The footage, captured by the Perseverance rover as it continues to explore the Red Planet, also revealed 'first of its kind' geological formation resting atop the dried remains of an ancient lakebed.

Dark blue, jagged boulders of volcanic basalt were spotted surrounding the speckled white rock, which was found to have a mineral composition unlike anything NASA has ever seen before on Mars.

The NASA team operating the rover named this rocky field 'Mount Washburn' in honor of a mountain in Yellowstone National Park. 

Perseverance — a car-sized, remote-controlled mobile lab — has been exploring the dusty basin of this asteroid impact site, dubbed Jezero crater, since February 2021.

Jezero was once flowing with water about 3.7 billion years ago, with evidence of a 'paleolake' and a long, lost river delta within the rim of this 28-mile-diameter crater.

Fine-grained sand and mud of exactly the consistency known to preserve fossils on Earth were ferried into Jezero by these rivers: fine clay that Perseverance had been sent to explore in NASA's belief that this crater may have once supported alien life.

'Every once in a while, you'll just see some strange thing in the Martian landscape,' as one NASA planetary geologist Dr Katie Stack Morgan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory put it, 'and the team is like, 'Oh, let's go over there!''

Most of the bluish-black rocks seen on the surface of Mars, like those on 'Mount Washburn,' are volcanic basalt.

'Mars is composed mostly of rocks similar to terrestrial basalts called tholeiites,' according to planetologist and geophysicist Dr G. Jeffrey Taylor at the University of Hawaii, 'which make up most oceanic islands, mid-ocean ridges, and the seafloor beneath sediments [on Earth].'