<p>In a significant finding, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has discovered its first meteorites on the red planet, which scientists have named 'Lebanon' and its smaller companion 'Lebanon B'.</p>.<p>The Mars meteorites were found May 25 and NASA released a detailed photo of the Lebanon meteorites Tuesday.<br /><br />Curiosity took detailed pictures of the main Lebanon meteorite using its high-resolution Chem-Cam and Remote Micro-Imager cameras. The images revealed strange angular cavities in the surface of the rock.<br /><br />"That 'Lebanon' is huge, almost 7 feet," NASA spokesman Guy Webster from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California was quoted by Space.com as saying.<br /><br />Webster said Curiosity also found a third meteorite at the same time it spotted the Lebanon rocks.<br /><br />In a raw photo from Curiosity, the third meteorite - which is also about 7 feet wide - can be seen just beyond the closer Lebanon meteorites.<br /><br />"Heavy Metal! I found an iron meteorite on Mars," Curiosity's handlers wrote on the mission's Twitter page.<br /><br />The three meteorites are the first space rocks on Mars discovered by the Curiosity rover since it landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, Webster added.<br /><br />"One possible explanation is that they resulted from preferential erosion along crystalline boundaries within the metal of the rock," NASA officials wrote in a statement.<br /><br />"Another possibility is that these cavities once contained olivine crystals, which can be found in a rare type of stony-iron meteorites called pallasites, thought to have been formed near the core-mantle boundary within an asteroid."<br /></p>
<p>In a significant finding, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has discovered its first meteorites on the red planet, which scientists have named 'Lebanon' and its smaller companion 'Lebanon B'.</p>.<p>The Mars meteorites were found May 25 and NASA released a detailed photo of the Lebanon meteorites Tuesday.<br /><br />Curiosity took detailed pictures of the main Lebanon meteorite using its high-resolution Chem-Cam and Remote Micro-Imager cameras. The images revealed strange angular cavities in the surface of the rock.<br /><br />"That 'Lebanon' is huge, almost 7 feet," NASA spokesman Guy Webster from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California was quoted by Space.com as saying.<br /><br />Webster said Curiosity also found a third meteorite at the same time it spotted the Lebanon rocks.<br /><br />In a raw photo from Curiosity, the third meteorite - which is also about 7 feet wide - can be seen just beyond the closer Lebanon meteorites.<br /><br />"Heavy Metal! I found an iron meteorite on Mars," Curiosity's handlers wrote on the mission's Twitter page.<br /><br />The three meteorites are the first space rocks on Mars discovered by the Curiosity rover since it landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, Webster added.<br /><br />"One possible explanation is that they resulted from preferential erosion along crystalline boundaries within the metal of the rock," NASA officials wrote in a statement.<br /><br />"Another possibility is that these cavities once contained olivine crystals, which can be found in a rare type of stony-iron meteorites called pallasites, thought to have been formed near the core-mantle boundary within an asteroid."<br /></p>