In 2014, NASA’s Opportunity rover spotted a small rock that’s white on the outside, with a red interior - like a jelly doughnut, Lee said. The Mars doughnut isn’t the only pastry-shaped rock that has been found on the planet. The Perseverance rover is the first step of the campaign, a joint effort by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that seeks to bring scientifically selected samples back from Mars to be studied on Earth with lab equipment far more complex than could be sent to the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS) NASA's Perseverance rover has found a diverse. The rover team has no plans to do so, as it’s currently driving Perseverance in the opposite direction toward boulders it will eventually sample, Rice said. NASA’s Perseverance rover works at a rocky outcrop called Skinner Ridge in Mars’ Jezero Crater. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. … I would recommend that Perseverance divert from its current course to check it out.” 20, 2021, by the Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, was stitched together from six individual images after they were sent back to Earth. It’s also possible that the rock was “thrown away from another part of Mars by the impact of a large asteroid,” Lee said. In this case, the doughnut shape could have been created by weaker materials in the rock eroding upon entering Mars’ atmosphere, he added. The rock is surrounded by smaller rocks or fragments, “so maybe (it’s) a meteorite that broke up upon landing,” Lee said. National Science FoundationĪn observatory in Antarctica reveals ‘ghostly’ new portrait of the Milky Way Rice, who is on the rover’s Mastcam-Z imaging team, first spotted the rock on June 14.Īn artist's composition of the Milky Way seen through a neutrino lens (blue). NASAs Perseverance Mars Rover has sent images, recordings, video, and data back to Earth since its February 2021 landing on the surface of the planet. The Perseverance team hasn’t made the rover go closer to the doughnut-shaped rock to examine or sample it, so its exact makeup and origins are unknown, said Jim Rice, an assistant research scientist in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. The Mars “doughnut” is one of the latest objects captured about 100 meters (roughly 328 feet) away in the delta of the Jezero Crater by the SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager - one of the rover’s cameras helping scientists see what’s on the planet’s surface. The rover collects samples of rock and broken rock and soil (called regolith) for possible return to Earth by a future Mars mission. Launched in July 2020, the Mars Perseverance rover continues to explore the planet’s 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) Jezero Crater for signs of ancient microbial life, according to NASA. An image captured by the Mars rover Perseverance shows a mysterious doughnut-shaped rock on the red planet’s surface.
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