A rock on Mars spilled a shocking yellow treasure after Curiosity by chance cracked by its unremarkable exterior.
When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) physique over the rock again in Could, the rock broke open, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: brimstone.
Though sulfates are pretty frequent on Mars, this represents the primary time sulfur has been discovered on the purple planet in its pure elemental type.
What’s much more thrilling is that the Gediz Vallis Channel, the place Curiosity discovered the rock, is suffering from rocks that look suspiciously much like the sulfur rock earlier than it bought fortuitously crushed – suggesting that, in some way, elemental sulfur could also be plentiful there in some locations.
“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” stated Curiosity mission scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July.
“It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
Sulfates are salts that type when sulfur, normally in compound type, mixes with different minerals in water.
When the water evaporates, the minerals combine and dry out, leaving the sulfates behind.
These sulfate minerals can inform us so much about Mars, akin to its water historical past, and the way it has weathered over time.
Pure sulfur, then again, solely types below a really slim set of situations, which aren’t recognized to have occurred within the area of Mars the place Curiosity made its discovery.
There are, to be honest, a number of issues we do not know in regards to the geological historical past of Mars, however the discovery of scads of pure sulfur simply hanging about on the Martian floor suggests that there is one thing fairly massive that we’re not conscious of.
Sulfur, it is necessary to know, is an important factor for all life. It is normally taken up within the type of sulfates, and used to make two of the important amino acids dwelling organisms must make proteins.
Since we have recognized about sulfates on Mars for a while, the invention would not inform us something new in that space. We’re but to seek out any indicators of life on Mars, anyway.
However we do preserve stumbling throughout the stays of bits and items that dwelling organisms would discover helpful, together with chemistry, water, and previous liveable situations.
Caught right here on Earth, we’re pretty restricted in how we will entry Mars. Curiosity’s devices had been in a position to analyze and establish the sulfurous rocks within the Gediz Vallis Channel, but when it hadn’t taken a route that rolled over and cracked one open, it may have been someday till we discovered the sulfur.
The following step shall be to determine precisely how, primarily based on what we find out about Mars, that sulfur might have come to be there.
That is going to take a bit extra work, presumably involving some detailed modeling of Mars’s geological evolution.
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In the meantime, Curiosity will proceed to gather information on the identical.
The Gediz Vallis channel is an space wealthy in Martian historical past, an historical waterway whose rocks now bear the imprint of the traditional river that after flowed over them, billions of years in the past.
Curiosity drilled a gap in one of many rocks, taking a powdered pattern of its inside for chemical evaluation, and remains to be trundling its approach deeper alongside the channel, to see what different surprises may be ready simply across the subsequent rock.
An earlier model of this text was revealed in July 2024.
