Looks like Oppy has finished looking at the heatshield and is now heading for some cheese

As a (modest) collector of them, I have to say that - lying in a small depression, rounded, and marked with shallow indentations that look very much like regmaglypts or "thumbprints" to give them their nickname - that cheesy rock looks an awful lot like an iron or stony/iron meteorite to me...

Stu

Sho' looks like that, Stu!

That was my first guess, but I am Rank Amateur Junior Apprentice Third Class.

In lyford's image, it looks like the rock has disrupted the underlying small dune.
Does this mean it fell (if it indeed fell) fairly recently (in geological terms) ?
I think if it was buried deep and came up through wind erosion of the soil matrix, the pit it is situated in would look differently.

Feel free to insult me for being wrong, I have repeatedly confessed I am "geologically challenged"

To me, the small depression that the rock occupies appears to be the result of scour. It looks as if sediment has built up on the left side (up-wind side?) of the rock and has been eroded from the right side (down-wind side?) of the rock.

What I find curious about the rock, in addition to the small cavities inthe surface, is the fact that it looks so rounded. Has that rounding been caused only by the wind or was some other process involved?

With wind and a rock - you end up with the dust tail downwind from the rock - and an erroded area on the upside side.

Doug

Here's the pancam subframe image from sol 339

My thoughts are that this rock is a piece of an evaporite unit that is ejecta. The depressions may be solution cavities. The dune features are aeolian scour and a tail.

We'll know more once we get to thwack it with the virtual hammer...

--Bill

space.com article:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/mars_object_050113.html

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has come across an interesting object -- perhaps a meteorite sitting out in the open at Meridiani Planum. Initial data taken by the robot’s Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) is suggestive that the odd-looking “rock” is made of metal.

An article on Space.com quotes Squyres as saying that the rock is "made of metal", though he doesn't specify what metal. He sees this as possible evidence for a meteoric origin, though admits that this is a "preliminary" analysis.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I didnt know B2 went that far off course

Iron meteorite?


Doug

Some iron meteorite piccies for ya…

http://buhlplanetarium3.tripod.com/CSC-Meteorite.JPG ( part of "Canyon Diablo" meteorite that made “Meteor Crate” in Arizona, 50,000 years ago… )

http://obswww.unige.ch/~bartho/EAAE/L2/l2_fig17.gif ( Recovery of the famous “Willamette” meteorite… )

http://www.lvaas.org/gallery/2001/bus-trip...e-meteorite.jpg ( Current location of the Willamette meteorite – the foyer of the Hayden Planetarium.)

Now the more I look at that object on Meridiani the more I’m convinced it’s a meteorite. It’s got all the features of a meteorite, and if Steve S says it’s made of metal - as many meteorites are, being fragments of asteroids - then that’s promising, right..?

Actually, I'm sat here packing a few of my (small!) meteorites up for a talk I'm giving in a school tomorrow, including a piece of Canyon Diablo which must have been held by several thousand pairs of schoolkid hands by now. That object on Mars isn't that big, so wouldn't have made much of a crater,especially as it landed on hard ground anyway. I mean, look how pathetic - sorry, disappointing! - the "crater" left by Oppy's heatshield was...

I know, I know, crazy idea, but... well... we find meteorites from Mars here on Earth, so what would be the odds of Oppy finding a piece of Earth there on Meridiani?

As the song said, “the chances of anything coming from Mars… are a million to one…”

Aha. But still they come…

Stu

Impressive? No, hole-ly remarkable!

some of it looks shiney

Guess we'll know if it breaks the RAT when they try to grind it.

Mmm.... gruyere....

OK. This rock was found right next to Endurance. Visual inspection displays little resmblence to rocks found locally. The mini-TES says it's metallic. It left no indications of an impact crater of its own.

It certainly appears to be exogenous to me. It could be a fragment from an impact on the other side of the planet that bounced and rolled into it's curent position, but the odds favor it being a piece of the impactor that created Endurance Crater.

I can't wait to see an attempt to RAT it.

If the rock is indeed an iron meteorite that might very well destroy the RAT.

That's true...I would think they'd proceed very cautiously if they tried to RAT it. On second thought though, I guess I really can't think of a good reason why they'd want to even take that chance, if it is metallic. The other instruments on the IDD should be able to determine if it is a meteorite.

Steve Squires gave a little presentation here on the iron meteorite. Pretty interesting.

Any specifics?

Was it revealed if they've done Mossbaur or APX integrations on it yet?

"Meteorite" under the microscope:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...ger/2005-01-14/

Perhaps all those little "cobbles" strewn over Meridiani are meteorites too? They have yet to take a look at those.

Checking out the RAT before grind?

Pancam image with another piece of heatshield debris:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DPP2594R1M1.JPG

Also, LOTS of "cobbles" on the surface and right in the distance near the horizon, top left you can just make out what appear to be a group of rocks? They must be pretty big.

There's more outcropping over there - without doubt - that odd pink colour was what we saw of Burns Cliff before we got to the crater rim

Doug

Ok how's this for irony. We've found Martian meteorites on Earth. Wouldn't it be a kick if cheese rock is really a meteorite that was blasted off of early Earth by the asteroid or planetoid hit that created our moon?

Interesting MI of The Rock. Two things I notice right away: there are "fresh" looking scratches on the rock and you can see bright reflections from small
?crystals? in the rock.

I'm not up too much on meteorites: does it look like one, with a fusion crust?

--Bill

Maybe it was kicked up by the heat shield?

It would also explain why it looks like it was just dumped there recently

I doubt that is Victoria...doesn't look far away enough...but it is defintely an outcrop. Maybe Vostok?

The rover is now examining the rock with the IDD:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...cam/2005-01-15/ .

The Rock doesn't look like it was emplaced that recently. That is an appreciable scour/dust tail around it. And you don't see a source for this rock in the Bellyflop area.

What is the azmuth of that outcrop? We can locate a feature from the orbital images of the area.

Great, Bruce: the thwacker is deployed.

--Bill

More microscopic imager shots of the rock which has now ben brushed, it's got to be a meteorite

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DPP2939M2M1.JPG

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...ger/2005-01-16/

looks like you can see the flow lines....

Especially in this one....

How about this fine banding:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DPP2939M2M1.JPG

......and what about the pebble like feature in the bottom right of this photo:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...DPP2593L7M1.JPG

Can you get these sort of features in meterorites?

Not sure if it's posted yet, but there's an interesting article at CNN about the possible meteorite:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/18/m...over/index.html

It IS a metoerite !!!!

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6899

The Opportunity rover has found the first meteorite on the surface of Mars, scientists confirmed to New Scientist on Tuesday.

Scientists first spotted the unusual pitted rock sitting by itself near the rover's discarded heat shield earlier in January. An instrument that measures thermal emissions scanned the rock from afar and it appeared to be made from metal, suggesting it was a meteorite.

Then, on 15 January, Opportunity extended its instrument arm to the rock. It used its Mossbauer spectrometer to confirm that the rock was made of iron and nickel, showing that it must indeed be a meteorite that had fallen from the sky.

After an hour of grinding, one-quarter of the grinding head had worn away.

Thank god they tried the RAT on a iron meteorite on Earth

iirc - the heads cutting surfaces are diamond in a resin setting - that self sharpens over time - expendable but very long lasting - and they've both suffered only a tiny tiny ammount of wear so far - but something like that meteorite would kill it in a jiffy

Doug

That meteorite is bit less surprising when you consider that (as, I think, it was "New Scientist" that suggested in its previous article) it may well be a chunk of the impactor that produced Endurance Crater in the first place. (It is a rather eeerie coincidence, though, that they found it sitting right next to the heat shield.)

As for the fact that it's sitting on the surface rather than being partially buried: remember how the Meridiani Plain wa formed in the first place. A flat layer of soft sedimentary rock, created billions of years ago and then buried, has only recently been reexposed, and is now being slowly ground away from the top by an extremely shallow layer (just a fraction of a meter thick) of basalt sand that's blowing in from some other locality and migrating gradually across the surface of the entire huge rock sheet from one end to the other. If that iron meteorite hit the surface after the sand layer had already begun to be deposited, then the migrating sand would just tend to "flow" around it -- any time the wind piled up sand on the lower part of its windward side, this would lead to it starting to sit on an increasingly high pedestal of protected sand underneath it, then that pedestal would finally collapse under its weight and leave it sitting on the current surface of the overall sand sheet again. And the meteorite, of course, is far too hard to be eroded away by the sand. (Note that there seems to be some accumulation of sand trapped in its side pits, just as you'd expect in this scenario.)

If this meteorite really is a chunk of the Endurance impactor, though -- not that we'll ever know for sure -- it would prove that that crater must have been blasted out after the sand sheet had already covered the Meridiani sedimentary rock sheet -- otherwise the meteorite would be sitting snugly in a socket that it had blasted out of the rock sheet itself, in which case the sand WOULD partially cover it now.

This may be total nonsense, but could it be that 'Bounce' is a (stone) meteorite as well and the 'Mars rocks' found on Earth are actually not from Mars?

Very unlikely. The SNC meteorites ahve been pegged as pretty definitely coming from Mars on the grounds that:

(1) Some of them contain trapped gas bubbles that just happen to contain exactly the same mixture of isotopes that Viking found in Mars' atmosphere.

(2) All of them save the famous ALH84001 were last melted 1.3 billion years ago or less (in some cases only 200 million years ago) -- and there is no conceivable way that volcanic processes could be going on in any asteroid that late (or on the Moon).

(3) Some of them contain water-weathered minerals unlike any seen in any regular stony meteorites, indicating that they had to be exposed to small traces of groundwater of the type that could be found in Mars' subsurface.

As for Bounce Rock, our evidence on it is indirect: it has almost the same mineral mixture as some Mars meteorites -- which means that, although there's no way to firmly rule out that it's a stony meteorite, the odds are extremely high that it's a chunk of Martian basalt thrown as ejecta from a big cratering event, maybe a long distance away on the surface.

Postscript: in a nicely detailed new Planetary Society report on both rovers' most recent activities ( http://planetary.org/news/2005/mer-update_0121.html ), Steve Squyres describes a scenario for the history of the iron meteorite that seems to be the same thing I guessed. (The article also confirms that the strange mottling some Forum readers have noted on one of Opportunity's rear Hazcams is due to the recent dust storms.)