It is, without a doubt, the most studied planet outside of Earth. And soon it will become the first one that humans will set foot on. We have studied it with satellites, with probes and with rovers. And it is precisely with one of these, which answers to the name of Curiosity, that we have studied it. encountered a surprise, or rather caused one: When passing over a rock, it broke it and its interior revealed something that scientists had not expected at all: pure sulfur.
The Curiosity rover, despite its agility to travel through an unknown planet without clear paths, is a “6×6 monster” of 900 kilos, it is not strange that in its path it can accidentally break geological samples. The surprising thing is that In this case it is sulfur (the tenth most abundant element in the universe) in its pure elemental form.
“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur It’s like finding an oasis in the desert – points out a statementAshwin Vasavada, a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the scientists responsible for analyzing the find. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
The location where it was found also contributes to the surprise of scientists. It is in the Gediz Vallis channel, a region full of rocks suspiciously similar to sulphur, suggesting that this element may be abundant in the area.
According to the Vasavada team, the region is rich in sulphates, salts that They are formed when water evaporatesIn this way, sulphates become “footprints” left by geology, chemistry and the passage of time, containing information about the presence of water and its composition.
While we generally associate sulfur with the smell of rotten eggs (a result of hydrogen sulfide gas), sulfur in its elemental chemical form is odorless and forms only in a narrow range of conditions that scientists had not associated with the history of the regionBut Curiosity found plenty: an entire field of shiny rocks that look just like the one it crushed on its journey.
All this evidence of water is the story of a past more complex than the team’s initial expectations And so they were eager to analyze the composition of the rocks in the area. The initial problem was that the sulfur rocks were too small and fragile to sample with the drill, until the rover came across a rock nicknamed “Mammoth Lakes.” The engineers controlling Curiosity had to find a part of the rock that they could safely drill into and analyze. And it wasn’t easy.
After drilling his 41st hole using the powerful drill Perched on the end of its 2-meter robotic arm, the rover fed the powdered rock into instruments inside its “belly” for further analysis so scientists could determine what materials the rock was made of. We will surely have more information about it soon. And probably more surprises.