NASA’s Curiosity rover: some discoveries

NASA’s Curiosity rover has made the most unusual find on Mars to date as scientists believe it provides the clearest clues yet to Mars.

In this regard, NASA’s Curiosity rover found rocks made of pure sulfur.

And it all started when NASA’s one-ton Curiosity rover drove over a rock and cracked it open, revealing yellowish-green crystals never before seen on the red planet.

The Curiosity team was eager for the rover to investigate the Gediz Vallis channel, a winding groove that appears to have been formed 3 billion years ago by a mixture of flowing water and debris.

The channel is carved into part of the 5-kilometer-high Mount Sharp. The rover has been climbing the mountain since 2014.

“I think it’s the strangest find of the entire mission and the most unexpected,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

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White rocks were visible in the distance, and mission scientists wanted to get a closer look.

Drivers of NASA’s Curiosity rover, sending instructions from Earth, made a 90-degree turn to position the robotic rover in the right position for its cameras to capture a mosaic of the surrounding landscape.

On the morning of May 30, Vasavada and his team looked at Curiosity’s mosaic and saw a crushed rock in the rover’s wheel tracks. A closer image of the rock made the “mind-blowing” finding clear, he said.

NASA’s Curiosity rover: some discoveries

Some of the discoveries of NASA’s Curiosity rover, lakes that have lasted millions of years and the presence of organic materials, have contributed to the ultimate goal of the rover’s mission: to try to determine if Mars hosted habitable environments.

Now, scientists are on a mission to find out what the presence of pure sulfur on Mars means and what it says about the red planet’s history.

At first, the team thought the “strange rocks” were part of the channel debris, perhaps a layer that water had carried from high up in the mountain.

But upon closer inspection, including the fortuitous crushing of the sulfur rock, the team now thinks the flat, uniform field of rocks formed where they were found.

The team was eager to sample the rocks for study, but Curiosity was unable to drill into the rocks because they were too small and brittle. To determine what process formed the sulfur rocks, the team looked at nearby bedrock.

Pure sulfur only forms under certain conditions on Earth, such as volcanic processes or in hot or cold springs. Depending on the process, different minerals are created at the same time as the sulfur.

On June 18, 2024, the team sampled a large rock from the channel nicknamed “Mammoth Lakes.” An analysis of the rock dust, performed by instruments inside the rover, revealed a greater variety of minerals than ever seen before during the mission, Vasavada said.

Since landing on Mars on Aug. 5, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has ascended 2,600 feet (800 meters) to the base of Mount Sharp from the floor of Gale Crater.

The mountain is a central peak of the crater, which is a vast, ancient dry lake bed.

Each layer of Mount Sharp tells a different story about the history of Mars, including periods when the planet was wet and when it became drier.