A collection of recent photos of the Aeronautics and Space Administration’s rover rover (NASA) Perseverance reveals the presence of a cobblestone in Mars. Uniquely, the stone is still on top of another stone in a balanced position.
The photo was taken at Jezero Crater by the Mastcam-Z Perserverance camera, at SOL 466 (466th day on Mars), on Sunday (12/6).
For information, the Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras with powerful zoom lenses that take color pictures and videos, as well as three-dimensional images, as quoted from the official website. NASA.
Like the Mastcam camera on the Curiosity rover, the Mastcam-Z on Mars 2020 consists of two duplicate camera systems mounted on a mast that stand on the rover’s deck.
The cameras are next to each other and pointing in the same direction, providing a 3-D view similar to what the human eye would see, only better. They also have a zoom function to see details of distant targets.
James Rice, a geologist on the Mastcam-Z team of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, said balancing rocks or balanced rocks or sometimes also called Precariously Balanced Rocks (PBR), have small sizes to formations as high as hundreds of meters.
In his opinion, the formation occurred naturally and was not too extraordinary.
The so-called balanced stone is often connected to a larger bedrock. The ‘magic rock’ itself is found in Rockytop outcrops (an ancient, exposed bedrock formation) near the delta bottom.
He thinks it most likely formed after a large aeolian (wind) and/or chemical erosion carved it out of the local bedrock.
Rice calls these rock types more than just geological knowledge, in fact they are sometimes called “reverse seismometers” because the presence of PBR may be an indication of the presence of a Martian earthquake.
“If the rock is still in balance, then the ground hasn’t moved enough to knock it down. So we can use this feature to study the seismic history of an area,” Rice said. Gizmodo.
At the same time, the Perseverance rover also got a photo of a piece of shiny material tucked into some rocks. NASA believes the object is part of the rover’s thermal blanket when it lands in 2021.
In a tweet, NASA said the rover landed 2 kilometers from where the remains of the blanket were found, but noted that the object could have been moved by the wind or landed there on its own.
(lom/arh)
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