This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/13/nasa-perseverance-rock-helmet-photo/85649312007/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
ULA’s Vulcan rocket launches Space Force satellites into orbit
ULA’s Vulcan rocket lifts off with two nationwide safety satellites certain for geosynchronous orbit.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has added to its trove of curious finds, because the house company revealed a photograph of a rock on the floor of Mars that appears like a centuries-old helmet.
The rock has a pointed peak, a flared “brim,” and textures that might lead cheap observers to check it to a witch’s hat or a tent.
The texture is shaped by spherules on the rock. Similar formations discovered on Earth are created by way of chemical weathering, mineral precipitation or volcanic processes, according to Space.com.
The picture, taken Aug. 5 by the rover’s Left Mastcam-Z camera, was chosen because the photograph of the week for week 234 of its mission on Mars.
“This rock’s target name is Horneflya and it’s distinctive less because of its hat shape (which looks to me to be generally consistent with the pyramid shape we often see in of wind-eroded float blocks on the surface of Mars) and more because it’s made almost entirely of spherules,” David Agle, a spokesperson for the Perseverance group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, advised the house information outlet.
It shouldn’t be the primary time the rover has discovered a spherule-covered rock, having despatched again a photo of a studded rock in March.
Camera key to Mars discoveries
The Left Mastcam-Z camera on the Perseverance can seize panoramic shade and 3D pictures of the planet’s floor, based on NASA, permitting scientists and observers to see Martian options extra clearly.
The rover is trying to find indicators of historic microbial life as part of a bigger endeavor to know the habitability of Mars.
The helmet rock offers scientist a clue on what Mar’s environmental historical past, based on Space.com.
Perseverance was despatched to survey Jezero Crater to check the “wet history” of the Red Planet. The rover accomplished the climb to the summit of the crater in December 2024, three years after touchdown.
“Conceivably, microbial life could have lived in Jezero during one or more of these wet times,” NASA says on the house web page for the mission. “If so, signs of their remains might be found in lakebed or shoreline sediments.”
Perseverance’s analysis is meant to pave the way in which for people to achieve Mars within the years forward below NASA’s Artemis program, which is able to start with astronauts returning to the moon to set up a base of operations. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has additionally expressed his imaginative and prescient of launching uncrewed journeys to the Red Planet earlier than people attain it ‒ maybe as early as 2028.
Contributing: Eric Lagatta – USA TODAY
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/13/nasa-perseverance-rock-helmet-photo/85649312007/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
