Mars rover Curiosity has discovered an unusual stone of alien origin

(ORDO NEWS) — The US space agency has announced that the Curiosity rover has come across a 30 cm wide rock that appears to be of alien origin.

Iron-nickel meteorites are a common class of space objects that are regularly found on Earth and Mars (the Spirit and Opportunity rovers).

The new stone found by Curiosity belongs to the same class. With his spots, he reminded NASA engineers who work with the rover of a drink of cocoa, and therefore it was called “Cocoa”.

Barely visible, shiny dots on the dark surface of an iron-nickel meteorite were left by laser pulses used to determine the chemical composition of the Curiosity rover’s ChemCam spectrometer.

This is not the first meteorite discovered on the Red Planet: for example, in 2016, Curiosity found a stone that was dubbed Egg Rock (“Egg Rock”).

Meteorites are still actively bombarding Mars today. Their impacts on the surface of the Red Planet were recorded by the seismograph of the InSight lander.

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