NASA‘s Curiosity rover has found an abundance of pure sulfur on Mars after it just lately drove over a rock and cracked it open, gorgeous scientists.
The six-wheeled rover has noticed sulfur on Mars earlier than, however solely in a combination with different minerals, together with magnesium and calcium. Pure sulfur, an odorless component that kinds in very particular circumstances that planetary scientists hadn’t linked to the rover’s location, seems to be infused in lots of rocks throughout the area, in line with a NASA assertion.
“Discovering a discipline of stones fabricated from pure sulfur is like discovering an oasis within the desert,” Ashwin Vasavada, who’s the mission’s undertaking scientist on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, stated within the assertion. “It should not be there, so now we’ve got to elucidate it.”
Within the rover’s photograph of the rock (above), yellow sulfur crystals will be seen crowding throughout the internal areas of the item’s crushed pockets. These crystals had been too small and brittle for Curiosity to pattern with a drill, so it ended up parking close to one other giant rock nicknamed Mammoth Lakes, in line with NASA. Right here, the rover used a drill on the finish of its robotic arm to scoop out a gap in that rock and saved it for additional evaluation earlier than trawling away.
Associated: Little Mars ‘snowman’ noticed by NASA’s Perseverance rover (photograph)
Curiosity, which is presently within the twelfth yr of its mission, stumbled upon its newest discovery on Might 30 when it was exploring Gediz Vallis, a channel winding down the slopes of Mount Sharp within the heart of the Gale Crater. The rover has been finding out the channel for the previous few months for indicators of historic microbial life.
From what we perceive of Mars’ previous, Mount Sharp would have been so much wetter billions of years in the past than it’s as we speak. The Gediz Vallis channel snaking by means of the mountain would have been carved because the planet started drying out, probably by sturdy winds and even violent flows of liquid water. Curiosity has recognized some indicators of this historical past, notably in mounds of particles scattered throughout the channel. The rocks sport pale rings or halos close to their edges, which scientists say are attributable to water-led chemical reactions after the rocks absorbed obtainable minerals deposited within the space.
Scientists aren’t positive what function Mars’ historical past would have in forming the pure sulfur simply found, or if the component has any connection to different sulfur-based minerals beforehand found within the area.
“Discovering unusual and surprising issues is what makes planetary exploration so thrilling,” Vasavada stated.
