Curiosity Finds and Examines a Meteorite on Mars (2016)

The dark, smooth-surfaced object at the center of this sol 1505 (30th October 2016), image from Curiosity's Mast Camera (R-MastCam) was examined with laser pulses and confirmed to be an iron-nickel meteorite.

The grid of shiny points visible on the object resulted from that laser zapping by Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument.

The meteorite is about the size of a golf ball and lying on the ground ~2.61 meters from the rover. It was informally named "Egg Rock" after a site in Maine. Locations around Bar Harbor, Maine, were the naming theme for an area on Mars' Mount Sharp that Curiosity reached in October 2016.

Iron-nickel meteorites are a common class of space rocks found on Earth, and previous examples have been found on Mars, but Egg Rock was the first on Mars to be examined with a laser-firing spectrometer, the laser pulses induced bursts of glowing gas (plasma) at the target, and ChemCam's spectrometer read the wavelengths of light from those bursts to gain information about the target's composition.

The laser pulses also burned through the dark outer surface, exposing bright interior material. The image includes a scale bar of 5 centimeters (about 2 inches).

Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/PIA21134