Curiosity team members said on Twitter on Thursday (February 2nd) that the space rock is about 0.3 meters wide and consists mostly of iron and nickel. And the meteorite has a name.

The Curiosity team posted a tweet that also included a photo of the rock.

In August 2012, the car-sized rover Curiosity landed inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater on Mars to find out if the area could support long-term Earth-like life.

Studies over the past decade have answered this question in the affirmative, showing that Gale contained a potentially habitable lacustrine-stream system in the distant past. This basin probably persisted for millions of years at most, perhaps allowing time for Martian microbes to emerge.

Curiosity is not a life-hunting mission, so it is not looking for signs that these microbes once existed. But Curiosity’s cousin Perseverance, which landed inside another Martian crater in February 2021, is collecting dozens of samples for future return to Earth as well as searching for life.

Since September 2014, Curiosity has been climbing the slopes of Mount Sharp, a massive mountain that rises about 5.5 kilometers into the sky from the center of Gale.

The rover recently marked an important milestone on this journey by reaching sulfate-rich sediments that form in relatively dry conditions. Mission team members say Curiosity’s observations of these rocks could help scientists better understand when and how Gale Crater and the Red Planet as a whole moved from a relatively hot and humid place to the cold desert today.

According to its mission sheet, Curiosity has traveled 29.47 km on Mars. As the rover team noted in several other tweets with photos on Thursday, it encountered several other meteorites during its epic journey from the rover planet.

“Here is another meteorite I found in 2016. It’s called “Egg Rock,” aka a golf ball, in a Twitter post Thursday.

Another tweet on Thursday read, “And while my team calls this 2-metre meteorite ‘Lebanon’, I call it a MONSTER.”

Curiosity discovered Lebanon, or The Beast, in May 2014, but NASA didn’t release photos of the big rock until July of that year. The monster and two nearby rocks were the first meteorites Curiosity found on the Red Planet.