For the past 10 years, the Curiosity rover has traveled the Martian terrain, looking for clues about the planet’s potentially habitable past. Recently, a car the size of a car drove through a transition zone, moving from an area that could have hosted lakes on the surface to one that means drier conditions for the Red Planet.
NASA’s Curiosity rover took note of the change of scenery above a Martian mountain, which the robot has been climbing since 2014. Mount Sharp, 5 km high (5 km), is the central peak of the crater. Gale de Mars, that the rover is exploring clues to ancient water. At the base of Mount Sharp, Curiosity collected evidence of clay minerals that formed from lakes and streams that formerly crossed Gale Crater. But higher up the mountain, it seemed as if those streams had dried up in drips and sand dunes, which had formed above the sediments of the lake.
This so-called transition zone is marked by a shift from a clay-rich region to one filled with salty mineral sulfate, and could mean a major change in the Mars climate that took place billions of years ago. The higher Curiosity goes to Mount Sharp, the less clay and more sulfate it detects. Curiosity will soon begin drilling the last sample of rock collected in the transition zone in hopes of learning more about the change in the mineral composition of the rocks in that zone.
“We no longer see the lake deposits we saw for years below on Mount Sharp,” Ashwin Vasavada, a Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA press release. “Instead, we see a lot of evidence of drier climates, like dry dunes that sometimes had streams around them. That’s a big change from the lakes that persisted for perhaps millions of years before.”
The Curiosity rover captured this panorama of a sulfate region of Mars. (Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)
The area Curiosity is currently exploring also has hills that may have formed in dry conditions, and these hills are marked by large wind-swept sand dunes that have probably hardened like rock over time, according to NASA. Meanwhile, the rover also found evidence of sediment that was transported by streams of water through the sand dunes. These sediments now appear as stacked layers of scaly-looking rocks.
Although Mars is a dry, desolate planet today, scientists believe it may have once been habitable, harboring lakes and other bodies of water on its surface. At the beginning of its history, Mars somehow lost some of its atmosphere and its water dried up. Several robotic missions, from NASA and other space agencies, have worked to reconstruct this ancient history. A new rover from Mars, Perseverance, landed on the planet in February 2021 and has been searching for microfossils: preserved evidence of ancient microbial life.
As it approaches its 10th anniversary on Mars, Curiosity has begun to show some signs of aging. On June 7, Curiosity entered the dreaded safe mode when a temperature reading showed warmer-than-usual temperatures, according to NASA. The rover returned to work two days later, but NASA engineers are still investigating the cause of the problem, hoping it won’t affect the rover’s operations as it climbs to the top of a new era in Martian history. .