Nickel-ron Meteorite Found on Mars
THE MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO NICKEL AND ITS APPLICATIONS
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THIS PITTED 'ROCK' on the surface of Mars is believed to be a meteorite. It is about the size of a soccor
ball and is composed mainly of iron and nickel.
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READ MORE about the origin of nickel on our 'Did You
Know' page.
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Nickel Magazine, March 2005 -- NASA’s Mars exploration rover called Opportunity has found a
nickel-iron meteorite, the first ever identified on another planet.
The pitted, football-size object is mostly composed of iron and nickel, according to data from the vehicle’s on-board spectrometers. Only a small fraction of the meteorites that fall to Earth have a similar composition.
"This is a huge surprise, though maybe it shouldn’t have been," says Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, U.S.A. the principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity.
"I never thought we would get to use our instruments on a rock from someplace other than Mars," Squyres says. "Think about where an iron meteorite comes from: a destroyed planet or planetesimal that was big enough to differentiate into a metallic core and a rocky mantle."
"Mars should be hit by a lot more rocky meteorites than iron meteorites," Squyres says. "We’ve been seeing lots of cobbles out on the plains, and this raises the possiblility that some of them may in fact be meteorites."
NASA’s chief scientist Dr. Jim Garvin says "exploring meteorites is a vital part of NASA’s scientific agenda, and discovering whether there are storehouses of them on Mars opens new research possibilities, including further incentives for robotic and then human-based return missions. Mars continues to provide unexpected science ‘gold’, and our rovers have proven the value of mobile exploration with this latest finding."
PHOTO: NASA
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