NASA's Perseverance rover discovers shiny metallic rock on Mars that could be a meteorite from an ancient asteroid, containing high levels of iron and nickel.

NASA scientists were baffled after uncovering a rock on Mars that didn’t belong there — with a composition pointing to potentially interstellar origins. “This rock was identified as a target of interest,” the space agency wrote in a recent blog post detailing the potentially intergalactic gravelstone.

NASA scientists made an unexpected discovery on Mars—a strange shaped rock given the name “Phippsaksla” that may not have originated on the red planet at all. While surveying bedrock at a site called Vernodden,

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has made another strange discovery. While investigating the Vernodden area of Jezero Crater – the crater where the rover first landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 – it found an unusually shaped rock that is not meant to be Where it may have come from is anyone’s guess,

Mars is a cold, dry, desert-like planet. But billions of years ago, scientific evidence suggests that it had a thick atmosphere, which kept it warm enough to support flowing water on its surface. So, what happened to the Red Planet, and could it happen to Earth?

The ESCAPADE mission, which launched to space on a Blue Origin rocket on Thursday, breaks the mold of how planetary science missions typically come together.

NASA's Perseverance rover used its SuperCam laser and special instruments to study the rock closely. The analysis showed that the rock has a lot of iron and nickel in it. These elements are rare on Mars,

NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft launched aboard Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket Thursday afternoon from Cape Canaveral, beginning their journey to Mars with arrival expected in 2027.

New Glenn is set to lift off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The launch window opens at 2:57 p.m. and closes at 4:25 p.m. ET. Blue Origin will begin livestreaming the event approximately 20 minutes before liftoff, and you can watch right here.

Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, plans to challenge SpaceX with the powerful, partially reusable New Glenn rocket.

Created in 2000 by Bezos, Amazon’s founder, Blue Origin already holds a NASA contract for the third moon landing by astronauts under the Artemis program. Elon Musk’s SpaceX beat out Blue Origin for the first and second crew landings, using Starships, nearly 100 feet (30 meters) taller than Bezos’ New Glenn.

Interest in Martian life had been spurred by a now infamous announcement from the White House lawn in 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared that signs of life had been detected in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. That claim was later refuted—but it caused enough clamor to put the search for Martian life at the top of NASA’s agenda.