Recently MastCam and ChemCam imaging revealed\u00a02 iron meteorites along our traverse.\u00a0 These are the first found by Curiosity, though the 2 MER, Spirit and Opportunity also identified iron meteorites.<\/p>\n
The Curiosity ones: called Lebanon and Littleton were identified by their high reflectivity (‘specular’) compared to the other rocks, native to Gale Crater. They are < 1 m across.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The freshness of the meteorite surfaces suggests that they have not been exposed to the water and salts that the mudstones and other sedimentary rocks experienced.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An interesting\u00a0puzzle is that we have only ever seen iron meteorites on Mars.\u00a0 Stony meteorites are by far the the most common sort on Earth and were also identified on the lunar surface by Apollo 17.\u00a0 Was there a recent break up of an iron meteorite parent body which led to a shower of meteorites on Mars or is it that the shiny surface enables us to identify iron metorites, but stony meteorites are more difficult?<\/p>\n
The image below shows a ChemCam RMI image superimposed on a Mastcam image.\u00a0 The pitted surface shows regmaglypts, which are caused by the\u00a0passage of a meteorite through an atmosphere. The action of sand carried by the wind in reecnt times on the surface of Mars may have enhanced these features.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently MastCam and ChemCam imaging revealed\u00a02 iron meteorites along our traverse.\u00a0 These are the first found by Curiosity, though the 2 MER, Spirit and Opportunity also identified iron meteorites. The Curiosity ones: called Lebanon and Littleton were identified by their high reflectivity (‘specular’) compared to the other rocks, native to Gale Crater. They are < […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}