Latest news with #CuriosityMars
Yomiuri Shimbun
16-05-2025
- Science
- Yomiuri Shimbun
NASA Rover Finds Fresh Evidence of Warm, Wet past of Mars
NASA / Handout via Reuters, file A 'self-portrait' of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle on Vera Rubin Ridge on the planet Mars, according to NASA, in this photo mosaic assembled from dozens of images taken and released in January 2018. WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A mineral called siderite found abundantly in rock drilled by a NASA rover on the surface of Mars is providing fresh evidence of the planet's warmer and wetter ancient past when it boasted substantial bodies of water and potentially harbored life. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012 to explore whether Earth's planetary neighbor was ever able to support microbial life, found the mineral in rock samples drilled at three locations in 2022 and 2023 inside Gale crater, a large impact basin with a mountain in the middle. Siderite is an iron carbonate mineral. Its presence in sedimentary rocks formed billions of years ago offers evidence that Mars once had a dense atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, a gas that would have warmed the planet through the greenhouse effect to the point that it could sustain bodies of liquid water on its surface. There are features on the Martian landscape that many scientists have interpreted as signs that liquid water once flowed across its surface, with potential oceans, lakes and rivers considered as possible habitats for past microbial life. Carbon dioxide is the main climate-regulating greenhouse gas on Earth, as it is on Mars and Venus. Its presence in the atmosphere traps heat from the sun, warming the climate. Until now, evidence indicating the Martian atmosphere previously was rich in carbon dioxide has been sparse. The hypothesis is that when the atmosphere — for reasons not fully understood — evolved from thick and rich in carbon dioxide to thin and starved of this gas, the carbon through geochemical processes became entombed in rocks in the planet's crust as a carbonate mineral. The samples obtained by Curiosity, which drills 3 to 4 centimeters down into rock to study its chemical and mineral composition, lend weight to this notion. The samples contained up to 10.5% siderite by weight, as determined by an instrument onboard the car-sized, six-wheeled rover. 'One of the longstanding mysteries in the study of Martian planetary evolution and habitability is: If large amounts of carbon dioxide were required to warm the planet and stabilize liquid water, why are there so few detections of carbonate minerals on the Martian surface?' said University of Calgary geochemist Benjamin Tutolo, a participating scientist on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover team and lead author of the study published on April 17 in the journal Science. 'Models predict that carbonate minerals should be widespread. But, to date, rover-based investigations and satellite-based orbital surveys of the Martian surface had found little evidence of their presence,' Tutolo added. Because rock similar to that sampled by the rover has been identified globally on Mars, the researchers suspect it too contains an abundance of carbonate minerals and may hold a substantial portion of the carbon dioxide that once warmed Mars. The Gale crater sedimentary rocks — sandstones and mudstones — are thought to have been deposited around 3.5 billion years ago, when this was the site of a lake and before the Martian climate underwent a dramatic change. 'The shift of Mars' surface from more habitable in the past, to apparently sterile today, is the largest-known environmental catastrophe,' said planetary scientist and study coauthor Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and Astera Institute. 'We do not know the cause of this change, but Mars has a very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere today, and there is evidence that the atmosphere was thicker in the past. This puts a premium on understanding where the carbon went, so discovering a major unsuspected deposit of carbon-rich materials is an important new clue,' Kite added. The rover's findings offer insight into the carbon cycle on ancient Mars. On Earth, volcanoes spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the gas is absorbed by surface waters — mainly the ocean — and combines with elements such as calcium to form limestone rock. Through the geological process called plate tectonics, this rock is reheated and the carbon is ultimately released again into the atmosphere through volcanism. Mars, however, lacks plate tectonics. 'The important feature of the ancient Martian carbon cycle that we outline in this study is that it was imbalanced. In other words, substantially more carbon dioxide seems to have been sequestered into the rocks than was subsequently released back into the atmosphere,' Tutolo said. 'Models of Martian climate evolution can now incorporate our new analyzes, and in turn, help to refine the role of this imbalanced carbon cycle in maintaining, and ultimately losing, habitability over Mars' planetary history,' Tutolo added.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's Mars orbiter snapped this image of Curiosity trucking along down at the surface
The Curiosity Mars rover covers a lot of ground for a robot that only moves at a max speed of .1 mph. A photo snapped recently by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides a pretty cool visualization of what the rover has been up to so far this year, showing the tracks Curiosity left behind as it journeyed from its previous science target — an area called the Gediz Vallis channel — to its next destination. The rover itself is just a tiny speck at the front of the roughly 1,050-foot-long trail, and according to NASA, this snap 'is believed to be the first orbital image of the rover mid-drive across the Red Planet.' The image was captured on February 28 by the orbiter's HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, and shows Curiosity's movement over 11 drives starting at the beginning of that month. While a few weeks might seem like a long time for tire tracks to stick around in the dirt, this is normal for Mars. The tracks are '[l]ikely to last for months before being erased by wind,' NASA says. Curiosity is expected to reach its next science destination, which is home to formations thought to have been created long ago by groundwater, in the coming weeks.
Forbes
26-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
See NASA Rover's Epic Mars Panorama — As It's Snapped From Orbit
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this view looking back down at the floor of Gale Crater from ... More its location on Mount Sharp on Feb. 7, 2025, the 4,447th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Curiosity was continuing its climb through a region of the mountain called the sulfate-bearing unit. Above is a sample of a spectacular new panoramic image created using images sent back from Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover. The rover — on its 4,447th Martian day (called a sol) when it took the image — landed in 2012 in Gale Crater near the planet's equator. That crater was formed by an ancient asteroid impact and is about 93 miles (150 kilometers) in diameter. For the last few years, Curiosity has been traveling slowly up Mount Sharp, within the crater. It's about three miles (five kilometers) high and comprises many different geological layers — which is why Curiosity is there. From Mount Sharp, it can see a lot of Gale Crater, with what looks like mountains in the background of its panorama, below, actually the rim of the vast crater. NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this view looking back down at the floor of Gale Crater from ... More its location on Mount Sharp on Feb. 7, 2025, the 4,447th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Curiosity was continuing its climb through a region of the mountain called the sulfate-bearing unit. The image was captured on Feb. 7, 2025, using the telephoto lens on the rover's Mast Camera. It can be downloaded in 19,506x3,191 pixel (62 megapixels) quality from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and now remotely operates the rover from 203 million miles (326 million kilometers) away. The image took so long to return to Earth because Curiosity can only send data at a speed of 32 kbit/s, which is extremely slow compared to typical broadband speeds. NASA's Curiosity rover appears as a dark speck in this contrast-enhanced view captured on Feb. 28, ... More 2025, by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Trailing Curiosity are the rover's tracks, which can linger on the Martian surface for months before being erased by the wind. Exactly three weeks after Curisoity's exquisite panorama of Gale Crater, the robot itself was imaged by another robot flying above. Captured on Feb. 28 by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — which has been circling the red planet since 2006 — Curiosity appears as a dark speck, its tracks obvious behind it. They're expected to dissipate within a few months as the famously strong Martian wind takes hold. Curiosity moves at a top speed of 0.1 mph (0.16 kph). 'By comparing the time HiRISE took the image to the rover's commands for the day, we can see it was nearly done with a 69-foot drive,' said Doug Ellison, Curiosity's planning team chief at JPL. During its tenure on Mars, Curiosity has detected methane in the atmosphere, complex organic molecules, finger-like rocks and even an 'alien doorway.' The rover was launched from Cape Canaveral on Nov. 26, 2011, and landed inside Gale Crater on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012. A self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the robot at a drilled sample site called ... More "Duluth" on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp in Mars on June 20, 2018. (Photo by NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS / HANDOUT/) The same week these two spectacular images emerged, so did a study that suggested that heavy rain once fell on Mars. The new study from geologists at the University of Colorado Boulder portrays Mars as relatively warm and wet billions of years ago, with rain feeding valleys and channels that shaped the Martian surface. 'You could pull up Google Earth images of places like Utah, zoom out, and you'd see the similarities to Mars,' said research lead Amanda Steckel at the California Institute of Technology. Some water probably existed on Mars during about 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. 'Once the erosion from flowing water stopped, Mars almost got frozen in time and probably still looks a lot like Earth did 3.5 billion years ago,' said senior author Brian Hynek at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's Curiosity rover finds major clue that Mars was once habitable
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. While slowly climbing the slopes of Mount Sharp — a towering peak inside Mars' Gale Crater — NASA's Curiosity rover made a remarkable discovery: large deposits of carbon locked away in carbonate minerals. That may sound a little dry at first, but in reality this find could be a major piece of the puzzle in our search for ancient life on the Red Planet. Carbonate minerals form when carbon dioxide interacts with water and rock, making them an important marker of past environmental conditions. Scientists have spotted these minerals before on Mars — by rovers on the ground, orbiters above, and even in Martian meteorites that fell to Earth — but Curiosity's latest data adds exciting new details. "It tells us that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct," said the study's lead author, Ben Tutolo, associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary, in a statement. The minerals found by the rover likely formed in extremely dry conditions through chemical reactions between water and rock followed by the process of evaporation. This process points to a time when Mars had a thick enough atmosphere, rich in carbon dioxide, to support liquid water on the surface. However, as the atmosphere thinned, that carbon dioxide would have begun turning into stone. One standout mineral in Curiosity's new discovery is siderite, an iron-rich carbonate found in surprisingly high amounts — between five and 10% by weight — alongside salts that dissolve easily in water. "The broader implications are the planet was habitable up until this time, but then, as the [carbon dioxide] that had been warming the planet started to precipitate as siderite, it likely impacted Mars' ability to stay warm," said Tutolo. What makes this find even more fascinating is the presence of iron oxyhydroxides in the same deposits. These minerals suggest Mars may have once also had a functioning carbon cycle — similar to Earth's — where some of the carbon dioxide locked in rocks eventually made its way back into the atmosphere. Related Stories: — NASA's Perseverance rover hits the Mars rock gold mine: 'It has been all we had hoped for and more' — Curiosity Mars rover discovers largest organic molecules ever seen on Red Planet — Curiosity rover rolls past 'Devil's Gate' on Mars: Space picture of the day By comparing Curiosity's findings with orbital data, scientists believe similar layers across the planet could have trapped up to 36 millibars' worth of atmospheric carbon dioxide — enough to dramatically change Mars' climate. This Martian discovery also ties in closely with work being done right here on Earth. Tutolo says he's been exploring ways to combat climate change by turning human-made carbon dioxide into stable carbonate minerals — essentially locking carbon away in rock. "What we're trying to do on Earth to fight climate change is something that nature may have already done on Mars," he said. "Learning about the mechanisms of making these minerals on Mars helps us to better understand how we can do it here. Studying the collapse of Mars' warm and wet early days also tells us that habitability is a very fragile thing."
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Strange sphere-studded rock on Mars found by NASA's Perseverance rover
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's Perseverance rover has encountered another rock on Mars that has left scientists puzzled. Named "St. Pauls Bay" by the mission team, the Mars rock features hundreds of millimeter-size dark gray spheres, some of which have tiny pinholes. Perseverance discovered this rock on March 11 on the rim of the Jezero Crater, an ancient lakebed that the rover has been exploring since 2021 for signs of past microbial life. Scientists say determining the geological origins of this area's features could provide valuable insights into how rocks in the region evolved over billions of years. "Placing these features in geologic context will be critical for understanding their origin, and determining their significance for the geological history of the Jezero crater rim and beyond," the Perseverance team wrote in a statement. The St. Pauls Bay rock is located on the slopes of the Witch Hazel Hill area, a scientifically significant rocky outcrop spanning more than 330 feet (101 meters), with each of its rock layers acting like a page in the book of Mars' history. According to the statement about the new sphere-studded specimen, however, this rock may have floated in from elsewhere. Speaking of elsewhere on the Red Planet, NASA's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers previously spotted similarly textured rocks near their respective landing sites, Endurance and Gale craters, which scientists have interpreted as concretions formed by the interaction of groundwater circulating through the rocks' pores. Last year, Perseverance itself spotted popcorn-like textured rocks that also suggest groundwater once flowed through them. However, these formations can also arise from volcanic processes, such as the rapid cooling of molten rock droplets during an eruption, or from meteorite impacts, upon which vaporized rocks condense. "Each of these formation mechanisms would have vastly different implications for the evolution of these rocks, so the team is working hard to determine their context and origin," the mission team said in the statement. The rover is currently on a bonus mission exploring the rim of Jezero Crater, where ancient Martian groundwater may have interacted with rocks in a way that created an environment completely different from what the rover had previously explored on the crater floor. The samples it has collected, including one with intriguing features resembling leopard spots and poppy seeds which scientists suspect could be evidence of ancient microbial activity, are in 30 cigar-sized tubes awaiting pickup by NASA's complex Mars Sample Return mission. Related Stories: — Curiosity Mars rover discovers largest organic molecules ever seen on Red Planet — Curiosity rover discovers new evidence Mars once had 'right conditions' for life — NASA's Curiosity Mars rover begins exploring possible dried-up Red Planet river The ambitious effort is undergoing an overhaul after it ran into cost and schedule overruns. Former NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced earlier this year that the agency is leaving two alternate mission plans for the Trump administration to return the samples home, each of which would require Congress to allocate $300 million for it to start launch proceedings by 2030 and return the samples between 2035 and 2039.
