Latest news with #MarsSurface
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Curiosity rover finds more coral-shaped rocks on Martian surface
The Brief The Curiosity Mars rover photographed more rocks that are shaped like coral on the red planet's surface. Researchers said the rocks were evidence that at one point water was on Mars. The Curiosity rover has been on the red planet for over 13 years. NASA's Curiosity rover has spotted some unusually-shaped rocks on Mars' surface. Coral on Mars? Dig deeper Photos shared on NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website show wind-eroded rocks that are shaped like pieces of coral. The rover discovered these specimens on July 24, 2025. Researchers nicknamed the rock "Paposo." The backstory Many rocks like Papaso litter the red planet's surface, which researchers said formed billions of years ago when liquid water still existed on Mars. In 2022, NASA shared images of another rock that also looked like coral but more flower-shaped. The flower-shaped rock was found in the Gale Crater. What they're saying "Water carried dissolved minerals into rock cracks and later dried, leaving the hardened minerals behind. Eons of sandblasting by the wind wore away the surrounding rock, producing unique shapes," NASA said. Curiosity has been roving Mars' surface for 13 years, according to JPL's website. The Source Information for this article was taken from the JPL website. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Could signs of Mars life be hidden in its thick layers of clay?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The thick, mineral-rich layers of clay found on Mars suggest that the Red Planet harbored potentially life-hosting environments for long stretches in the ancient past, a new study suggests. Clays need liquid water to form. These layers are hundreds of feet thick and are thought to have formed roughly 3.7 billion years ago, under warmer and wetter conditions than currently prevail on Mars. "These areas have a lot of water but not a lot of topographic uplift, so they're very stable," study co-author Rhianna Moore, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas' Jackson School of Geosciences, said in a statement. "If you have stable terrain, you're not messing up your potentially habitable environments," Moore added. "Favorable conditions might be able to be sustained for longer periods of time." On our home planet, such deposits form under specific landscape and climatic conditions. "On Earth, the places where we tend to see the thickest clay mineral sequences are in humid environments, and those with minimal physical erosion that can strip away newly created weathering products," said co-author Tim Goudge, an assistant professor at the Jackson School's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. However, it remains unclear how Mars' local and global topography, along with its past climate activity, influenced surface weathering and the formation of clay layers. Using data and images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — the second-longest-operating spacecraft around Mars, after the agency's 2001 Mars Odyssey — Moore, Goudge, and their colleagues studied 150 clay deposits, looking at their shapes and locations, and how close they are to other features like ancient lakes or rivers. They found that the clays are mostly located in low areas near ancient lakes, but not close to valleys where water once flowed strongly. This mix of gentle chemical changes and less intense physical erosion helped the clays stay preserved over time. "[Clay mineral-bearing stratigraphies] tend to occur in areas where chemical weathering was favoured over physical erosion, farther from valley network activity and nearer standing bodies of water," the team wrote in the new study, which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on June 16. The findings suggest that intense chemical weathering on Mars may have disrupted the usual balance between weathering and climate. RELATED STORIES — NASA's Curiosity Mars rover discovers evidence of ripples from an ancient Red Planet lake (images) — Ocean's worth of water may be buried within Mars — We finally know where to look for life on Mars On Earth, where tectonic activity constantly exposes fresh rock to the atmosphere, carbonate minerals like limestone form when rock reacts with water and carbon dioxide (CO2). This process helps remove CO2 from the air, storing it in solid form and helping regulate the climate over long periods. On Mars, tectonic activity is non-existent, leading to a lack of carbonate minerals and minimal removal of CO2 from the planet's thin atmosphere. As a result, CO2 released by Martian volcanoes long ago likely stayed in the atmosphere longer, making the planet warmer and wetter in the past — conditions the team believes may have encouraged the clay's formation. The researchers also speculate that the clay could have absorbed water and trapped chemical byproducts like cations, preventing them from spreading and reacting with the surrounding rock to form carbonates that remain trapped and unable to leech into the surrounding environment. "[The clay is] probably one of many factors that's contributing to this weird lack of predicted carbonates on Mars," said Moore.
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's Mars rover proves these peculiar ridges have secrets to tell
NASA's Curiosity rover has started drilling into a bizarre landscape on Mars that could upend assumptions about when the Red Planet truly dried out. After a long drive, the Mini Cooper-sized robot reached a so-called boxwork region, where a gridlike pattern of ridges splays over six to 12 miles. For years, orbiters had observed this area from space but never up close. Scientists had hypothesized before the rover arrived that the peculiar ridges formed with the last trickles of water in the region before it dried out for good. But mineral veins discovered in the boxwork suggest groundwater stuck around longer than anyone expected. The bedrock between the ridges contains tiny white veins of calcium sulfate, a salty mineral left behind as groundwater seeps into rock cracks. Deposits of the material were plentiful in lower rock layers from an earlier Martian period. But no one thought they'd appear in the layer Curiosity is exploring now, which formed much later. "That's really surprising," said Curiosity's deputy project scientist, Abigail Fraeman, in a statement. "These calcium sulfate veins used to be everywhere, but they more or less disappeared as we climbed higher up Mount Sharp. The team is excited to figure out why they've returned now." SEE ALSO: Rubin Observatory's first images flaunt millions of galaxies. Take a look. Ancient Mars used to be wetter — flush with rivers, lakes, and maybe even oceans — but over billions of years, it turned into a dusty, cold desert. What's unclear is when that shift happened and how long conditions suitable for life might have lingered. Curiosity's new findings complicate what scientists thought they knew about the timeline. The rover has spent more than a decade in Gale Crater climbing Mount Sharp, reading the rock layers like pages in a planetary chronicle. The layer it's on now is chock-full of magnesium sulfates, salty minerals that typically form as water evaporates. That fits the narrative researchers had expected: This was supposed to be a chapter when Mars was well on its way to arid. That's why a new sample Curiosity drilled this month, dubbed Altadena, could be enlightening. As the rover analyzes the boxwork's composition, scientists may gain a better understanding of how it formed, what minerals are present, and whether any clues about ancient single-celled microorganisms might be hidden there. The rover will drill more ridges in the coming months to compare them and evaluate how groundwater may have changed over time. Bedrock between the boxwork ridges contains tiny white veins of calcium sulfate. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS The mission's next targets lie farther into the boxwork region, where the patterns grow larger and more distinct. Curiosity will keep looking for organic molecules and other potential evidence of a habitable environment in Mars' ancient past. The rover team has begun nicknaming features after places near Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni, one of the driest, saltiest places on Earth. It's reminiscent of the Martian landscape Curiosity is sightseeing today. "Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment," said Kirsten Siebach, a rover scientist based in Houston, in an earlier statement. "That makes this an exciting place to explore."
Fox News
27-06-2025
- Science
- Fox News
NASA's Curiosity rover discovers unusual 'boxwork' patterns on Mars linked to ancient waterways
NASA's Curiosity rover is getting a firsthand look at a region on Mars previously only seen from orbit that features a "boxwork" pattern, along with evidence of ancient waterways, including rivers, lakes and maybe an ocean. New images and data from the Mars rover have already raised questions about how the red planet's surface was changing billions of years ago. Scientists are still unable, though, to answer why the planet's water eventually dried up and converted the surface into a chilly desert. Curiosity rover is in an area called Gale Crater, and evidence has shown that when it was formed, water was percolating under the surface. NASA said the rover had found evidence of groundwater in the crater when it encountered crisscrossing low ridges, some of which were only a few inches tall and were described by geologists as being arranged in a boxwork pattern. Beneath the ridges is bedrock scientists believe formed when groundwater trickled through the rock and left behind minerals that accumulated in the cracks and fissures. The minerals then hardened and became cement-like. The formations were worn away after what NASA called "eons of sandblasting" from Martian wind, though the minerals remained and revealed a network of resistant ridges within. Rover has already analyzed ridges that scientists say look more like a crumbling curb. But the patterns created over time stretch across miles of a layer on the 3-mile-tall Mount Sharp. The rover has been climbing the foothills of Mount Sharp since 2014, NASA said. What scientists also find interesting about the boxwork patterns is they have not been found anywhere else on the mountain by orbiters overhead or Curiosity. "A big mystery is why the ridges were hardened into these big patterns and why only here," said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "As we drive on, we'll be studying the ridges and mineral cements to make sure our idea of how they formed is on target." NASA said the patterns are found in a part of Mount Sharp formed during various eras of the ancient Martian climate. So, as the rover ascends from the oldest layers to the youngest, it is essentially time traveling and searching for signs that water existed on Mars and which environments would have supported microbial life in the planet's ancient times. "The rover is currently exploring a layer with an abundance of salty minerals called magnesium sulfates, which form as water dries up," NASA said. "Their presence here suggests this layer emerged as the climate became drier. "Remarkably, the boxwork patterns show that even in the midst of this drying, water was still present underground, creating changes seen today." Recent clues exposed on Mars may provide additional insight for scientists into why the boxwork patterns formed where they did. The bedrock between the ridges has a lot of tiny fractures filled with white veins of calcium sulfate, which is a salty mineral left behind when groundwater trickles through cracks in rocks, NASA said. In the lower layers of the mountain, similar veins were plentiful, and one was even enriched with clays. But, until now, none of the veins had been spotted in the sulfate. "That's really surprising," said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Abigail Fraeman of JPL. "These calcium sulfate veins used to be everywhere, but they more or less disappeared as we climbed higher up Mount Sharp. The team is excited to figure out why they've returned now." The Curiosity rover was launched Nov. 26, 2011, and landed on Mars Aug. 5, 2012. Its mission was to find out whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support life, and, early on, the rover discovered chemical and mineral evidence of habitable environments from the past.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Mars rover captures first close-up photos of giant 'spiderwebs' on the Red Planet
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has taken the first ever close-up images of gigantic Martian "spiderwebs" on the Red Planet. The zig-zagging ridges, which were left behind by ancient groundwater, could reveal more about Mars' watery past and provide clues about whether the planet once harbored extraterrestrial life, researchers say. The web-like features, known as "boxwork," are made up of criss-crossing ridges of mineral-rich rocks that infrequently litter the surface of Mars. The patterns can span up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across and look as if they have been spun by giant arachnids when viewed from space. Yet, until now, these structures have never been studied up close. Smaller boxwork formations are found on the walls of caves on Earth and form via a similar mechanism to stalagmites and stalactites. Scientists have suggested the same mechanism created these structures on Mars, only on a much larger scale. "The bedrock below these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickling through the rock left behind minerals that accumulated in those cracks and fissures, hardening and becoming cementlike," NASA representatives wrote in a statement. "Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within." The web-like features should not be confused with the infamous "spiders on Mars" — a geological feature created by carbon dioxide ice on the planet's surface, which was recently recreated on Earth for the first time. Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there Curiosity is currently exploring a patch of boxwork on the slopes of the 3.4-mile-tall (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp at the heart of Gale Crater, where the wandering robot touched down in 2012. The rover set out for the area in November 2024 and arrived earlier this month. The features are a priority target for mission scientists because the ridges do not appear anywhere else on the mountain — and experts have no idea why. On June 23, NASA released the first close-up images of the faux spiderwebs, along with an interactive video on their YouTube channel (see below), which enables you to explore the site in 3D. The rover also drilled and analyzed some samples of rocks surrounding the web-like ridges and found that they contained veins of calcium sulfate, a salty mineral that is also left behind by groundwater. This particular mineral hasn't been seen so far up Mount Sharp before, so its discovery here is "really surprising," Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity's deputy project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement. Researchers hope that by studying boxwork up close, they can learn more about Mars' watery past, before the planet's oceans were stripped away by solar radiation. Future findings could also shed light on the giant subsurface ocean that was recently discovered deep below the Martian crust. RELATED STORIES —Lights on Mars! NASA rover photographs visible auroras on Red Planet for the first time —Mars cozies up to one of the brightest stars in the sky in 'mind-blowing' conjunction photo —NASA spots Martian volcano twice the height of Mount Everest bursting through the morning clouds Some experts also think that the ridges could finally help settle the debate around whether Mars once harbored extraterrestrial life. "These ridges will include minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with salty liquid water flowing through," Kirsten Siebach, a Curiosity mission scientist at Rice University in Houston who has been studying the area, previously said. "Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment. That makes this an exciting place to explore."
