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PIA05174: Adirondack's Inner Self
A spectrum from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reveals the different iron-containing minerals that makeup the martian rock dubbed Adirondack.
 Target Name:  Mars
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 
 Spacecraft:  Spirit
 Instrument:  Moessbauer Spectrometer 
 Product Size:  3403 x 2376 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  JPL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA05174.tif (24.26 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA05174.jpg (457.8 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:
This spectrum - the first taken of a rock on another planet - reveals the different iron-containing minerals that makeup the martian rock dubbed Adirondack. It shows that Adirondack is a type of volcanic rock known as basalt. Specifically, the rock is what is called olivine basalt because in addition to magnetite and pyroxene, two key ingredients of basalt, it contains a mineral called olivine. This data was acquired by Spirit's Moessbauer spectrometer before the rover developed communication problems with Earth on the 18th martian day, or sol, of its mission.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/University of Mainz

Image Addition Date:
2004-01-30