NASA’s Perseverance rover collided with a rocky donut that probably fell to the surface from the sky. A strange dark-colored rock with a characteristic hole in the center got into the lens of the Perseverance camera on June 23. This mysterious rock lay surrounded by other blocks of the same color, which indicates their common origin. Perhaps this rock is an alien for Mars.
The raw image was noticed and processed by amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson, who published an exciting photo of a doughnut rock on June 24.
“A rock that looks like a doughnut could be a large meteorite that split into pieces when falling on the surface of Mars,” representatives of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said via Twitter.
Might be wrong but I reckon @NASAPersevere has spotted a big, ring-shaped meteorite in Jezero crater… Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/S Atkinson pic.twitter.com/k4TUcPgvWy
— Stuart Atkinson (@mars_stu) June 24, 2023
Finding a meteorite on the Red Planet is not an emergency. For example, Perseverance somehow discovered a potential meteorite just a few weeks after landing in February 2021. And the older brother of the rover, Curiosity, has discovered several space rocks on Mars since landing in August 2012, including a metal one, which was given the nickname Cacao in February of this year.
By the way, the Perseverance find is not the first rock noticed that resembles a cake. In January 2014, NASA’s Opportunity rover discovered a rock, white on the outside and red on the inside, which led team members to compare it to a jelly doughnut.
Now the Perseverance rover is exploring the crater of Mars, which has a width of 45 kilometers and is called Jezero. In the past, this crater had a large lake and a river delta. The rover, the size of a car, studies this ancient environment, looks for traces of past life and collects dozens of samples for further return to Earth.
A small Ingenuity helicopter helps a large rover in its work. Ingenuity went to Mars together with Perseverance and quickly coped with five demonstration flights that showed that aerial research on the Red Planet was possible.
Now this brave 1.8 kg helicopter is on an extended mission, exploring routes and promising scientific goals for its robotic partner. To this day, Ingenuity has completed 51 successful flights on Mars, covering a total of 11.7 kilometers above the surface of Mars in the air.
Earlier, we reported how Perseverance noticed a rock in the shape of a dormant cat on Mars.
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