NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds Opal Gems On Mars In Search For Signs Of Water

American space agency NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the Martian surface, has found water-rich opal in the fractured halos in the Red planet's Gale crater, according to a report in space.com. The discovery holds significance as it may serve as an important resource for human exploration. It shows that Mars has a vast network below the surface that could provide water-rich and radiation-shielded conditions that are more hospitable than the surface, the outlet further said. Scientists hope that they will be able to harvest the water stored inside these opals one day, which could act serve crewed missions.

The Curiosity rover is currently exploring the Gale crater at the equator of the Sun-blasted planet (where the conditions are extremely harsh) and had previously beamed data back from its spectrometre.

The NASA scientists compared those images with the new ones and found ring-like structure of a light-coloured sediment, which later turned out to be opal, said space.com.

"Our new analysis of archival data showed striking similarity between all of the fracture halos we've observed much later in the mission. Seeing that these fracture networks were so widespread and likely chock-full of opal was incredible," research physicist Travis Gabriel, formerly of the University of Arizona, said in a statement.

"Given the widespread fracture networks discovered in Gale Crater, it's reasonable to expect that these potentially habitable subsurface conditions extended to many other regions of Gale Crater as well, and perhaps in other regions of Mars," Ms Gabriel said.

In August last year, Curiosity completed 10 years of exploring Mars. Its primary task was to signs of ancient life on the planet. Curiosity is part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission and is the biggest and the most capable rover ever sent to the Red Planet.