Although currently our planetary neighbor is distinguished by its arid surface, millions of years ago hosted not only rivers or lakes, also huge oceans. In fact, numerous wet areas have been detected under the surface, With enough water to fill several oceans. But there could be other testimonies of the presence of Martian water.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has sent images of what seems to be a piece of coral on Mars. The strange object is, in fact, a small light -colored rock, eroded by the wind, which the rover found inside the Gale crater of the red planet. What has surprised experts is that It looks significantly to the creatures that form reef in the oceans of the earth.
Black and white photography taken with the remote microimagen of the curiosity (a high -resolution telescopic camera mounted on the rover) and shared by NASA in a statement shows The rock of approximately 2.5 centimeters wide with its intricate ramifications.
“Curiosity has found many rocks like this, which They were formed by the combination of old water with billions of years of wind erosion”, Says the space agency.
Coral -shaped rocks on Mars began to form billions of years ago, when the red planet still had water. As on earth, This water was full of dissolved minerals. It was leaked through small cracks in the Martian rocks, depositing minerals gradually and forming solid veins inside.
These veins form The strange branches of the choral -shaped object We see in the current image of Curiosity, after millions of years of erosion for winds loaded with sand that worn the rock. Other examples of unusual rocks found in Mars include “paposo”a strange rock that measures approximately 5 cm wide and that the curiosity also discovered on July 24, and a tiny flower -shaped object, which The rover photographed in the Gale crater in 2022.
The Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, in the Gale crater, a meteorite impact crater located in the boundary between the highlands of the south of the red planet, full of craters, and the soft plains of the north. The mission of the Rover, led by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, consists of Scan the Martian surface in search of indications that it was habitable at some point in the remote past.
So far, Curiosity has traveled approximately 35 kilometers from the 154 km crater wide His career is serpentant and slow, since he must stop to pierce rocks, collect samples and collect data.
Rover explorations have discovered abundant evidence that there was once the possibility of life on Mars, including long rock carbon chains of 3.7 billion years old and indications that Mars once had a carbon cycle. And maybe life.