Lock-on Mars Curiosity accidentally crashes through an unassuming exterior wall, spilling out the incredible yellow treasure.
As the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) body over the rock, the rock broke apart to reveal yellow crystals of elemental sulfur, or sulphur. While sulfates are fairly common on Mars, this is the first time sulphur has been found in its pure elemental form on the Red Planet.
Even more intriguing is that the Gediz Canyon Strait, where Curiosity found the rock, happens to be littered with rocks that look suspiciously similar to the sulfur rock before it was shattered, suggesting that elemental sulfur may be abundant in some places for some reason.
“Finding a field of pure sulfur rock is like finding an oasis in the desert.” “We’re not going to be able to do anything,” said Ashwin Vasavada, a Curiosity project scientist. of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“It can’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
Sulfates are sulfur,Normally CompositeWhen the water evaporates, the minerals mix together and dry out, leaving only the sulfates behind.
These sulfate minerals can tell us a lot about Mars. History of Waterand how it has weathered over time.
Pure sulfur, on the other hand, can only form under very specific conditions, and those conditions are not known to occur in the areas of Mars discovered by Curiosity.
To be fair, there’s a lot we don’t know about Mars’ geological history, but the discovery of such a large amount of pure sulfur floating around on the Martian surface suggests there’s something pretty big we don’t know about.
Sulfur is an important one to understand. An essential element for all lifeIt is usually ingested in the form of sulfates and is used to make two of the essential amino acids that organisms need to make proteins.
Sulfates on Mars have been known for some time, so this discovery doesn’t tell us anything new in that area. In any case, we still haven’t found any signs of life on Mars, but we are finding fragments of debris that could be useful for life. Chemical, waterand Past habitable conditions.
As long as we remain on Earth, our access to Mars is quite limited, and while Curiosity’s instruments were able to analyze and identify the sulfur rocks in Gediz Canyon, it may have been a long time since we’d seen Mars if Curiosity hadn’t taken a route that caused it to roll over the rocks and break them apart.
The next step will be to work out exactly how the sulfur got to be there, based on what we know about Mars. That will take a bit more work and will likely require detailed modeling of Mars’ geological evolution.
frameborder=”0″ allow=”Accelerometer; Autoplay; Clipboard writing; Encrypted media; Gyroscope; Picture-in-picture; Web sharing” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen>
Meanwhile, Curiosity continues to gather data about the site: Gediz Canyon is an area packed with Martian history, with ancient waterways still visible in the rocks, remnants of an ancient river that flowed through the area billions of years ago.
Curiosity sparked the discovery There’s a hole in one of the rocksThey took powdered samples from the interior for chemical analysis and are now working their way further along the channel, trying to discover what surprises lie just around the next rock.
