Someone please warn Elon Musk.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has made a “stunning” discovery on Mars: yellow-green crystals of pure sulfur never before seen on Earth’s mysterious red neighbor, scientists say.
The literal groundbreaking discovery came when the one-tonne rover Curiosity drove over a pile of rocks and cracked one of them while exploring the deep, winding channels of Gediz Canyon, thought to have been formed by water three billion years ago.
“We think this is the strangest and most unexpected discovery of the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [JPL] Pasadena, California He told CNN“To be honest, there’s a lot of luck involved in this. Not every rock has something interesting in it.”
The rover’s operators had spotted a white rock in the distance that mission scientists wanted to investigate further, and on May 30, Vasavada and his team reviewed images from the rover that showed the broken rock in the wheel tracks.
What he saw under magnification was “stunning,” he said, as he saw “incredible textures and colors inside” what at first looked like typical Martian rock.
They were further shocked when analysis proved it to be entirely sulfur.
“Nobody had pure sulfur on their bingo card,” Vasavada said.
Sulfur rocks are normally “beautiful, translucent and crystalline,” Vasadava said, but millions of years of weathering have worn the rocks’ exteriors with sand, allowing them to blend in with the rest of Mars’ orange landscape.
Curiosity has previously found plenty of sulfates, which are salts containing sulfur that form when water evaporates. Pure sulfur only forms on Earth under extreme conditions, like volcanic activity or hot springs, CNN reported.
According to CNN, the Gediz Canyon channel was carved into the side of the three-mile-high Mount Sharp, and the rover has been steadily climbing the mountain for 10 years.
Scientists are now investigating what the presence of pure sulfur means for Mars and its cosmic history.
This discovery prompted SpaceX CEO Musk to Colonization of the Red Planet future.
