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NASA's Curiosity robot has found a new meteorite that was discovered on Mars.
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The meteorite is approximately 1 foot in width and mostly composed of nickel and iron, Curiosity team members announced on Twitter on Wednesday. The meteorite also has an official designation.
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"We're calling it 'Cacao,'" the Curiosity team wrote in the Twitter post, which includes a photo of the rock.
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The car-sized Curiosity arrived in Mars the wide 96-mile Gale Crater in August 2012 as part of a mission to discover if the region could have had a home for Earth-like life in the past.
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The robot's work over the last decade has answered this question with a yes and has shown that Gale was a possible living lake and stream system in distant times.
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Furthermore, the watershed could have lasted millions of years over an interval, possibly allowing time for the development of Martian microbes.
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Curiosity isn't a life-hunting task; therefore, it's not seeking evidence of these microbes, if they even existed.
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But Curiosity's relative Perseverance was discovered in an entirely different Mars Crater in February 2021 and had been conducting an investigation into the existence of life and is also collecting hundreds of samples to be returned to Earth.
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Since September 2014, Curiosity has been climbing the slopes of Mount Sharp, which is a massive mountain that rises 3.4 miles from Gale's central.