Yellow crystals Elemental Sulfur According to the Curiosity team, the discoveries were made when NASA's Curiosity rover accidentally drove over a rock on May 30, 2024, breaking it apart.
Although sulfur may remind you of the smell of rotten eggs, elemental sulfur is odorless.
It forms only under a narrow range of conditions that scientists have not linked to the history of the place.
Curiosity then discovered lots of bright chunks of rock that looked similar to the rock the rover had crushed.
“Finding a rock block made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist and a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“It can't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
It was one of several Curiosity discovered while driving off-road through a channel in Gediz Canyon, a 5-kilometer (3-mile) groove that runs gently down part of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity has been climbing the base of the mountain since 2014.
The channel was discovered from space years before the rover launched and is one of the main reasons the science team wanted to visit this part of Mars.
Researchers believe the channel was carved out by flows of liquid water and debris, leaving a ridge of rock and sediment stretching for 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) on the mountainside below the channel.
The goal is to better understand how this landscape changed billions of years ago, and while recent clues are helping, there is still much to learn from this dramatic formation.
Since Curiosity arrived in the strait earlier this year, scientists have been studying whether a large pile of rubble that rose from the bottom of the strait was formed by an ancient flood or landslide.
The latest clues from the spacecraft suggest that both played a role: some mountains appear to have been left by powerful flows of water and debris, while others appear to be the result of more localized landslides.
These conclusions are based on the rocks found in the debris middens: while stones carried by water are rounded like river stones, some of the debris middens are littered with more angular rocks that appear to have been deposited by dry avalanches.
Eventually, water seeped into all the material that had settled here.
Chemical reactions caused by water have caused white “halo” shapes to appear on some of the rocks.
Erosion by wind and sand has revealed the shapes of these halos over the years.
“This has not been a quiet period for Mars,” said Dr. Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's Mast Camera.
“There has been a lot of activity here. We're seeing multiple flows through the channel, including heavy flooding and rocky flows.”
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This article is a version of a press release provided by NASA.
Source: www.sci.news
