A FEW BOOK TIPS
✅ The Planet Mars And Its Inhabitants
www.amzn.to/4fhPT4r
✅ Planet Mars: Story of Another World
www.amzn.to/46hluPM
✅ Missions to Mars: A New Era of Rover and Spacecraft Discovery on the Red Planet
www.amzn.to/46g2mld
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Scientists were surprised on May 30 when a rock over which NASA’s Curiosity rover passed opened up and revealed something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals.
Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich in sulphates, a type of salt that contains sulphur and forms as water evaporates. But where previous detections have been of sulphur-based minerals – in other words, a mixture of sulphur and other materials – the rock that Curiosity recently opened is made of elemental, or pure, sulphur. It is unclear what relationship, if any, elemental sulphur has with other sulphur-based minerals in the area.
While people associate sulfur with the smell of rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It only forms in a narrow range of conditions that scientists have not associated with the history of this site. And Curiosity found plenty of it – a whole field of shiny rocks that look similar to the one the rover smashed.
“Finding a field of rocks made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
It’s one of several discoveries that Curiosity made while off-road inside the Gediz Vallis channel, a groove that winds through part of the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) Mount Sharp, whose base the rover has been climbing since 2014. Each layer of the mountain represents a different period in Martian history. Curiosity’s mission is to study where and when the planet’s ancient terrain could have provided the necessary nutrients for microbial life, if any ever formed on Mars.
These conclusions are based on rocks found in the debris piles: while the stones carried by water flows become rounded like river stones, some of the debris piles are full of more angular rocks that may have been deposited by dry avalanches.
Finally, the water has penetrated all the material that has settled here. Chemical reactions caused by the water have whitened white “halo” shapes on some of the rocks. Wind and sand erosion revealed these halo shapes over time.
“This has not been a quiet period on Mars,” said Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and deputy principal investigator of Curiosity’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam. ”There has been an exciting amount of activity here. We’re observing multiple flows in the channel, including energetic floods and rock-rich flows.”
sources:
www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-science-laboratory/curiosity-rover/nasas-curiosity-rover-discovers-a-surprise-in-a-martian-rock/#hds-sidebar-nav-4
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Super cool!
Very cool. I wonder what a Flat Earther would say about this? Quick tip: The first question to ask a Flat Earther is What is your level of education?
Possibly a extinct thermal vent at a thermal pool like Yellowstone park or a piece of sulphur that broke a way / washed away in a flood was deposited there and the ground dried out leaving it abandoned to desiccate.