The Perseverance Rover spies incredible blue rocks on Mars and makes incredible discoveries

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the clearest image yet of the Martian landscape, showing incredible blue rocks on the dusty surface that raise crucial questions about the Red Planet’s complex history.

The new image from Mars shows rich, dark blue, jagged volcanic rocks spread across an ancient Martian lake bed at Mount Washburn, named after a mountain in Yellowstone National Park. Next to these beautiful blue rocks, Perseverance’s onboard cameras captured a white rock, something never seen before on Mars.

“This was like the textbook definition of [chasing] the bright, shiny thing because it was so bright and white,” says NASA planetary geologist Dr. Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“Every once in a while you’ll just see some strange things in the Martian landscape,” adds Dr. Morgan.

The Perseverance team took the new images using the rover’s SuperCam, designed to examine rocks and soil on Mars using a camera, laser and spectrometers, as well as MastCam-Z.

Panoramic image of a rocky Martian landscape with several scattered dark rocks and pebbles across reddish-brown sand. The terrain is uneven, with small hills, under a pale sky. No vegetation or water is visible.
“This natural color mosaic consists of 18 images and shows a boulder field on “Mount Washburn” (named after a mountain in Wyoming) in Mars’ Jezero Crater. The Perseverance science team nicknamed the bright boulder with dark spots near the center of the mosaic “Atoko Point ” (after a feature in the eastern Grand Canyon). The images were acquired by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on May 27, 2024, the 1,162nd Martian day, or solar, of the mission.” | NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The SuperCam system, which weighs 10.6 kilograms (23.4 pounds), is mounted on the “head” of the rover’s long-necked mast and can send 4.2 megabits of data back to Earth each day. As for MastCam-Z, its primary mission is to capture high-resolution videos and panoramic color 3D images of the Martian surface. This camera weighs about four kilograms (8.8 pounds) and captures approximately two megapixel images. It can send almost 150 megabits of data to Earth per sun (March day).

A rocky landscape with various sizes of stones scattered over a reddish-brown terrain under a pale sky. A large white stone stands out among darker stones. The scene appears dry and barren.
A crop of the image above showing Atoko Point

The striking white rock has been named ‘Atoko Point’ and is named after a large rock in the Grand Canyon. The rock is about 35.6 centimeters (14 inches) tall, and thanks to SuperCam’s spectrometers, researchers have determined that the white rock is anorthosite, a rock type that has never been observed on Mars before despite being long theorized .

This type of rock is intriguing because, despite extensive research, it is unclear how they form on Earth, let alone Mars. This is also the dominant rock type on the Moon, covering about 80% of the lunar surface. The volcanic Atoko Point rock may have formed deep below the Martian surface or may have been moved around by ancient Martian rivers that have long since dried up. At this time it is unknown.

What scientists do do know, however, is that this rock is important to the understanding of Mars and its history.


Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

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