NASA's Curiosity rover made a "mind-blowing" discovery on Mars: rocks made of pure sulfur, which have never been seen on the Red Planet. According to CNN, the ground-breaking discovery was made after the one-ton Curiosity rover drove over a pile of rocks and cracked open while probing the Gediz Vallis channel. The unexpected unearthing revealed a new existence that "shouldn't be there," making for the first of its kind finding in the past 30 years of the planet's exploration, the outlet reported.
"I think it's the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, told CNN. "I have to say, there's a lot of luck involved here. Not every rock has something interesting inside," Mr Vasavada added.
Sharing the news on X (formerly Twitter), Mars Curiosity wrote, "*Cronch* I ran over a rock and found crystals inside! It's pure sulfur. (And no, it doesn't smell.) Elemental sulfur is something we've never seen before on Mars. We don't know much about these yellow crystals yet, but my team is excited to investigate."
Take a look below:
According to CNN, the Curiosity team was eager for the rover to investigate the deep and winding Gediz Vallis channel, believed to have been formed by water 3 billion years ago. The team spotted white stones in the distance and the mission scientists wanted a closer look. On May 30, Mr Vasavada and his team reviewed images from the rover that showed a crushed rock in the wheel's tracks.
A closer picture of the rock made clear the "mind-blowing" find, Mr Vasavada said. The team viewed the "gorgeous texture and colour inside" of what had initially appeared to be a typical Martian rock. They were even more shocked when analysis proved it was completely sulfur.
"No one had pure sulfur on their bingo card," Mr Vasavada said. According to him, sulfur rocks are usually "beautiful, translucent and crystalline". However, the millions of years of weathering sandblasted the rocks' exterior blending them with the rest of the orange Martian landscape, he explained.
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Moreover, it's not like the rover only chanced upon a handful of these rocks made of pure sulfur; instead, an entire field has exposed the scientists to tons of them. "Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting," Mr Vasavada said.
Notably, Curiosity had previously discovered a number of sulfates, or salts that contain sulfur that are formed when water evaporates. But pure sulfur only forms on Earth under extreme conditions, such as volcanic processes or in hot springs.
Now, Scientists are probing what the presence of pure sulfur means for Mars and its history.
