NASA Discovered Something Strange on the Surface of Mars

Mars has a habit of turning ordinary geology into something that looks strange from Earth. NASA’s Curiosity rover recently gave scientists another unusual moment when a rock nicknamed “Atacama” became stuck on its robotic drill arm for almost a week. The rover had been trying to drill into the rock on Mount Sharp, but instead of collecting a clean sample, it accidentally lifted the entire rock off the Martian surface.

The incident was not evidence of aliens or anything supernatural. But it was strange because NASA said this had never happened before in Curiosity’s previous drilling work. The rock was about 1.5 feet wide and weighed around 28.6 pounds, turning a routine Mars operation into a six-day engineering problem millions of miles away.