A small Martian meteorite will commence its journey home on a US probe robot on Thursday, a report in The Guardian said.
The meteorite will perform a key function in NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 expedition and will be used to calibrate detectors on board the robot rover Perseverance which aims to look for signs of past life on Mars.
The basalt-based rock has been on Earth for the last 6,00,000 years after what is thought to be a asteroid or comet, plunged into the Red planet and sprayed debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and crashed into space.
The meteorite was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been housed in the Natural History Museum since then. The curator of meteorites, Professor Caroline Smith said, “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?”
Also a member of the Mars 2020 science team, she noted, “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.”
The rock, named SAU 008, will ensure maximum accuracy in identifying organic materials that indicate if life once existed on our neighbouring planet. Several other instruments including a high-precision laser called Sherloc will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks.
“The piece of rock we are sending was specifically chosen because it is the right material in terms of chemistry, but also it is a very tough rock,” Smith added. “Some of the Martian meteorites we have are very fragile. This meteorite is as tough as old boots.”
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.