NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered a “surprising” substance on Mars that “shouldn’t be there.”
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)The rover has been exploring the fourth planet from the sun since 2012, but made a particularly “exciting” discovery on May 30th. scientist Scratching his head.
NASA’s Curiosity rover first went to Mars in 2012, exploring an area called Gale Crater, “a large impact basin with a huge layered mountain at its center.” And for the past year or so, NASA’s rover has been exploring a “special area” of Gale Crater known as Gediz Canyon, a “sulfate-rich” waterway located in the center of the crater and winding down the slopes of Mount Sharp.
Scientists hypothesize that “billion years ago, the water in streams and ponds dried up, leaving behind minerals,” leaving behind sulfur-based minerals, or “a mixture of sulfur and other substances.”
“Assuming the hypothesis is correct, these minerals provide intriguing clues as to how and why the Red Planet’s climate changed from Earth-like conditions to the frozen desert we know today,” the paper adds.
Indeed, the Mars rover has already found “a wide variety of rock types and signs of past water,” and has found minerals like magnesium sulfate, calcium sulfate, and sodium chloride. But two months ago, while traversing the salty terrain, the rover made a surprising and unexpected discovery.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity made the discovery (NASA Visualization Technology Applications Development (VTAD))
In the press release: share On July 18th this week, NASA revealed that the Curiosity rover had discovered rocks on the planet that were “made of elemental sulfur, or pure sulfur.”
The rock’s interior was revealed when it accidentally broke as the rover drove over it, revealing yellow sulfur crystals inside.
The researchers then used the spacecraft’s mast camera to analyze the rocks and a robotic arm called an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer to detect their composition.
The rover discovered yellow crystals of elemental sulfur (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
“It is unclear whether there is a relationship between elemental sulfur and other sulfur-based minerals in the region,” NASA explained, adding that the rover had not only found one rock containing pure sulfur, but “an entire rock field.”
And given that pure sulfur can only form under a “narrow range of conditions that scientists have not linked to the history” of the probe’s location, this discovery has scientists quite puzzled.
Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, acknowledged that the rover’s stumbling upon the rock was a “big stroke of luck,” but said, “Finding a rock mass made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert.”
“It can’t be there,” Vasavada decided. “So now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
