By Stacy Liberatore for Dailymail.com
17:28 Jul 21, 2024, updated 19:45 Jul 21, 2024
NASA’s Curiosity rover has made a “mind-blowing” discovery on Mars that scientists say “shouldn’t be there.”
The one-ton rover discovered yellowish-green crystals of pure sulfur while searching for chemical evidence that the Red Planet was once habitable.
Although sulfur-containing minerals have been observed on the Martian world, elemental sulfur alone has never been observed before.
Curiosity accidentally cracked white rocks as it passed through the Gediz Vallis channel, revealing “strange” structures that add to growing evidence that Mars was once a habitable world.
The one-ton rover discovered yellowish-green crystals of pure sulfur during its search for chemical evidence that the Red Planet was once habitable
Previous research has suggested that sulfur may have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth more than four billion years ago, when the atmosphere was rich in sulfur and carbon, emitted by volcanic activity.
The microbes metabolized sulfur isotopes, releasing oxygen and beginning the process of oxygenation of the atmosphere, known as the Great Oxygenation Event.
But scientists did not say Curiosity’s discovery is an indication of past life on Mars.
The discovery adds to growing evidence of other elements essential to life identified on Mars, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus.
This discovery shows that Mars was covered in water, an essential element for life.
Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist, said: “Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert.
“It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
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The breakthrough discovery was made May 30 as Curiosity traveled off-road through the Gediz Vallis channel, a rille that runs partway down the three-mile-high Mount Sharp, the base of which the rover has been climbing since 2014.
The six-wheeled rover had already detected sulfur on Mars, but only mixed with other minerals like magnesium and calcium.
When combined with other elements, sulfur gives off a pungent odor, but pure sulfur found on Mars is odorless.
NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California have identified a set of white rocks for the first time and given Curiosity instructions to explore them.
The rover sent back to Earth a close-up image of the white stones, which included a spike of crushed rock near Curiosity’s wheels.
And that’s when the team spotted the yellow crystals.
“I think this is the strangest discovery of the whole mission and the most unexpected,” Vasavada told CNN.
Curiosity made the strange discovery when it accidentally broke some white stones while crossing the Gediz Vallis canal.
“I have to say there’s a lot of luck here. Not every stone contains something interesting.”
While the sulfurous rocks were too small and brittle to be sampled with the drill, a large boulder nicknamed “Mammoth Lakes” was spotted nearby.
Rover engineers had to search for a section of rock that would allow safe drilling and find a parking spot on the soft, sloping surface.
After Curiosity drilled its 41st hole using the powerful drill at the end of the rover’s seven-foot robotic arm, the six-wheeled scientist poured the powdered rock into instruments inside its belly for further analysis so scientists could determine what materials the rock is made of.
“No one had pure sulfur on their bingo card,” Vasavada said.
Sulfur rocks typically have a “beautiful translucent, crystalline texture,” the scientists explained.
But the group seen on Mars had been sandblasted over millions of years, dulling the bright yellow and making them appear reddish like the surrounding landscape.
However, the discovery adds to growing evidence of other elements essential to life identified on Mars, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus.
The Gediz Vallis channel is one of the main reasons the science team wanted to visit this part of Mars. The region is located just south of the Martian equator.
Scientists believe the channel was carved by flows of liquid water and debris, which left a three-kilometer stretch along the mountainside below the channel.
The goal was to develop a better understanding of how this landscape changed billions of years ago, and recent clues have provided some insight.
Since Curiosity arrived in the canal earlier this year, scientists have been studying whether ancient floodwaters or landslides formed the large mounds of debris rising from the canal floor.
Curiosity’s latest clues suggest that both played a role: some clumps were likely left by violent flows of water and debris, while others appear to be the result of more local landslides.
These conclusions are based on the rocks found in the debris mounds. While the stones carried by the flowing water become rounded like river rocks, some of the debris mounds are riddled with more angular rocks that dry avalanches may have deposited.
Eventually, water penetrated all the materials that were deposited here. Chemical reactions caused by the water bleached some of the rocks into “halo” shapes. Erosion by wind and sand revealed these halo shapes over time.
“It was not a quiet time on Mars,” said Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and deputy principal investigator for Curiosity’s Mast Camera.
“There has been some exciting activity here. We are seeing a lot of flows in the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows.”
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