Latest news with #MiniCooper-sized
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A NASA rover sent home an immersive Mars panorama. Watch the video.
At first glance, this view may look like a vista from a bluff in the southwestern United States. But those aren't ordinary mountains in the distance. What appears to be a sierra is in fact the rim of an enormous crater on Mars, formed when an asteroid slammed into the Red Planet billions of years ago. The vantage point is from the slopes of the three-mile-tall Mount Sharp, sculpted over time within the crater after the ancient collision. NASA's Curiosity rover captured this extremely wide snapshot as it traversed its extraterrestrial stomping grounds in Gale Crater this February. The agency has since converted that data into a 30-second immersive video, which you can watch further down in this story. It's perhaps the next best thing to actually hiking the chilly desert roughly 140 million miles away in space. "You can imagine the quiet, thin wind," said NASA in a post on X, "or maybe even the waves of a long-gone lake lapping an ancient shore." SEE ALSO: A NASA Mars rover looked up at a moody sky. What it saw wasn't a star. NASA's Curiosity rover snaps a selfie image on lower Mount Sharp in Gale crater in August 2015. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS Since its mission launched in 2011, Curiosity, a Mini Cooper-sized lab on six wheels, has traveled about 352,000,020 miles: some 352 million whizzing through space and another 20 rumbling over Martian terrain. At the time when Curiosity drank up this scenery, it was climbing a region of Mount Sharp known as the sulfate-bearing unit. This area is chock full of salty minerals. Scientists think streams and ponds left them behind as the water dried up billions of years ago. Studying this geology offers clues about how and why Mars may have transformed from a more Earth-like world to the frozen desert it is today. Almost exactly a year ago, the rover accidentally discovered elemental sulfur, its wheels crushing the material to expose a bed of yellow crystals. When pure sulfur is made naturally on Earth, it's usually associated with superheated volcanic gases and hot springs. Another way it can form is through interactions with bacteria — a.k.a. life. "We don't think we're anywhere near a volcano where the rover is," Abigail Fraeman, deputy project scientist on the Curiosity mission, told Mashable in September, "so that is a puzzling feature to find in this particular location." A 30-second video in the above X post showcases the vast Martian panorama. Now Curiosity is on its way to a new destination where it will study an unusual landscape, called a "boxwork." This region likely necessitated warm groundwater to form. And where there's water, there's potential for life — at least the kind scientists know about. Researchers wonder if the boxwork could have hosted ancient single-celled microorganisms. From Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images, the land feature looks like a spiderweb of ridges, spanning several miles. Dark sand fills the hollow spaces among the lattice. Scientists believe this particular boxwork may have formed when minerals in the last trickles of water seeped into surface rock and hardened. As the rocks weathered over the ages, minerals that had cemented into those cracks remained, leaving behind the weird pattern. The rover's science team doesn't expect Curiosity to reach its destination until at least late fall, said Catherine O'Connell-Cooper, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, in the mission log. "Our drives are long right now," O'Connell-Cooper wrote, "but we are still taking the time to document all of the wonderful geology as we go, and not just speeding past all of the cool things!"
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's rovers just found similar gnarly rocks on opposite sides of Mars
Aliens aren't terraforming Mars, but one of NASA's rovers just found something with a strange texture that might entice a cauliflower lover to do a double-take. Curiosity, a Mini Cooper-sized lab on wheels, was ambling over rugged terrain a few days ago this March when its navigation camera spotted some Martian rocks unlike any others. The scientists leading the rover's expedition say they've never seen anything quite like this on the Red Planet. "Oh my glob," the anthropomorphic Curiosity account posted on X. "What are these lumpy rocks?" But Curiosity wasn't the only one with a geological mystery. At the same time, roughly 2,300 miles away on the other side of the planet, Perseverance found bumpy rocks of a different kind, calling to mind the famous "Martian blueberries" discovered by the Opportunity rover in 2004. SEE ALSO: Scientists found huge beaches on Mars likely from a long gone ocean Curiosity took close-up pictures of a strange bumpy rock it discovered on Mars in March. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS Since its mission launched in 2011, Curiosity has traveled about 352,000,020 miles: some 352 million whizzing through space and another 20 over the rusty-dusty terrain. Right now it's on its way to an unexplored part of Gale Crater, called a "boxwork" region, which likely necessitated warm groundwater to form eons ago. Often outshined by its younger twin rover Perseverance, Curiosity stole back the limelight earlier this week for a monumental discovery based on one of its rock samples. Within it, researchers detected the largest organic molecules yet on Mars, suggesting the chemistry needed for life may have progressed further on the Red Planet than once thought. The molecules, which contain long chains of carbon atoms, could be pieces of fatty acids, key ingredients for Earth life. Though the organic molecule find, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, isn't proof of life, it does encourage scientists that other more complex molecules linked to life could still be on Mars. Previously, researchers have been skeptical over whether such evidence could remain on the planet after millions of years of radiation and environmental changes. Suffice to say, Curiosity is not to be underestimated in its scientific value. The team gave Curiosity's new rocks official names — Manzana Creek and Palo Comado — and took pictures for the record. The leftward rock in the image at the top of this story has jagged, vertical surfaces and "a lot of crazy rough texture," according to the mission journal. Perseverance discovered a bumpy rock on the rim of the Jezero Crater in March. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / IRAP "The rocks were shaped by a combination of wind and water over time, resulting in the cool textures we see today," Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity's deputy project scientist, told Mashable. Perseverance's bumpy rock, on the other hand, looks a little more like a cluster of miniature peas than cauliflower. It's covered in millimeter-scale beads, some pierced with tiny pinholes. The rover found the rock, officially dubbed St. Pauls Bay, around the rim of Jezero Crater. And it seems both rovers' sightings have flummoxed their humans. "What quirk of geology could produce these strange shapes?" wrote Alex Jones, a researcher working on the Mars 2020 mission team, in a blog post. A Martian rock, dubbed St. Pauls Bay, stands out in gray in a field of reddish-brown terrain. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU Spherical features can form on rocks when water flows through them, creating concretions of minerals over time. But they can also form in other ways, like in volcanic eruptions and meteorite strikes. When droplets of molten rock are thrown into the air by volcanoes or impacts, they cool as they travel, hardening in little balls. Scientists will continue studying the rocks using the tools available to them on the rovers, but such finds reinforce the desire for NASA to bring samples back to Earth for more rigorous studies. Right now the space agency is trying to figure out how to save its Mars Sample Return mission, the plan to fly home bits of rock, dust, and air collected by Perseverance. NASA will spend the next year working on engineering plans for two potential new approaches that are considered less complicated and expensive.
