Curiosity Rover Sees a Weird Martian Rock Formation

Not to be trump by the young upstart Perseverance , NASA ’s Curiosity scouter has spend recent day imaging interesting rock at the root of Mount Sharp on Mars , near which the rover landed in August 2012 . One of those lineament is an arch , similar to some of the tower geology present on parts of Earth — but this arch is only about 6.5 inches tall .

Raw icon of the arch taken late last week were recently made available on Curiosity’simage vena portae . The structure is located in Mars ’ Gale Crater , which is a closely 4 - billion - year - old shooting star impact site that likely hold water system at some item in its ancient chronicle , base on the clay and sulfate mineral repository located in it .

At the Martian tidy sum ’s base , Curiosity come across a formation unique enough to pique the interest of NASA scientists . They had the rover inspect the rock and roll up nigh using theChemistry and Camera tool , or ChemCam , which can image rock-and-roll and unpack their chemical substance composition , and itsMast Camera , which have pictures of the terrain .

The unusual formation, imaged by Curiosity rover’s Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) in July 2021.

The unusual formation, imaged by Curiosity rover’s Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) in July 2021.Image:NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

The sway arch sit around unassumingly on the floor of Gale Crater . It ’s prominent on the otherwise flat terrain around it and is a bit offset , with one side of the arch confluence the other slightly below its pinnacle . It would await peculiar even on Earth . Commentatorson social mediasaid the organization appear like a cat on a jet ski or a snake ’s back . If you take care in the arch ’s negative space , it appears a bit like a squashed function of Great Britain .

Whatever you see , the rock grain is a “ specially whimsical ” object lesson of the terrain in the area , Abigail Fraeman , a planetary geologist at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , publish in a recentblog post .

Perseverance , the raw Martian wanderer , has upgraded instruments equate to Curiosity , but this rock is about as far from Perseverance as New York City is from Los Angeles , so our betting odds of see it in better detail are next to nothing . Years from now , though , NASA plans to get off a spacecraft to bring Martian rock to Earth . persistency will be collecting and storing cache of samples for eventual recovery , one of the most ambitious skill objective to date in space . Those Martian rocks will be the furthermost objects in the solar system to be retrieve by humankind .

The weird rock (bottom left).