NASA’s mission to carry meteorite piece found in Oman back to Mars

A massive chunk of a martian meteorite will be carried onboard NASA‘s Mars 2020 rover mission, to serve as target practice for a high-precision laser on the rover’s arm.
The ambitious Mars 2020 rover will collect samples from the red planet’s surface that a future mission could potentially return to Earth, NASA said.

One of the rover’s many tools will be a laser designed to illuminate rock features as fine as a human hair.
That level of precision requires a calibration target to help tweak the laser’s settings.
The team behind the laser instrument called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) selected Sayh al Uhaymir 008 (SaU008), a meteorite found in Oman in 1999.
Besides being more rugged than other samples, a piece of it was available courtesy of Caroline Smith, principal curator of meteorites at London’s Natural History Museum.
SaU008 will be the first martian meteorite to have a fragment return to the planet’s surface – though not the first on a return trip to Mars, the US space agency