Curiosity Rover Sees a Weird Martian Rock Formation

Not to be outdone by the younger upstart Perseverance, NASA’s Curiosity rover has spent current days imaging attention-grabbing rocks on the base of Mount Sharp on Mars, close to which the rover landed in August 2012. One of these options is an arch, much like among the towering geology current on components of Earth—however this arch is just about 6.5 inches tall.

Raw pictures of the arch taken late final week have been lately made obtainable on Curiosity’s image portal. The construction is positioned in Mars’ Gale Crater, which is an almost 4-billion-year-old meteor affect website that possible held water in some unspecified time in the future in its historic historical past, based mostly on the clay and sulfate mineral deposits positioned in it.

At the Martian mountain’s base, Curiosity got here throughout a formation distinctive sufficient to pique the curiosity of NASA scientists. They had the rover examine the rock up shut utilizing the Chemistry and Camera tool, or ChemCam, which might picture rocks and unpack their chemical composition, and its Mast Camera, which takes photos of the terrain.

The rock arch sits unassumingly on the ground of Gale Crater. It’s outstanding on the in any other case flat terrain round it and is a bit offset, with one facet of the arch assembly the opposite barely beneath its acme. It would look peculiar even on Earth. Commentators on social media stated the formation seems to be like a cat on a jet ski or a serpent’s backbone. If you look within the arch’s adverse area, it seems a bit like a squashed map of Great Britain.

Whatever you see, the rock texture is a “particularly whimsical” instance of the terrain within the space, Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a current blog post.

Perseverance, the newer Martian rover, has upgraded instruments in comparison with Curiosity, however this rock is about as removed from Perseverance as New York City is from Los Angeles, so our odds of seeing it in higher element are subsequent to nothing. Years from now, although, NASA plans to ship a spacecraft to carry Martian rocks to Earth. Perseverance shall be gathering and storing caches of samples for eventual retrieval, one of probably the most bold science goals up to now in area. Those Martian rocks would be the farthest objects within the photo voltaic system to be retrieved by humankind.

More: The Weirdest Images Ever Taken on Mars