Mars’ rusty red surface may have given it its famous “Red Planet” status, but it would also appear that thousands of white rocks are strangely littered on the Martian ground. NASA’s Perseverance rover, a robotic geologist that has been exploring the Jezero Crater since early 2021, puzzled scientists when it delivered images of over 4,000 light-toned, pebble-sized rocks scattered all over the crater floor.
“These are very unusual rocks and we’re trying to figure out what’s been going on,” Candice Bedford, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana and a member of the Mars 2020 science team, said at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LSPC) last month.
The announcement comes as NASA wraps up an architectural review of returning Martian rocks to Earth as part of the agency’s ambitious Mars Sample Return (MSR) program.
www.space.com/thousands-mysterious-rocks-mars-sample-return