While exploring the Gediz Vallis region on Mars, Curiosity accidentally crushed a small rock and discovered strange yellow crystals.
According to Live Science, Gediz Vallis is a deep channel carved into the slope of Mount Sharp in the heart of the Gale Crater, an area that scientists believe was once an ancient river valley where Martian life may have thrived.
Curiosity is a car-sized rover designed to search for signs of life and has been operating on Mars since 2012, having been remarkably fortunate in its findings.
This time, the rock it encountered and broke contained something scientists have long sought on other planets: sulfur crystals.
These yellow crystals, which are more precious than gold to scientists, were revealed in the rock that the Curiosity rover’s wheels accidentally crushed – (Image: JPL/NASA)
As the camera on the rover’s arm focused on the object it had stumbled upon, scientists discovered strange yellow crystals sparkling within the newly exposed core.
However, the crystals within this rock were too small and fragile for the rover to handle properly.
Curiosity then paused to search for a larger rock of the same type. This time, the drill revealed that these yellow crystals were indeed pure sulfur.
Sulfur had previously been detected on Mars, but only in combination with other elements in compounds known as sulfates.
Scientists suspected that pure sulfur might exist somewhere on the Red Planet but were surprised to find it within surface rocks.
“It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Curiosity mission.
Images taken around the site of the two discovered rocks also showed many other large and small rocks of the same kind scattered nearby. NASA scientists likened this rock field to a “oasis in the desert.”
Sulfur is one of the six elements known as NCHOPS – which includes nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur – that make up the basic structure of organic compounds in nature on Earth.
For this reason, astrobiologists have long sought these elements on other worlds, as their presence suggests the potential for life.
For Mars, NASA has nearly concluded that it harbored life at some point—at least it once did, but all life forms have since become extinct.
Nevertheless, the search for additional chemical elements related to life and the conditions that support life, as well as how these elements exist in this strange environment, brings us one step closer to confirming that the Red Planet was once a “second Earth.”
