Mysterious Purple-Coated Rocks Found All Over The Place On Mars - IFLScience

The plucky Mars rover has found these purple rocks at almost every site it's explored in Jezero Crater so far, ranging from large rocks to tiny pebbles, and yet NASA scientists aren't quite sure what this purple coating is or how it formed.

The purple appears as both a thin, smooth coating on some rocks and paint-like splodges on others.

This isn't actually the first time purple rocks — or even green rocks, for that matter — have been found on Mars.

The purple patches spotted by Perseverance have also been typically found in less dusty areas, according to another early analysis presented at the AGU conference, this time by a team, led by Bradley Garczynski of Purdue University, who are studying the coatings using images captured by Perseverance's "eye" cams, the Mastcam-Z cameras.

However, Garczynski told NatGeo we haven't seen this type of purple rock coating before, and certainly not in the frequency Perseverance seems to be coming across them. .