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NASA’s Curiosity rover makes its ‘most unexpected’ find on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover makes its ‘most unexpected’ find on Mars

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has made its most unusual find to date on Mars: rocks made of pure sulfur, CNN writes.

It all began when the 1-ton rover happened to drive over a rock and crack it open, revealing yellowish-green crystals never spotted before on the red planet.

“I think it’s the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected. I have to say, there’s a lot of luck involved here. Not every rock has something interesting inside,” Ashwin Vasavada, a Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said.

The Curiosity team was eager for the rover to investigate the Gediz Vallis channel, a winding groove that appears to have been created 3 billion years ago by a mix of flowing water and debris. The channel is carved into part of the 5-kilometer-tall Mount Sharp. The rover has been scaling the mountain since 2014.

White stones had been visible in the distance, and the mission scientists wanted a closer look. The rover drivers at JPL, who send instructions to Curiosity, did a 90-degree turn to put the robotic explorer 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 lying amid the rover’s wheel tracks. A closer picture of the rock made clear the “mind-blowing” find.

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