Originally published at: Mars rover stumbled on a fantastic chunky meteorite | Boing Boing
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What a hunk! 
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That comment has triggered my movie Tourette’s resulting in this gif:
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What cool find. They can get a few bucks for that from Mad Mike’s Meteorite Mega Menagerie.
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Musk’s already adding it to the assets column on Twitter’s balance sheet.
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International Community: You mean about a third of a meter?
American Scientists: When YOUR country builds an awesome Mars rover then YOU can measure the meteorites. This one’s ours!
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What’s that in giraffes?
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well, giraffe hooves are the size of dinner plates, and dinner plates are between 11 and 12 inches, so… one. one giraffe foot.
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So about a foot?
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Actshully… doesn’t NASA use the metric system?
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Any thoughts on how those parallel striations were created on an uneven surface? (Perhaps made upon low angle impact on Mars? FeNi is pretty hard, though. Any metallurgists here?)
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one big foot
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I was thinking the same thing, but what about encountering similar dense objects, like passing through an asteroid belt or something?
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We’re on the same wavelength. But I couldn’t imagine a case where a single scrapping impact event was likely (the impactor’s surface would have to have been configured to deliver what appears to be roughly the same width and depth for each striation. If the cause instead was multiple impacts, then that points to the meteorite running into a field of stationary (enough) objects or vice versa, and yet creating, again similar scrapes (which is what you’ve posit, I think). It’s the similarity of the striations’ width and apparent depth that baffles me. Perhaps some process involved as it heated up upon entering Mars atmosphere?
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Lucky guess on my part!!! Thx!!
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