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    Gale Crater tagged posts

    New Insights into how Mars became Uninhabitable

    October 9, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist concept image of an early wet Mars.
    This is an artist’s concept of an early Mars with liquid water (blue areas) on its surface. Ancient regions on Mars bear signs of abundant water – such as features resembling valleys and deltas, and minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water. Scientists think that billions of years ago, the atmosphere of Mars was much denser and warm enough to form rivers, lakes, and perhaps even oceans of water. As the planet cooled and lost its global magnetic field, the solar wind and solar storms eroded away to space a significant amount of the planet’s atmosphere, turning Mars into the cold, arid desert we see today.
    NASA/MAVEN/The Lunar and Planetary Institute

    NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale crater on Mars, is providing new details about how the ancient Martian clim...

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    New Research Points to Possible Seasonal Climate Patterns on Early Mars

    August 10, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Research suggests seasonal climate patterns on early mars
    Patterns in mud cracks show that Mars may have had cyclical moisture patterns. Left: the terrain in the Gale Crater where Curiosity is currently exploring. Right: mud cracks on Earth, where wet-dry cycling has occurred, creating Y-shaped patterns. Credit: Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06220-3

    Scientists aren’t entirely sure how life began on Earth, but one prevailing theory posits that persistent cycles of wet and dry conditions on land helped assemble the complex chemical building blocks necessary for microbial life. This is why a patchwork of well-preserved ancient mud cracks found by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is so exciting to the mission’s team.

    A new paper in Nature details how the distinctive hexagonal pattern of these mud cracks offers the first evidence of wet-d...

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    Explosive Volcanic Eruption Produced Rare Mineral on Mars

    July 26, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    NASA's Mars Curiosity rover
    NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover snapped this low-angle self-portrait at the site where it drilled into a rock July 30, 2015, producing a powder (visible in foreground) that was later confirmed to contain the rare mineral tridymite. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

    Researchers publish scenario that explains 2016 discovery by NASA’s Curiosity rover. Planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the California Institute of Technology have an answer to a mystery that’s puzzled the Mars research community since NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a mineral called tridymite in Gale Crater in 2016.

    Tridymite is a high-temperature, low-pressure form of quartz that is extremely rare on Earth, and it wasn’t immediately clear how a concentrated chunk of it ended...

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    NASA’s Curiosity Rover finds clues to chilly Ancient Mars buried in Rocks

    May 20, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This graphic depicts paths by which carbon has been exchanged among Martian interior, surface rocks, polar caps, waters and atmosphere, and it also depicts a mechanism by which it is lost from the atmosphere.
    Credits: Lance Hayashida/Caltech

    By studying the chemical elements on Mars today — including carbon and oxygen — scientists can work backwards to piece together the history of a planet that once had the conditions necessary to support life.

    Weaving this story, element by element, from roughly 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away is a painstaking process. But scientists aren’t the type to be easily deterred...

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