Opportunity Finds New Meteorite on Mars

The last nine weeks have been very eventful for the Martian rover Opportunity, which has spent the first six of them looking at Block Island, a large meteorite it found on the surface of the Red Planet. After it looked at it from most possible angles – in a bid to provide its mission controllers with enough data to assess its origins –, the exploration robot departed that location, en route to its previous destination, the Endeavor Crater. As it was riding along happily, during its 2,022nd day on Mars, the robot came across a new meteorite, three weeks after it left the old one.

The new space rock is a bit smaller than Block Island, which can mean that more of it burned up upon entering the atmosphere, or that it has been on the surface for longer, under constant wind and sand pressure that eroded it. Block Island had some fairly interesting conclusions to provide, in terms of how the planet's climate might have looked like in the past, and it may be that the new piece of space junk could aid in that regard as well. It's doubtful, however, that the rover will spend another one and a half months looking at it, as it needs to make its deadline as fast as possible.

According to experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, the newly found rock is no more than 18.5 inches (47 cm) long. The image was taken on the 2,020th sol (Martian day), and controllers had to make the robot go back about 92 feet (28 meters), until it reached the location. After it was brought near the meteorite, and made to face it, Opportunity was driven an additional 3.3 feet (one meter) towards Shelter Island, so that its robotic arm is now able to touch the structure. The JPL team plans to use the arm to make contact with Shelter Island, and to conduct a number of scientific measurements on it.

Early estimates place the weight of the meteorite at around half a ton, although it could turn out that it's heavier than that, experts say. It is also believed that the rock is simply too large to have plunged to Mars' current atmosphere, which means that the conditions when it crashed on the surface might have been quite different. That remains to be assessed, the JPL team says, as it could add to the picture of Mars' past that is currently being formed out of readings collected by landers, rovers and orbiters on and around the planet.