NASA, which is all set to launch its Mars Rover Perseverance on Thursday is to send back a rock from Mars, which has been identified to be 700,000 years old. It has been hypothesized that the rock is a fragment of a meteorite from Mars that had supposedly hit Earth several thousand years ago. It was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the Museum Of National History ever since.
This will form a key part of NASA’s Mars mission. “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.
Researchers believe that the Martian meteorite got formed 450 million years ago and got blasted off from Mars when an asteroid hit it at least 600,000-700,000 years ago launching its debris into space. One of these pieces is said to have crashed into the deserts of Oman and came to be known as the Say al Uhaymir (SAU 008). This meteorite is the one that is to be sent back to Mars.
The rock along with nine other types of material has been put in a housing, on the front of the rover where it will be scanned from time to time by the Sherloc instrument.
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, as reported by The Guardian.