NASA’s Curiosity rover’s latest stunning discovery on Mars has revealed yellow-green crystals of pure sulfur, never before seen on the Red Planet.
Scientists say the spacecraft made the unprecedented discovery after passing over a pile of rocks and breaking one of them while exploring the Geddes Vallis channel. The unexpected discovery revealed a new presence that “shouldn’t exist,” making it the first such discovery in the past 30 years of exploring the planet.
The serendipitous discovery was clearly like “finding an oasis in the desert,” says Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Moreover, it’s not as if the rover accidentally found a handful of these pure sulfur rocks; an entire field exposed scientists to tons of them.
“Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting,” Vasavada added.
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@MarsCuriosity added the exciting event to its e-magazine and posted it online:
“*crunch* I stepped on a rock and found crystals inside it!
“It’s pure sulfur. (It has no smell.) Elemental sulfur is something we’ve never seen on Mars before. We don’t know much about these yellow crystals yet, but my team is excited to investigate.”
Curiosity’s official Twitter update left many wondering how the sulfur discovery didn’t smell bad. “Hey, people associate sulfur with the smell of rotten eggs, which is the result of hydrogen sulfide gas, but elemental sulfur is odorless. It only forms in a narrow range of conditions that scientists have not linked to the history of this location,” the Curiosity rover’s Mars page briefly explained.
Why is this discovery groundbreaking?
As is already known, sulfur is one of the basic elements of life, one of the six basic elements, along with carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus. What makes this discovery even more novel is that these elements together make up 98% of living matter on Earth. This consideration has once again led scientists into a black hole of possibilities and questions surrounding the conditions and history of possible life on the Red Planet.
Learn about Curiosity’s discovery:
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The spacecraft had previously found sulfates, or sulfur-containing salts, on the planet, which are formed when water evaporates. The team of scientists associated with the project had even been able to locate white calcium sulfate (gypsum) in a large number of cracks in the Martian surface, suggesting hard water deposits from ancient groundwater flows. However, Vasavada exclaimed, finding “pure sulfur” wasn’t even on their “bingo card.”
Vasavada also noted that while such rocks have a “beautiful, translucent, crystalline texture,” their presence on the surface of Mars and greater exposure to weathering has led to a camouflage effect where the rocks blend in with the planet’s rocks, which are largely identified by shades of orange.
Eventually, they were able to detect the “remarkable texture and color inside” of the rock and used the rover’s resources to analyze it; the data thus proved that it was pure sulfur.
Similar to this accidental discovery, NASA’s Spirit rover also accidentally discovered nearly pure silica, again suggesting that hot springs or steam vents may have once existed on the planet. The discovery also suggests that such occurrences could provide conditions conducive to the emergence of microbial life, if it ever existed.
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In fact, curiosity did not kill the cat, but he found a friend again in a lucky accident.
The Curiosity rover has made the “strangest” and “most unexpected discovery” while investigating the Geddes Vallis channel, which appears to have formed 3 billion years ago from flowing water and debris. CNN The channel was dug into the side of the five-kilometer-high Mount Sharp, which the rover has been installing since 2014, Vasavada said through the Curiosity project.
The project scientist and his team reviewed images taken by the rover, which showed crushed rock lying in its wheel tracks.
“I have to say that luck plays a big role here. Not every rock has something interesting inside it,” Vasavada told CNN, claiming that luck played a significant role in their latest discovery, which expanded their survey to include the Red Planet’s intriguing mysteries.
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