Someone should alert Elon Musk.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has made an “astonishing” discovery on the surface of Mars — yellowish-green crystals of pure sulfur, never before seen on Earth’s mysterious red neighbor, scientists say.
The groundbreaking discovery was made literally after the one-ton Curiosity rover drove over a pile of rocks and cracked one of them while exploring the deep, winding Geddes Vallis channel, which is believed to have been formed by water 3 billion years ago.
“I think this is the strangest and most bizarre discovery of the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [JPL] In Pasadena, California, He told CNN,“I must say that luck plays a big role here. Not every rock has something interesting inside it.”
The rover operators had spotted white rocks in the distance, and mission scientists wanted to investigate further. On May 30, Vasavada and his team reviewed images from the rover that showed a crushed rock in the wheel tracks.
When they zoomed in, they saw “amazing”, he said, seeing the “incredible texture and color inside” of what initially appeared to be a typical Martian rock.
They were even more shocked when analysis proved that it was composed entirely of sulfur.
“Nobody had pure sulfur on their bingo card,” Vasavada said.
According to Vasadava, sulfur rocks are usually “beautiful, translucent, crystalline” — but millions of years of weathering have eroded the exterior of the rocks, blending them in with the rest of the orange landscape on Mars.
The Curiosity rover has previously detected a number of sulfates, or sulfur-containing salts that form when water evaporates. Pure sulfur on Earth only forms under extreme conditions, such as volcanic processes or in hot springs, CNN reported.
The Geddes Vallis channel was dug into the sides of the three-mile-high Mount Sharp, which the rover has been steadily climbing for 10 years, according to CNN.
Scientists are now exploring what the presence of pure sulfur means for Mars and its cosmic history.
This discovery may give SpaceX CEO Elon Musk more inspiration to achieve his goal of colonizing the Red Planet in the future.
