A rock on Mars spilled a shocking yellow treasure after Curiosity unintentionally cracked by way of its unremarkable exterior.
When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) physique over the rock again in Might, the rock broke open, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: brimstone.
Though sulfates are pretty widespread 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 affected by rocks that look suspiciously just like the sulfur rock earlier than it obtained fortuitously crushed – suggesting that, one way or the other, elemental sulfur could also be considerable there in some locations.
“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” mentioned Curiosity challenge 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, often 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, equivalent to its water historical past, and the way it has weathered over time.
Pure sulfur, however, solely varieties below a really slender set of circumstances, 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 large that we’re not conscious of.
Sulfur, it is necessary to know, is an important component for all life. It is often taken up within the type of sulfates, and used to make two of the important amino acids residing 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 search out any indicators of life on Mars, anyway.
However we do preserve stumbling throughout the stays of bits and items that residing organisms would discover helpful, together with chemistry, water, and previous liveable circumstances.
Caught right here on Earth, we’re pretty restricted in how we will entry Mars. Curiosity’s devices had been capable of 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 will likely be to determine precisely how, based mostly on what we learn about Mars, that sulfur could have come to be there.
That is going to take a bit extra work, probably 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 historic 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 continues to be trundling its method deeper alongside the channel, to see what different surprises could be ready simply across the subsequent rock.
An earlier model of this text was revealed in July 2024.
