NASA’s extraterrestrial life-hunting robot has attempted to grind a rock on Mars and discovered something unusual inside.
In an area called Serpentine Rapids on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is designed to hunt for extraterrestrial life, has tried to grind one of the mysterious rocks from a red outcrop known as Wallace Butte.
The grinding patch, measuring 5 cm in diameter, revealed a striking patch of white, black, and green inside.
“One of the biggest surprises for the exploration team was the presence of dull green spots within the grinding patch, including dark cores with lighter green edges,” the NASA Perseverance mission team stated.
Strange green features appear in the image sent back by NASA’s robot from the Red Planet – (Photo: NASA).
On its homepage, NASA explains that on Earth, red rocks and soils often derive their color from oxidized iron (Fe 3+), the same form of iron that gives our blood its red hue and creates the rusty red color of iron and iron-containing alloys.
The green spots, like those observed in the grinding mark at Wallace Butte, are typically found in sedimentary rock formations composed of ancient red soils on Earth.
This green color forms when liquid water seeps through sediments before they harden into rock, triggering a chemical reaction that reduces oxidized iron to its reduced form (Fe 2+).
Importantly, on Earth, bacteria sometimes participate in this iron reduction process.
There is another possibility also related to life: the green spots could result from the decomposition of organic material—possibly from plants, animals, or microorganisms—that creates localized reducing conditions.
Additionally, interactions between sulfur and iron could also generate reducing conditions without the involvement of microorganisms.
Unfortunately, the narrow location prevented NASA’s extraterrestrial life-hunting robot from bringing its arm—equipped with expensive instruments like SHERLOC and PIXL—close to the green spots in the grinding mark.
Thus, the composition of these colored spots remains a mystery.
However, the research team will continue to search for similar interesting and surprising features in other rocks.
Perseverance is currently on a daring journey climbing the rim of the massive Jezero Crater, which may have once been an ancient river delta when the neighboring planet still had water like Earth.
Jezero Crater is the area where the rover landed in 2021, beginning its quest to find traces of extraterrestrial life that NASA believes still exists or at least once existed on Mars.
If successful, Perseverance will officially commence its exploration of a new territory.
In addition to Perseverance, NASA also operates another life-hunting robot on the Red Planet, Curiosity, which is active in Gale Crater.
