NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has recently passed through a channel in which pure sulfur rocks litter the ground, and scientists aren’t sure why.
In July, GNN reported how the rover had found a strange white stone, broke it open, and found sulfur crystals, shocking the rover’s science team back at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Now, as Curiosity prepares to leave its 12-year haunt along the slopes of the three-mile-high Mount Sharp, it’s had to pass through a shallow channel littered with the same white stones.
The channel, known as Gedis Vallis, is located among the mountain’s foothills, the geology of which indicates they had formed in an already dry climate after water had begun disappearing from the surface of Mars.
However, the presence of the channel suggests that water flows still coursed through the area from time to time, and evidence of rivers and wet debris in the channel helps to corroborate the idea.
It was only after the rover entered Gedis Vallis that the field of sulfur stones was discovered. Though the area had been scouted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the stones were too small to be detected by the probe’s instruments.
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“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.
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From a vantage point, Curiosity, which has now driven about 20 miles since landing in 2012, imaged the field with its MastCam, and stitched together a 360° view of its surroundings, which NASA turned into a convenient video with spacey music.
EXPLORE the Gedis Vallis below…
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