars to take with me,” he said.
Another little piece of Mars to carry with me.
My latest sample is from a rock loaded with the greenish mineral olivine, and there are several ideas among my science team about how it got there. Hypotheses are flying! Science rules. #SamplingMars https://t.co/L6lhCNdqWq pic.twitter.com/bFXxExhS1P
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) November 16, 2021
Compiled from Science Times, Saturday, November 20, it is known, Olivine is an iron magnesium silicate that makes up most of the Earth’s upper mantle. The team behind the Perseverance rover have many hypotheses about how olivine appears in rock.
Olivine has been found in several unusual locations in outer space. The material was discovered in a crater on the massive asteroid Vesta by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. An Olivine fingerprint was found in a Martian soil sample by the Curiosity rover, investigating another region of Mars.
NASA did not elaborate further on the circulating olivine theory. However, under the close supervision of Perseverance, the Jezero crater secretly reveals its geological past.
“My latest sample comes from a rock laden with the greenish mineral olivine, and there are some ideas among my science team about how it got there. Hypotheses fly! The rules of science,” NASA tweeted.
Billions of years ago Jezero Crater harbored a lake and river, making it a good place to look for signs of life. Perseverance’s main mission is to see if he can find remains, or chemical fossils, that suggest long-lost microbial life.
As part of this process, the rover fires its laser at the rock, disrupts the soil sample and places the best of it in a titanium tube.
The tiny piece is the third sample the rover has collected during its operation on the Red Planet. Perseverance landed on Mars last February and slowly slid across the floor of the 28-mile-wide Jezero crater.
Rover itself collected its first two samples in early September from a rock called Rochette. The success came after a failure to get the rock to stick inside the sample tube, which NASA claims is very brittle rock. These rock samples will soon be brought to Earth when NASA sends a spacecraft to retrieve them from Mars.
For your information, Perseverance is currently investigating the Sétah area, where scientists believe the presence of unique rocks could reveal information about Mars’ past and the history of water’s existence.
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