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If you are watching this Mars vista evokes childhood memories of the song “One of these things is not like the others”, NASA the scientists are right there with you.

Persistence, a laboratory the size of a car on six wheels, traveled to the Red Planet’s Neretva Valley last week. Although this region may look like a barren desert, it was once an ancient river channel that flowed into Jezero Crater billions of years ago.

As Perseverance crossed the inlet, the rover encountered a boulder-covered hill, with one in particular catching the science team’s attention: a speckled light rock amid a sea of ​​dark lumps.

“Every once in a while you’ll just see some weird thing in the Martian landscape and the team says, ‘Oh, let’s go there,'” Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, told Mashable. “It was like the textbook definition of (chasing) the bright, shiny thing because it was so bright and white.”

The stone is so extraordinary that scientists said it was inside a league of its own. Closer analysis with the rover’s instruments showed it was likely anorthosite, a type of rock never before seen in Mars exploration, Stack Morgan said, although there are signs that such rocks should exist. Not even Curiosity roverwho has observed more variety in Gale Crater, has seen one quite similar to this one.

Although such anorthosite rocks are found on the Moon and in mountain ranges on Earth, they are generally considered rare in the Solar System. Genuine Martian examples have eluded researchers, including in our planet’s inventory Meteorites of the Red Planet who traveled through space to get here.

This finding could support the idea that the early crust of Mars was much more complex than once thought – and perhaps similar to the original crust of Earth. Understanding the ancient Martian crust could also help unlock secrets about Earth’s evolution and how life got here.

“It was like the textbook definition of (chasing) the bright, shiny thing.”

The rover team named the special boulder, about 18 inches wide and 14 inches tall, “Atoco Point” after a landmark in the Grand Canyon.

Perseverance has been exploring Jezero Crater, an ancient dried-up delta on Mars, since 2021.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

“Seeing a rock like Atoco Point is one of those hints that, yes, we have anorthosites on Mars, and this could be a sample of this material from the lower crust,” Stack Morgan said. “If we see it later in the context of other rocks, it could give us insight into how the earliest crust on Mars formed.”

Anorthosite is made mostly of feldspar, a mineral associated with lava flows. Feldspars are richer in silica than basalts and are among the last things to crystallize from magma. On the other hand, basalts, dark volcanic rocks rich in iron and magnesium, are ubiquitous on the surface of Mars.

Many of Perseverance’s scientists believe that subsurface magma made the minerals at Atoko Point, and that a giant impact on Mars may have scooped the rock to the surface, a piece that later fell from the rim of the crater to its current location. Others believe that the stone was made somewhere far away and a gushing ancient river carried it there.

The NASA team hopes to find many more rocks like Atoco Point in a few months when Perseverance reaches the crater rim.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona

Whether scientists will ever get hold of this stone or one like it remains to be seen. The persistence was sample collection from the Jezero crater in 2021. The region, an ancient dried-up delta, is where scientists believe microscopic organisms may have existed long ago. But the plan to fly rocks and dust to Earth, a complex mission called Mars Sample Return, is in jeopardy. Its rising costs have led to cutbacks and warnings of repeal by Congress. The agency now does a desperate plea for ideas on saving the mission.

Perhaps surprisingly, the rover team chose to walk away from Atoko Point without even taking a sample, despite its importance. That’s because the team hopes to find many more like it in a few months when the rover reaches the rim of the crater. Finding examples from its original location can provide scientists with much more context.

“We said, ‘OK, let’s keep this rock in mind,'” Stack Morgan said. “Maybe we’ll come back here if we don’t find this elsewhere on the rim of the crater.”