Curiosity’s still got it
Since sending the first successful rover to Mars in 1996, NASA has sent a slew of missions to our neighbor. And while Perseverance may have been their most recent venture to the Red Planet, it certainly isn’t the only rover gaining new ground.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars for over a decade, traveling some 17.64 miles (28.39 kilometers) from its landing site. Since 2014, Curiosity has been traversing the foothills of Mount Sharp where lakes and streams once flowed. Ascending Mount Sharp allows scientists to trace the, now ancient, history of Mars’ water, tracking how the planet evolved from one that was Earth-like to the freezing desert we know it as today.
But last fall Curiosity arrived at a what researchers call a “sulfate-bearing unit” and evidence of Mars’ watery past finally dried up. Or so they thought.
Instead, the team found the “missions clearest evidence yet of ancient water ripples that formed within lakes,” according to a NASA press release. The ripples are the remnants of waves disturbing sediment in a shallow lake. This movement created rippled texture in the rocks at the bottom of the lake.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this – and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.”
Curiosity has tried to collect samples from these rippled rocks, but the layer is so hard that attempts have been unsuccessful. Scientists plan to continue looking for soft rocks over the next week as they head toward another promising site on Mars: Gediz Vallis.
A pile of car-sized boulders and debris sit within this valley. Researchers suspect a small river may have caused wet landslides resulting in the debris. As it is one of the youngest features of Mount Sharp, the team is eager to get a closer look.
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS