The NASA Curiosity rover made a shocking discovery recently — rocks that are made of pure sulfur on Mars.
On Earth, pure sulfur forms only when certain conditions are present. This includes in cold springs, hot springs or a volcanic process. Depending on which process happens, different minerals also are created simultaneously with the sulfur.
In some dust that the rover took from Mars was a larger variety of different minerals than anyone had ever seen before.
As a scientist for the Curiosity project, Ashwin Vasavada, said:
“The running joke for us was we almost saw every mineral we’ve ever seen in the whole missions but all in this rock. It’s almost an abundance of riches.”
Scientists are undertaking the task now of figuring out exactly what this “mind-blowing” discovery of pure sulfur might mean for Mars as well as its history.
The simple presence of silica, which has also been discovered in the past on Mars, means there could have once been conditions present that would’ve been favorable to some form of microbial life.
The discovery of the sulfur was actually somewhat of an accident.
Operators of the rover noticed that it had driven over a rock and cracked it open. Doing so revealed that there were crystals that were yellowish green.
That’s when the scientists took a closer look, and conducted many tests, to discover the pure sulfur.
As Briony Horgan, a Purdue University professor of planetary science and a co-investigator on the rover mission called Perseverance, commented:
“My jaw dropped when I saw the image of the sulfur. Pure elemental sulfur is a very weird finding because on Earth we mostly find it in places like hydrothermal vents. Think Yellowstone! So, it’s a big mystery to me as to how this rock formed in Mt. Sharp.”
What Horgan was referring to is where the rock was discovered. It’s in what’s known as the Gediz Vallis channel, which is a groove that winds and that scientists believe was created about 3 billion years ago.
The channel itself is carved into Mt. Sharp, which is a three-mile-tall mountain that the rover has been scaling for 10 years now.
Curiosity first landed on Mars back in August of 2012. Since then, it’s ascended about 2,600 feet up the base of Mt. Sharp, starting at the floor of the Gale Crater. The crater is a huge ancient lake bed that has since dried up, and Mt. Sharp is the central peak of it.
Thus far, scientists have discovered that the multiple layers of Mt. Sharp has revealed different information about Mars’ history, including periods of time when it was wet and periods of time when it was drier.
In recent years, Curiosity has been keying in on the different features of the mountain, including the Gediz Vallis channel.
Vasavada said that this channel was formed many years after the mountain itself, because it carves through different layers of the mountain.
