NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has found the mission’s first confirmed mineral mapped from orbit. The rover discovered the match after drilling its first holes into a martian mountain.

Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement, “This connects us with the mineral identifications from orbit, which can now help guide our investigations as we climb the slope and test hypotheses derived from the orbital mapping.”

Curiosity collected the powder after drilling into a rock outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp late in September. The robotic arm delivered a small portion of the sample to the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument inside the rover. The sample, from a target known as “Confidence Hills” within the “Pahrump Hills” outcrop, had greater amounts of hematite than previous rock or soil samples analyzed by CheMin during the two-year mission. Hematite, an iron-oxide mineral, yields clues about ancient environmental conditions from when it formed.

From observations reported in 2010, before Curiosity’s landing site was chosen, a mineral-mapping instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed evidence of hematite in the geological unit that includes the Pahrump Hills outcrop. The landing site is located within the Gale Crater, an impact basin approximately 96 miles in diameter with the layered Mount Sharp rising roughly three miles high in the center.

According to mindat.org, hematite was originally named between 300 and 325 BCE by Theophrastus from the Greek, Ατματιτης for blood stone. Hematite can have a reddish brown color, ocherous masses, dark silvery-grey scaled masses, silvery-grey to black crystals, and dark grey masses.