A New Iron Age: On Mars

Image Credit : NASA

Sometimes Mars just seems to be begging us to come stay a while.

Composites are all the rage on Earth, and perhaps rightfully so. But one planet further out and making use of what is immediately available and our perspective may change somewhat. Take a look at the NASA news story below and consider the abundance of iron on the surface of Mars that this story implies, and what that means for future settlers. The Eiffel tower is iron. The Statue of Liberty is iron. Iron Man? Well maybe not, but it just might be that the future is staring us in the face, and with it comes a new “Iron Age.” One thing is for sure, whatever subset of future Mars bound colonists who also happen to be steam punk enthusiasts are just going to love it.

NASA News Story:

Curiosity Finds Iron Meteorite on Mars

This rock encountered by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is an iron meteorite called “Lebanon,” similar in shape and luster to iron meteorites found on Mars by the previous generation of rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle). The smaller piece in the foreground is called “Lebanon B.”

This view combines a series of high-resolution circular images taken by the Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) of Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument with color and context from rover’s Mast Camera (Mastcam). The component images were taken during the 640th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (May 25, 2014).

The imaging shows angular shaped cavities on the surface of the rock. One possible explanation is that they resulted from preferential erosion along crystalline boundaries within the metal of the rock. Another possibility is that these cavities once contained olivine crystals, which can be found in a rare type of stony-iron meteorites called pallasites, thought to have been formed near the core-mantle boundary within an asteroid.

Iron meteorites are not rare among meteorites found on Earth, but they are less common than stony meteorites. On Mars, iron meteorites dominate the small number of meteorites that have been found. Part of the explanation could come from the resistance of iron meteorites to erosion processes on Mars.

ChemCam is one of 10 instruments in Curiosity’s science payload. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed ChemCam in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency (CNES), the University of Toulouse and the French national research agency (CNRS). More information about ChemCam is available at http://www.msl-chemcam.com . The rover’s MastCam was built by and is operated by Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego.