Someone alert Elon Musk.
NASA’s Curiosity rover made a “mind-blowing” discovery on Mars — yellowish-green crystals of pure sulfur, never before seen on Earth’s mysterious red neighbor, according to scientists.
The literal ground-breaking find was made after the one-ton Curiosity drove over a pile of rocks and cracked one open while probing the deep and winding Gediz Vallis channel, believed to have been formed by water 3 billion years ago.
“I think it’s the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected,” 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 here. Not every rock has something interesting inside.”
The rover’s operators spotted white stones in the distance and 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’s tracks.
What they saw when they zoomed in was “mind-blowing,” he said, as they viewed the “gorgeous texture and color inside” of what had initially appeared to be a typical Martian rock.
They were even more shocked when analysis proved it was completely sulfur.
“No one had pure sulfur on their bingo card,” Vasavada said.
Sulfur rocks are usually “beautiful, translucent and crystalline,” according to Vasadava — but the millions of years of weathering sandblasted the rocks’ exterior, blending them with the rest of the orange Martian landscape.
Curiosity had previously discovered a number of sulfates, or salts that contain sulfur that are formed when water evaporates. Pure sulfur only forms on Earth under extreme conditions, such as volcanic processes or in hot springs, CNN reported.
The Gediz Vallis channel is dug out on the sides of the 3-mile-tall Mount Sharp, which the rover has been steadily climbing for 10 years, according to CNN.
Scientists are now probing what the presence of pure sulfur means for Mars and its cosmic history.
The discovery could give SpaceX CEO Musk even more inspiration to reach his goal of colonizing the red planet in the future.
