Rock From Mars Heads Home After 600,000 Year Odyssey Across Space (theguardian.com) 38
A tiny piece of Martian basalt the size of a 10p coin will be launched on board a U.S. robot probe on Thursday and propelled towards the red planet on a seven-month journey to its home world. The Guardian reports: This extraordinary odyssey, the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle, will form a key part of Nasa's forthcoming Mars 2020 expedition. Space engineers say the rock -- which has been donated by the Natural History Museum in London -- will be used to calibrate detectors on board the robot rover Perseverance after it lands and begins its search for signs of past life on the planet. "When you turn on instruments and begin to tune them up before using them for research, you calibrate them on materials that are going to be like the unknown substances you are about to study. So what better for studying rocks on Mars than a lump that originated there?" said Professor Caroline Smith, the Natural History Museum's principal curator of meteorites.
Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated on the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. "Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there." It is thought that the Martian meteorite was created when an asteroid or comet plunged into the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, spraying debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and eventually crashed on to Earth. That meteorite -- now known as SAU 008 -- was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum since then.
Among the instruments fitted to the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they might contain organic materials that indicate life once existed -- or still exists -- on Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure this is done with maximum accuracy. Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will dump them in caches on the Martian surface. These will then be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and blasted into space towards Earth for analysis.
Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated on the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. "Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there." It is thought that the Martian meteorite was created when an asteroid or comet plunged into the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, spraying debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and eventually crashed on to Earth. That meteorite -- now known as SAU 008 -- was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum since then.
Among the instruments fitted to the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they might contain organic materials that indicate life once existed -- or still exists -- on Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure this is done with maximum accuracy. Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will dump them in caches on the Martian surface. These will then be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and blasted into space towards Earth for analysis.
It's made of chalk (Score:2)
That's what a Martian would think Earth rock looked like if the Martian acquired a meterorite blasted off the White Cliffs of Dover. Imagine the surprise at Martian Mission Control when the probe lands in White Sands New Mexico. Surely Mars isn't composed of just one homogenous rock type? How is this calibration supposed to work?
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Good analogy - chalk is made of micro-fossils, so an alien planning an Earth expedition would *greatly* benefit from having a sample of chalk instead of going in blind.
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Don't be an idiot. The aliens ' control command would not send a blind alienaut to the third rock from Sol.
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Well call our star "Sun". What other civilizations call their star is up to them and unknown to us.
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"A tiny piece of Martian basalt" is what's being sent, and can probably be found almost anywhere, as it is on Earth.
the size of a 10p coin (Score:3)
I have no idea what size Martian coins are.
Anyway why do they keep using coins (flat cylinders) for comparison with objects that aren't f;at or cylindrical?
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"10p" indicates the apparent size of 10 Phobos diameters from the surface of Mars. Jeez, what do they teach you kids in school nowadays?
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Rule of Acquisition #2: Money is everything.
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I have no idea what size Martian coins are.
Anyway why do they keep using coins (flat cylinders) for comparison with objects that aren't f;at or cylindrical?
I think using a 10p coin as an example is an excellent comparison so that people from the UK (or wherever a p is used as a coin) will know exactly what they are talking about.
As for me, I have no fucking idea what a 10p coin is, let alone how large it might be.
If only we had some unit of measurement that could have conveyed the size of the rock in question. Any unit of measurement.
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Oh, for a more widely known length of measurement, it's about 0.0011 Brontosaurus (or 0.175 Linguine).
https://www.theregister.com/De... [theregister.com]
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Americans will use just about any system of measurement, as long as it's not metric.
Deported (Score:5, Funny)
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So the poor rock, after venturing all the way here in search of a better life, is being deported back to where it came from.
Don't be such a walkover. Those damn Martians can keep their construction debris in their own back yard.
Timothy Dexter. (Score:5, Funny)
> the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle
Famously, one man did this, Timothy Dexter. He was the world's worst businessman, but luck was with him every time.
Buy a buttload of worthless currency issued by a country destined to lose a war to the British? He was the one laughing when the British lost and the newly formed US government paid out. Ship bed-warmers to the West Indies? Well, turns out they make great ladles for molasses manufacture.
Same with the woolen mittens he sent there; His ship got there at the same time traders were leaving for what's now Siberia.
On to the coal. Someone suggested, as a joke or as an insult, that Dexter could make money shipping coal to Newcastle.
So he did.
His ship hit the harbor at Newcastle the same week the coal-miners went on strike and he was the only game in town.
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I remember reference, perhaps here about a book...
At age 50, Dexter authored A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress, in which he complained about politicians, the clergy, and his wife. The book contained 8,847 words and 33,864 letters, but without punctuation and seemingly random capitalization. Dexter initially handed his book out for free, but it became popular and was reprinted eight times.[2] In the second edition, Dexter added an extra page which consisted of 13 lines of punct
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Worst. Addendum. Ever.
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I wonder (Score:2)
I really wonder how can a piece of rock from Mars come to Earth. I mean, it is really REALLY difficult to put something into orbit. Where did the energy required come from? Is it as "simple" as a meteor impact?
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Thinner atmosphere and proximity to the asteroid belt means more hits, some of them hard. I believe calculations for the theory were done in the seventies or so.
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Of course, some random basement dwelling armchair manager is much more knowledgeable in astrophysics, geology and nuclear physics than a bunch of PhD's that have studied for years and worked in those fields for decades...
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And after some time... (Score:2)
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Charlie Brown picks up a rock from the beach (Score:3, Funny)
Normal (Score:2)
I was thinking what a wasteful, pointless gesture, but using it to normalize the analysis done on Earth from the exact same rock, to verify the remote analysis equipment under Martian conditions, very nice.
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Thank you. You wrote in one sentence the actual purpose of the rock, which the Guardian journalist couldn't get right in an entire paragraph. It's to calibrate the sensors aboard the spacecraft after they've transitioned from an Earth environment to a Mars environment. It still doesn't explain why a sample of Earth rock wouldn't have been just as effective at that task. I suspect there's a good reason, but we can't expect the Guardian to explain it properly.
this is not science (Score:1)
"Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there."
this is not a scientist talking, this is hardly more than wishful thinking.
more accurately stated, the odds are better than none that "our" rock came from Mars.
But when it gets there (Score:2)
The poor rock: finally travels a zillion km to get back home, and then discovers it's permanently quarantined inside the metal jail cell that brought it there.
A truly just NASA would eject it once the calibration is complete.
Very cool! (Score:2)
My Masters and PhD research was on analyzing the noble gases trapped in Martian meteorites, as well as those produced by cosmic ray spallation when the meteorite was in transit.
Since the atmosphere of Mars has changed over time, the gases in a meteorite can reveal a lot of interesting aspects of its history, like during what era of Martian history it was ejected, how long it spent in space, its diameter in space prior to being abated by the earth's atmosphere, etc.
Of course, there's a lot of other "fingerpr