The NASA research team thought about the origin of these rocks even before Perseverance landed on Mars. Scientists have been speculating that the nature of the rocks was either sedimentary or igneous. Now he has come close to his answer.
The US space agency announced this through a tweet. It was written in this post, NASA Persevere, the base of Jezero Crater of Mars, has been running in it for about 10 months. It appears to have formed from red-hot magma—possibly from a long-dormant Martian volcano.
Perseverance Project Scientist Ken Farley said that I was beginning to think that we would never get the answer. Then our PIXL instrument looked at a broken patch of rock in the ‘South Sittah’ region and all became clear.
The drill machine is fitted in the robotic arm of the Perseverance rover. It drills a few inches into the surface of the rock. The robot’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) uses X-ray fluorescence to map the structure of the drilled rock.
Last month, the rover found a core sample from a rock in the South Sittah region. PIXL data showed that the rock contained high amounts of olivine crystals.
Farley says that when such crystals settle in slowly cooling magma, then this type of rock is formed. Scientists still do not know whether the rocks were formed by the cooling of the surface of the lava or the subsequent process.
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