Someone warn Elon Musk.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has made a “mind-blowing” discovery on Mars — yellow-green crystals of pure sulfur never seen before in Earth’s mysterious red neighbor, according to scientists.
The truly ground-breaking discovery was made after a one-ton Curiosity drove over a pile of rocks and opened a crack while exploring the deep and winding Gediz Vallis channel, believed to have been formed by water 3 billion years ago.
“I think this is the strangest discovery of the entire mission and the most unexpected,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [JPL] In Pasadena, California, told CNN. “I have to say, there’s a lot of luck here. Not every rock has something interesting.
The rover’s operators saw white stones in the distance and mission scientists wanted to investigate further. On May 30, Wasawata and his team reviewed images from the rover that showed crushed rock in the wheel tracks.
What they saw as they zoomed in was “mind-blowing,” he said, adding that they saw “beautiful texture and color inside” what initially appeared to be a typical Martian rock.
They were even more shocked when analysis proved it was purely sulphur.
“Nobody’s bingo card has pure sulfur,” Wasawata said.
Sulfur rocks are normally “beautiful, translucent and crystalline,” Wasatava says — but millions of years of weathering have sanded the rocks’ exteriors, blending them in with the rest of the orange Martian landscape.
Curiosity previously discovered several sulfates, or sulfur-containing salts formed when water evaporates. Pure sulfur forms on Earth only under extreme conditions, such as volcanic processes or hot springs, CNN reported.
The Gediz Vallis channel is dug into the sides of the 3-mile-high Mount Sharp, which the rover has been steadily climbing for 10 years, CNN reported.
Scientists are now investigating what the presence of pure sulfur has to do with Mars and its cosmic history.
The discovery will give SpaceX CEO Musk more impetus to reach his goal of colonizing the Red Planet in the near future.
