[Rockhounds] Nasa Mars rover: Meteorite to head home to Red Planet

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

A small chunk of Mars will be heading home when the US space agency
launches its latest rover mission on Thursday.

Nasa's Perseverance robot will carry with it a meteorite that originated on
the Red Planet and which, until now, has been lodged in the collection of
London's Natural History Museum (NHM).

The rock's known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark
the workings of a rover instrument.

It will give added confidence to any discoveries the robot might make.

This will be particularly important if Perseverance stumbles across
something that hints at the presence of past life on the planet - one of
the mission's great quests.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53491555