{"id":78268,"date":"2024-07-20T13:40:24","date_gmt":"2024-07-20T09:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/?p=78268"},"modified":"2024-07-22T15:46:56","modified_gmt":"2024-07-22T11:46:56","slug":"nasas-curiosity-rover-makes-its-most-unexpected-find-on-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/news\/78268\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover makes its \u2018most unexpected\u2019 find on Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has made its most unusual find to date on Mars: rocks made of pure sulfur, CNN writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

“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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77951,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,47,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-society","category-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}