NASA’s Curiosity rover heads to new puzzling Martian vacation spot

After a 12 months of exploring a mysterious valley on Mars, NASA‘s intrepid Curiosity rover is headed to a brand new vacation spot with its personal intrigue. 

The Mini Cooper-sized robotic lab will research an uncommon panorama, known as a “boxwork,” that possible necessitated heat groundwater to type eons in the past on the Crimson Planet. And the place there’s water, there’s potential for all times — not less than the type scientists learn about. Researchers marvel if the boxwork might have hosted historic single-celled microorganisms.

“Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment,” stated Kirsten Siebach, a rover scientist primarily based in Houston, in a assertion. “That makes this an exciting place to explore.”

Because the mission launched in 2011, Curiosity has traveled about 372 million miles: some 352 million whizzing by way of house and one other 20 rumbling over the Martian terrain. 

At its most up-to-date web site, referred to as Gediz Vallis, the rover actually stumbled upon pure sulfur, its wheels crushing the fabric to reveal a mattress of yellow crystals. It turns on the market was an entire beach-like area of those rocks. Curiosity is surrounded by loads of rubble that comprises sulfur mixed with different supplies, however unadulterated sulfur is one thing particular.

When pure sulfur is made naturally on Earth, the component is normally related to superheated volcanic gasses and sizzling springs. One other means it may type is thru interactions with micro organism — a.okay.a. life.

“We don’t think we’re anywhere near a volcano where the rover is,” Abigail Fraeman, deputy venture scientist on the Curiosity mission, informed Mashable in September, “so that is a puzzling feature to find in this particular location.” 

The following leg of the rover’s journey will take a couple of months to drive. However scientists are keen to analyze the boxwork area on the foot of Mount Sharp due to what clues it might maintain about Mars’ historic historical past. 

From Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photos, the land characteristic seems like a spiderweb of ridges, spanning a number of miles. Darkish sand fills the hollowed areas among the many lattice of ridges.

Earlier than departing for the boxwork area, Curiosity takes a wide-view picture of the sector of sulfur stones, which seem white on the surface.
Credit score: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

There are a number of sorts of landscapes on Mars that seem as interconnected ridges, although they don’t seem to be all created in the identical means. Close to the Crimson Planet’s south pole, as an illustration, is a labyrinthine characteristic nicknamed “Inca Metropolis,” which can have shaped after a meteor affect. The collision might have led to fault traces within the floor that had been then backfilled with effervescent magma.

“Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment.”

Scientists consider this explicit boxwork in Mount Sharp’s foothills could have shaped when minerals in the final trickles of water seeped into floor rock cracks and hardened. Because the rocks weathered over the ages, minerals that had cemented into these fractures remained, abandoning the boxwork. 

A boxwork has shaped on the ceiling of the Elk’s Room, a part of Wind Cave Nationwide Park in South Dakota.
Credit score: Nationwide Park Service / Kim Acker

Boxwork formations happen on Earth, however they’re normally made with groundwater on cliffsides and in caves. The peculiar factor in regards to the instance at Mount Sharp is that it should have shaped when water was vanishing. Geologists additionally aren’t certain why this Martian characteristic is so huge, protecting an space of six to 12 miles. 

The rover staff hopes to determine whether or not microbes might have lived in that setting way back. 

“These ridges will include minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with salty liquid water flowing through,” Siebach stated.