A rock on Mars has just spilled a surprising yellow treasure after Curiosity accidentally broke through its bland exterior.
When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) body over the rock, the rock fractured, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: sulfur. Although sulfates are fairly common on Mars, this is the first time sulfur has been found in its pure elemental form on the red planet.
Even more excitingly, the Gediz Vallis channel, where Curiosity found the rock, is littered with rocks that look suspiciously like sulfur rock before it was accidentally crushed—suggesting that elemental sulfur may somehow be present there in some places.
“Finding a field of pure sulfur rocks is like finding an oasis in the desert,” says Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
Sulfates are salts that form when sulfur, usually in compound form, mixes with other minerals in water. As the water evaporates, the minerals mix and dry out, leaving sulfates behind.
These sulfate minerals can tell us a lot about Mars, such as its water history and how it has weathered over time.
Pure sulfur, on the other hand, only forms under a very narrow set of conditions that are not known to occur in the region of Mars where Curiosity made its discovery.
To be fair, we don’t know a lot about the geological history of Mars, but the discovery of wisps of pure sulfur just hanging on the surface of Mars suggests that there’s something pretty big that we’re not aware of. of.
It is important to understand that sulfur is an essential element for all life. It is usually taken in the form of sulfates and is used to make two essential amino acids that living organisms need to make proteins.
Since we have known about sulfates on Mars for some time, this discovery does not tell us anything new in this area. We still haven’t found any signs of life on Mars. But we keep coming across bits and pieces that living organisms would find useful, including chemistry, water, and past habitable conditions.
Being stuck here on Earth, we have pretty limited access to Mars. Curiosity’s instruments were able to analyze and identify the sulfur rocks in the Gediz Vallis channel, but if it hadn’t taken a path that flipped over and opened one up, it could have been some time before we found it.
The next step will be to figure out exactly how, based on what we know about Mars, that sulfur could have gotten there. This will require a bit more work, perhaps involving some detailed modeling of the geological evolution of Mars.
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Meanwhile, Curiosity will continue to collect data on the same. Gediz Vallis Channel is an area of ​​rich Martian history, an ancient waterway whose rocks now bear the imprint of an ancient river that once flowed through them billions of years ago.
Curiosity drilled a hole into one of the rocks, took a powdered sample of its interior for chemical analysis, and is now digging deeper into the channel to see what other surprises might await just around the next rock.