NASA’s Curiosity captured a 360-degree panorama before leaving Gediz Vallis channel, a feature it’s been exploring for the past year.
The rover embarks on a journey to Mars’ boxwork formation, investigating its weblike patterns and the late-stage water activity indicated by Gediz Vallis channel. This mission aims to uncover past conditions favorable for microbial life, informed by the surprising discovery of pure sulfur stones and ancient water flows.
Journey to the Boxwork
NASA’s Curiosity rover is gearing up for its next mission: a months-long journey to explore a unique Martian feature known as the boxwork. This formation, made up of intricate, weblike patterns, spans miles across the planet’s surface. Before heading to this new destination, Curiosity will bid farewell to the Gediz Vallis channel, a region shrouded in scientific intrigue. One key mystery for researchers is how this channel formed relatively late in Mars’ transition to a drier climate. Another puzzle lies in the field of white sulfur stones that Curiosity uncovered during the summer.
To study the area, the rover captured a 360-degree panorama showcasing the sulfur stones and other features within the channel before moving to its western edge at the end of September.
Use your mouse to explore this 360-degree view of Gediz Vallis channel, a region of Mars that NASA’s Curiosity rover surveyed before heading west to new adventures. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Traces of Ancient Waters
Curiosity’s overarching mission is to search for evidence that ancient Mars had the necessary conditions to support microbial life, if it ever existed. Billions of years ago, the Red Planet was home to lakes and rivers, and the Gediz Vallis channel—located at the base of the towering 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) Mount Sharp—could provide crucial insights. This channel may reveal what the environment was like as Mars was losing its water. While older layers on Mount Sharp formed in a dry climate, the presence of the channel suggests that water occasionally flowed through the region as the climate underwent significant change.
Scientists are still piecing together the processes that formed various features within the channel, including the debris mound nicknamed “Pinnacle Ridge,” visible in the new 360-degree panorama. It appears that rivers, wet debris flows, and dry avalanches all left their mark. The science team is now constructing a timeline of events from Curiosity’s observations.
Unraveling the Sulfur Mystery
The science team is also trying to answer some big questions about the sprawling field of sulfur stones. Images of the area from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) showed what looked like an unremarkable patch of light-colored terrain. It turns out that the sulfur stones were too small for MRO’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) to see, and Curiosity’s team was intrigued to find them when the rover reached the patch. They were even more surprised after Curiosity rolled over one of the stones, crushing it to reveal yellow crystals inside.
Science instruments on the rover confirmed the stone was pure sulfur — something no mission has seen before on Mars. The team doesn’t have a ready explanation for why the sulfur formed there; on Earth, it’s associated with volcanoes and hot springs, and no evidence exists on Mount Sharp pointing to either of those causes.
“We looked at the sulfur field from every angle — from the top and the side — and looked for anything mixed with the sulfur that might give us clues as to how it formed. We’ve gathered a ton of data, and now we have a fun puzzle to solve,” said Curiosity’s project scientist Ashwin Vasavada at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Spiderwebs on Mars
Curiosity, which has traveled about 20 miles (33 kilometers) since landing in 2012, is now driving along the western edge of Gediz Vallis channel, gathering a few more panoramas to document the region before making tracks to the boxwork.
Viewed by MRO, the boxwork looks like spiderwebs stretching across the surface. It’s believed to have formed when minerals carried by Mount Sharp’s last pulses of water settled into fractures in surface rock and then hardened. As portions of the rock eroded away, what remained were the minerals that had cemented themselves in the fractures, leaving the weblike boxwork.
On Earth, boxwork formations have been seen on cliffsides and in caves. But Mount Sharp’s boxwork structures stand apart from those both because they formed as water was disappearing from Mars and because they’re so extensive, spanning an area of 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers).
“These ridges will include minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with salty liquid water flowing through,” said Kirsten Siebach of Rice University in Houston, a Curiosity scientist studying the region. “Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment. That makes this an exciting place to explore.”
More About Curiosity
Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.), in Boulder, Colorado. JPL manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
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1 Comment
Sulfur stones were also recently discovered in the vicinity of the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah.