NASA’s Perseverance rover is on the hunt for gems
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
The Perseverance rover has found precious stones inside Martian pebbles. These gem grains are made of a substance called corundum, which is also known as ruby or sapphire depending on the traces of metals within it.
Ann Ollila at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and her colleagues first spotted hints of corundum while using Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument to examine a rock called Hampden River. SuperCam has several different ways to test a material’s composition, using two different lasers to either burn off its surface or provoke luminescence, then two cameras to examine the resulting light. In both tests, the results for Hampden River were nearly identical to the results from rubies measured in the lab, indicating the presence of tiny grains of corundum in the rock.
As the rover drove along the rim of Jezero crater, it left Hampden River behind and the researchers found another pebble called Coffee Cove to check out. Measurements of its make-up suggested corundum was present as well. It was the same for a third rock called Smiths Harbour. Ollila presented these findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas on 16 March.
These gems have never been spotted on Mars before, and it is unlikely that they formed there in the same way that they do on Earth. “[Corundum] usually is associated, on Earth, with tectonism. It’s a very specific environment – you have to have a very silica-poor environment, very aluminium-rich,” said Ollila in her presentation. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics like Earth does, so finding corundum there was unexpected. Instead of tectonism, the Martian corundum probably formed when meteorites smashed into the ground, heating and compressing the dust.
“I was very surprised,” said Allan Treiman at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas, who wasn’t part of Ollila’s team, during the conference session. “In retrospect, one might not have been, because there are aluminium-rich outcrops elsewhere on the planet and there are impacts, but I thought it was very shocking to see this.”
Because the grains of corundum are so small, less than 0.2 millimetres across, it was impossible to tell in images whether they are rubies or sapphires and what they might look like to the human eye.
“I would love to be able to pick one of those up and analyse it and see if it looks red – it’s pretty disappointing that all you can see is this white pebble,” said Ollila. But when hit with the SuperCam laser, they shone brightly.
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