Curiosity rover makes ‘amazing’ discovery on Mars – DW – 22.07.2024

NASA’s Curiosity rover has made an unexpected discovery on Mars: yellow crystals of pure sulfur, the first ever found on the Red Planet, the space agency said.

The discovery occurred in the Gediz Valley Channel, an area of ​​Mount Sharp that has attracted scientific interest since the rover’s arrival in 2014. During its exploration, Curiosity, which weighs 899 kilograms (1,950 pounds), accidentally broke open a rock, revealing its glowing interior.

This is the first encounter with elemental sulfur on the Red Planet, and the discovery has stunned scientists. “It’s like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it,” he added.

Vasavada also told CNN that what they saw when they zoomed in to see the “gorgeous texture and color of the interior” was “astonishing,” considering it initially looked like typical Martian rock.

pure sulfur

While sulfates, a type of sulfur-containing salt formed by the evaporation of water, are common on Mars and provide clues to the history of its water, this type of pure sulfur is odorless, unlike the characteristic rotten egg smell associated with hydrogen sulfide under very specific conditions that were previously not thought possible in this region of Mars.

The most intriguing thing is that there is a whole field of such stones in this area. In this sense, the abundance of these rocks in the Gediz Valley suggests that there are geological processes taking place on Mars that we still do not know about.

Gediz Valley Canal on Mars

The discovery joins other exciting discoveries in the Gediz Valley Canal, an ancient waterway that scientists had been eager to explore even before Curiosity launched. The rover found evidence that the region had a turbulent past, with massive floods and landslides that left behind piles of debris.

“There’s been a lot of activity here,” said Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “We’re seeing a lot of flow through the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows,” he added.

For now, Curiosity is continuing its exploration, drilling into rocks to analyze their composition and look for new surprises. Although pure sulfur is too fragile to sample, the rover did manage to drill into a nearby rock dubbed “Mammoth Lakes” for analysis.

Each discovery helps scientists better understand the geological history of Mars and the conditions that once existed on the planet. Although we have not yet found signs of life, we continue to find elements that may have been useful to living organisms in the past.

Edited by Felipe Espinosa Wang with information from NASA, Science Alert and CNN.