Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History involved in classification of Antarctic finds said the mineralogy, texture and the oxidized nature of the rock are unmistakably martian.
#Beware the face of mars xfile full
This 715.2-gram (1.6-pound) black rock, officially designated MIL 03346, was one of 1358 meteorites collected by ANSMET during the 2003-2004 austral summer.ĭiscovery of this meteorite occurred during the second full field season of a cooperative effort funded by NASA and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enhance recovery of rare meteorite types in Antarctica, in the hopes new martian samples would be found. 15, 2003, on an ice field in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 750 km (466 miles) from the South Pole.
Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) on Dec. The new specimen was found by a field party from the U.S. While rovers and orbiting spacecraft scour Mars searching for clues to its past, researchers have uncovered another piece of the red planet in the most inhospitable place on Earth - Antarctica. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.įor more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit and the Cassini imaging team home page. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. In conjunction with other Cassini instruments, Cassini images will help to determine the composition of different parts of Saturn’s ring system. Since pure water ice is white, it is believed that different colors in the rings reflect different amounts of contamination by other materials such as rock or carbon compounds. Saturn’s rings are made primarily of water ice. Cassini’s images show that color variations in the rings are more pronounced in this viewing geometry than they are when seen from Earth. Color variations in Saturn’s rings have previously been seen in Voyager and Hubble Space Telescope images. Other color variations across the rings can be seen. Many bands throughout the B ring have a pronounced sandy color. The brightest part of the rings, curving from the upper right to the lower left in the image, is the B ring. The image scale is 38 kilometers (23 miles) per pixel. The images that comprise this composition were obtained from Cassini?s vantage point beneath the ring plane with the narrow angle camera on June 21, 2004, from a distance of 6.4 million kilometers (4 million miles) from Saturn and a phase angle of 66 degrees. Nine days before it entered orbit, Cassini captured this exquisite natural color view of of Saturn?s rings.
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