Meet Jake Matijevic, a seemingly innocuous chuck of igneous rock (meaning rock that solidified from a molten liquid) sitting on the surface of Mars inside Gale Crater, where NASA’s rover Curiosity landed two months ago.
The football-sized rock, named after a well-respected Mars rover engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who died in August, was the first good target scientists found for Curiosity to zap with its laser.
So for a couple of days last month, fire away the rover did, pulverizing bits of dust and rock to expose what lies within. Scientists expected the rock would be similar to igneous rocks studied by previous Mars rovers elsewhere on the planet.
Instead, they discovered a rock that is much more chemically similar to an unusual, but well-studied type of rock on Earth that is found on islands like Hawaii and in continental rift zones like the Rio Grande, which extends from southern Colorado to Chihuahua, Mexico.
So what’s the connection to applejack liquor?
Apparently, minerals in these types of rocks result from a process similar to what colonists used to make booze from apple cider.
Explains Curiosity scientist Edward Stolper, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology:
In other words, take out the water from applejack and you’re left with concentrated alcohol. Take out some particular minerals from a planet’s magma, and you get a liquid that is very different from what you started with.
The composition of the Jake Matijevic rock is “a very close match to highly
crystallized, or fractioned magmas, that occur in particular places on Earth,” Stolper told reporters during a conference call on Thursday.
“This is based on one rock and one has to be careful to extrapolate,” he added, “but it is something that although unusual on Mars, is familiar to us on Earth. We know something about how such magmas are produced.”
Here’s to you, Curiosity. Bottom’s up!
Image: The Jake Matijevic rock, one of the rover Curiosity’s first targets of study, has a history that more closely resembles some rocks on Earth than previously studied rocks on Mars. The red dots are where the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam)
instrument zapped it with its laser on Sept. 21 and on Sept. 24. The circular
black-and-white images were taken by ChemCam to look for the pits produced by
the laser. The purple circles show areas analyzed by the rover’s Alpha Particle X-ray
Spectrometer The picture was take by Curiosity’s Mast
Camera on Sept. 22. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
