[Rockhounds] NASA rover discovers mysterious Mars boulder unlike any others

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

If looking at this *Mars*
<https://mashable.com/article/mars-long-cloud-arsia-mons-volcano> vista
conjures up childhood memories of the song, "One of these things is not
like the others," *NASA* <https://mashable.com/category/nasa> scientists
are right there with you.

*Perseverance*
<https://mashable.com/article/mars-ingenuity-helicopter-nasa-perseverance>,
a car-size lab on six wheels, traveled into the Red Planet's Neretva Vallis
last week. Though this region may look like a barren desert, it was once an
ancient river channel that fed into the Jezero crater billions of years
ago.

As Perseverance traversed the inlet, the rover came upon a hill covered in
boulders, with one in particular attracting the science team's attention: a
light speckled rock amid a sea of dark lumps.

"Every once in a while, you'll just see some strange thing in the Martian
landscape, and the team is like, 'Oh, let's go over there,'" Katie Stack
Morgan, deputy project scientist of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, told
Mashable. "This was like the textbook definition of (chasing) the bright,
shiny thing because it was so bright and white."

The boulder is so exceptional, scientists have said it's in *a league of
its own*
<https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-fords-an-ancient-river-to-reach-science-target?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nasajpl&utm_content=perseverance20240613>.
Closer analysis with the rover's instruments shows it is likely an
anorthosite, a rock type never seen before while exploring Mars, Stack
Morgan said, though there have been signs such rocks should exist. Not even
the *Curiosity rover*
<https://mashable.com/article/mars-water-waves-evidence-nasa>, which has
observed more variety in Gale Crater, has seen one quite like this.

https://mashable.com/article/nasa-mars-rover-boulder-discovery