A white rock, sparkling and totally different from the others, was photographed by NASA’s Perseverance rover inside the Jezero crater, on the planet Mars. A fascinating discovery, which has fueled questions about the “strange” stone: not only is it the first of its kind, but scientists don’t even know how it ended up there. The rock was found in an area called “Mount Washburn”, an area where billions of years ago there was a lake and which is now “populated” by rocks, usually of the classic black color. This, analyzed by the rover’s SuperCam and Mastcam-Z, highlighted a structure composed of pyroxene and feldspar, silicate minerals found on Earth, for example, in igneous and metamorphic rocks.
As explained by NASA in a statement, scientists have nicknamed the rock “Atoko Point”, after the well-known peak on the eastern Grand Canyon. A one-of-a-kind structure that inspired the name for the Mars rock. According to measurements its dimensions are: 45 centimeters wide and 35 centimeters high: “In terms of size, shape and arrangement of its mineral grains and crystals, and potentially its chemical composition, Atoko Point is in a league of its own” .
Experts believe that the minerals of the curious rock could be linked to an underground magma body that is now exposed on the edge of the Jezero crater, but other scientists think that it may have arrived from a place not far away, transported by the extinct Neretva Vallis river, which billions of years it passed through the area where Perseverance is now located.
Having arrived, not without some problems, at Mount Washburn, the rover found several rocks with interesting characteristics, as confirmed by Dr. Brad Garczynski of Western Washington University in Bellingham: “The diversity of structures and compositions of Mount Washburn was an exciting discovery for the team, as these rocks represent a lot of geological gifts brought down from the crater rim and potentially beyond.”