The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, has been exploring different aspects of the Gale crater on Mars to understand more about this transition from hot and humid to dry and very cold.
The latest study, collected from data captured by one of the rover’s instruments, suggests that Mars actually made a round trip between wetter and drier weather before completely losing surface water about three billion years ago. of years.
Curiosity has been steadily rising to the 3-mile-high Mount Sharp, located in the center of Gale Crater, since 2014.
An instrument called ChemCam sits on the rover’s mast and includes a high-resolution camera and laser that can vaporize the rocks to help the rover analyze its chemical composition. ChemCam has an infrared colored laser that can heat rock pieces to 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This vaporizes the rock and creates plasma, allowing scientists to look essentially within the minerals and chemicals that make it up and revisit the geological history of the planet.
The ChemCam’s camera was used to capture observations of Sharp Mountain terrain, which reveals slices of the Martian past as the rock varies.
A history lesson on Mars
Mount Sharp is an intriguing feature on Mars because it is one of the best ways the red planet recorded the history of its climate, water, and sediment.
“A major goal of the Curiosity mission was to study the transition from the habitable environment of the past, to the dry, cold climate that Mars now has. These layers of rock recorded this change in great detail,” said Roger Wiens, co- study. author of the document and scientist of the ChemCam team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a statement.
Orbiters around Mars have previously recorded information about minerals on the slopes of Mount Sharp. Curiosity data have provided even more detailed observations of sedimentary rock layers and have revealed dry, wet periods across the planet’s past.
Curiosity detects great changes in the layers
As Curiosity has climbed Mount Sharp, the layers have changed drastically.
The base of Mount Sharp is made of clay deposited by the lake that once filled the crater. On top are layers of sandstone that still retain evidence of how they were formed by wind-shaped dunes during drier times. The upper layers reveal more deposits of the floodplain, indicating when wet conditions returned to Mars.
Curiosity observations reveal that these changes between wet and dry times were large-scale events that alternated until the planet grew permanently arid. The Mount Sharp climate record has perfected curiosity in a time ranging from 2.9 billion to 3.7 billion years ago.
As long as the rover continues its mission, Curiosity will continue to ascend the foothills of Mount Sharp and use its drill to further explore the types of rock and what they reveal. This could provide more information on the cause of such drastic climate fluctuations.