Hematite
Hematite
Hematite is the most important iron ore. Although it was once mined in thousands of places around the world, today almost all of the production comes from a few dozen large deposits where large investments in equipment allow companies to exploit and to process the ore efficiently. Most of the ore is now produced in China, Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Canada, Venezuela and the United States.Hematite has a wide variety of other uses, but their economic importance is very low compared to that of iron ore. The ore is used to produce pigments, preparations for the separation of heavy media, radiation shields, ballasts and meny other products.
NASA has discovered that hematite is one of the most abundant minerals in rocks and soil on the surface of Mars. An abundance of hematite in Martian rocks and surface materials gives the landscape a reddish brown color and that is why the planet appears red in the night sky. It is the origin of the nickname of "red planet" of Mars.
Learn more about hematite: Wikipedia