A Martian Mystery: NASA Scientists Astonished by Strange Rock Discovery
NASA finds an iron-nickel-rich Martian rock likely to be a meteorite, baffling scientists and prompting further investigation.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has stumbled across an 80-centimetre boulder that appears starkly out of place on the Martian surface, raising excitement among scientists who suspect it may be the mission’s first confirmed iron-nickel meteorite. The rock, informally named “Phippsaksla”, was imaged on September 19, 2025, while the rover explored exposed bedrock at a site called Vernodden on the western rim of Jezero Crater. Standing roughly desk-sized amid a sea of flatter, fragmented local rocks, its unusual shape and composition immediately caught the team’s attention.
Preliminary analysis using Perseverance’s SuperCam laser and spectrometers revealed a high concentration of iron and nickel—elements rare in native Martian crust but typical of meteorites formed in the metallic cores of shattered asteroids. “This element combination is usually associated with iron-nickel meteorites formed elsewhere in the solar system,” the mission team wrote in a November 2025 blog post titled “A Stranger in Our Midst?” The find marks a sharp contrast with the sedimentary and volcanic rocks the rover has predominantly studied inside the crater over the past four years.
The discovery is particularly intriguing because, despite Jezero’s age and numerous small impact scars, Perseverance had not previously identified any iron-nickel meteorites—an oddity compared to the Curiosity rover, which found several in Gale Crater, including the meter-wide “Lebanon” in 2014 and “Cacao” in 2023. Scientists note that Phippsaksla sits atop bedrock shaped by ancient impacts, exactly the kind of exposed terrain where fallen meteorites are most likely to be preserved rather than buried or eroded.
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While the data strongly point to an extraterrestrial origin, the team cautions that further investigation is required for definitive confirmation. Additional SuperCam shots and possibly a close-up scan with the rover’s PIXL and SHERLOC instruments are planned before Perseverance continues its climb up the crater rim toward older geological units.
If verified, Phippsaksla will become the latest “alien” visitor preserved on Mars and a valuable new data point for understanding how many meteorites have rained down on the planet over billions of years. For now, the lonely boulder serves as a striking reminder that even on the Red Planet, strangers sometimes drop in from deep space.
