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.
