Someone warn Elon Musk.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has made a “startling” discovery on Mars: yellow-green crystals of pure sulfur that scientists say have never been seen before on Earth’s mysterious red neighbor.
The groundbreaking discovery was made after the one-ton Curiosity ran over and broke a pile of rocks while exploring the deep and winding Gediz Vallis Channel, thought to have been formed by water about 3 billion years ago.
“I think it’s the strangest find of the entire mission and the most unexpected,” said 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. Not every rock has something interesting in it.”
The rover operators noticed white rocks in the distance, and the mission scientists wanted to investigate further. On May 30, Vasavada and his team reviewed images from the rover that showed a crushed rock in the wheel tracks.
What they saw when they zoomed in was “astonishing,” he said, as they looked at the “beautiful texture and color inside” what at first appeared to be a typical Martian rock.
They were even more shocked when analysis showed it was all sulfur.
“Nobody had pure sulfur on their bingo card,” Vasavada said.
Sulfur rocks are typically “beautiful, translucent and crystal clear,” Vasadava said, but millions of years of weathering have sandblasted the outside of the rocks, causing them to blend in with the rest of the orange Martian landscape.
Curiosity had previously discovered a number of sulfates, or salts containing sulfur that form when water evaporates. Pure sulfur forms on Earth only under extreme conditions, such as volcanic processes or in hot springs, CNN reported.
According to CNN, the Gediz Vallis Channel is carved into the sides of the 3-mile-high Mount Sharp, which the rover has been steadily climbing for 10 years.
Scientists are currently investigating what the presence of pure sulfur means for Mars and its cosmic history.
The discovery could give SpaceX CEO Musk even more inspiration to achieve his goal of colonizing the Red Planet in the future.