LOS ANGELES -- The more Curiosity gets to know Mars, the more it seems like a big red Earth. Curiosity recently examined what appeared to be an ancient riverbed and conglomerate rocks similar to those at home. Now comes "Jake Matijevic" -- a pyramid-shaped chunk of rock that's proved to be a surprise, even to NASA.

The space agency says that Jake, named for a legendary NASA engineer, is unique -- unlike any rocks examined before on Mars. And that's saying something. Previous rovers have examined hundreds of Martian rocks.

When Curiosity team members picked Jake, they were just hoping for a "simple and uniform" rock that would help them compare results from two chemistry instruments.


"It's a strength of Curiosity to have instruments that use different techniques to get at the same answers," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday morning. "But it's also a challenge for the science team, like trying to understand the plot of a story when one person saw the movie and another read the book. We were hoping that Jake M. had a simple plot."


"Our laser instrument saw a slightly different composition at every point it analyzed," Vasavada said.





He stressed that scientists can't be certain Jake formed in the same way as rocks on Earth.

"Like many aspects of planetary exploration," the scientist noted, "we use the long history of Earth studies to form our best ideas to explain Mars."
