Perseverance rover spies stunning blue rocks on Mars and makes a startling discovery

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured the clearest view of the Martian landscape yet, showing striking blue rocks on the dusty surface, raising pivotal questions about the red planet’s complex history.

The new image from Mars shows rich, dark blue, jagged volcanic rocks spread across the bottom of an ancient Martian lake at Mount Washburn, named after a mountain in Yellowstone National Park. Besides these beautiful blue rocks, the cameras on board the rover captured a white rock, something never seen before on Mars.

“That was like the textbook definition of [chasing] “The bright, shiny thing because it was so bright and white,” says NASA planetary geologist Dr. Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“Every now and then, you’ll see some strange things in the Martian landscape,” Dr. Morgan adds.

The Perseverance team captured the new images using the rover’s SuperCam camera, designed to examine rocks and soil on Mars using camera, lasers and spectrometers, as well as MastCam-Z.

The SuperCam system, which weighs 10.6 kilograms (23.4 pounds), is mounted on the “head” of the rover’s long-necked mast and can send 4.2 megabits of data back to Earth every day. As for MastCam-Z, its primary function is to capture high-definition videos and 3D color panoramas of the Martian surface. This camera weighs about four kilograms (8.8 pounds) and records approximately 2-megapixel images. It can send approximately 150 megabits of data to Earth per Martian day (Martian day).

The striking white rock is named “Atoko Point,” named after a large cliff in the Grand Canyon. The rock is about 35.6 cm (14 inches) long, and thanks to SuperCam’s spectrometers, scientists have determined that the white rock is anorthosite, a type of rock that has never been observed on Mars before although it has long been theorized.

This type of rock is exciting because, despite extensive research, it is unclear how they form on Earth, let alone Mars. This is the dominant type of rock on the Moon as well, covering about 80% of the Moon’s surface. The Atoko Point volcanic rock likely formed deep beneath the surface of Mars, or may have been transported by ancient Martian rivers that dried up long ago. At this point, it is unknown.

What scientists He does However, what we do know is that this rock is important for understanding Mars and its history.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University/MSSS