NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Spots a Rock from the Stars

For five years, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been kicking up red dust around Jezero Crater, cataloging everything from ancient riverbeds to those weird polka-dotted rocks you see everywhere. But during a routine checkup last month, the six-wheeled rover found something that didn’t belong. A single boulder called Phippsaksla poked out of the cracked bedrock like an unwanted guest at a family reunion. This 31-inch wide rock caught the rover’s cameras with its sharp edges and pockmarked surface, implying it came from farther away from those rusty Martian plains than you’d think.

On September 2nd, Perseverance saw Phippsaksla from afar, a tiny silhouette on the horizon. On Martian day 1629, the rover decided to take a closer look and snapped some detailed photos with its Left Mastcam-Z camera. The images show a big chunk of rock that had worn into caves and ridges, sticking out like a sore thumb among the flat, broken slabs around it. Vernodden, the location on Jezero’s rim where this happened, is made up of bedrock formed by ancient impacts. Most of the rocks in this area are close to the surface and have been worn smooth over millions of years by wind and sand. Phippsaksla, on the other hand, stood tall, with a shape that was just a little too young and clean for the neighborhood.

Scientists back on Earth took a closer look using SuperCam, Perseverance’s laser-wielding eye that zaps rocks to reveal their composition. What did it find? Phippsaksla is loaded with iron and nickel, metals you don’t often find in Martian soil. You find those in the denser centers of asteroids, where the extreme heat would sort out all the heavy elements and form solid cores. Maybe an asteroid collision ripped one of those bodies apart and the shards were sent hurtling across the solar system until one crashed into Mars. If that’s the case, Phippsaksla would be Perseverance’s first iron-nickel meteorite, a nice badge of honor after all these years of digging through ordinary gravel.

Opportunity and Spirit, the dynamic rover duo from the early 2000s, found the first iron meteorites on Mars, including a large one the former drove around like a tourist. Curiosity, Perseverance’s predecessor, in Gale Crater, contributed to the total by discovering fist-sized Cacao in 2023 and bus-sized Lebanon in 2014. Jezero Crater is the same age as Gale; both basins were hit by the same asteroid barrage billions of years ago. Smaller craters in the region are new arrivals, but Perseverance had previously avoided these metal interlopers. Phippsaksla fills the gap, indicating that meteorites are more uniformly scattered on the Martian surface than previously imagined.

Confirmation takes more than one scan, so the team will bring Perseverance closer and use PIXL to map the rock’s constituents in greater detail. That equipment, a pixie-sized X-ray scanner, will seek for metals found in Earth’s rarest meteorites, which collectors pay a fortune for. If they locate it here, Phippsaksla could be a sample candidate. Perseverance possesses a unique ability: it can drill, seal, and store rock cores for a future voyage home. NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission, which is still facing funding constraints, may one day include this interloper in its payload and allow humans to analyze a bit of asteroid intestines.
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