They named it Cacao, which is kind of cute. But this rock is probably the core of an ancient planetesimal. Nothing cute about that.
. They’re particularly interesting on iron meteorites. They formed when Cacao was travelling through the atmosphere. Even though Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, it still creates enough friction to heat the meteorite’s surface. The regmaglypts are likely created by vortices of hot gas that melted the rock as it travelled through the atmosphere.
The dark, smooth-surfaced object at the center of this Oct. 30, 2016, image from the Mast Camera on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover was examined with laser pulses and confirmed to be an iron-nickel meteorite. Its surface is also marked with regmaglypts. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Most iron-nickel meteorites come from the cores of shattered planetesimals that formed in the early Solar System. Those objects were large enough to differentiate when they were molten. They formed a core of dense iron and nickel, much like Earth did. But life as a planetesimal was risky, and many of them were shattered into asteroids. That’s Cacao’s likely history.
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