NASA’s curiosity rover sent back an interesting image of what looks like a Mars coral.
The strange object is actually a small, brightly colored rock surrounded by winds discovered by Rover in the strong wind crater of Red Planet on July 24th, but it is very similar to the coral reef-building creatures found in Earth’s oceans.
Black and white photos taken with Curiosity’s remote microimager (a high-resolution telescopic camera mounted on a rover) show NASA shares it in an August 4 statement.
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“Curritivity has discovered many such rocks, which are formed by ancient waters and combined with sandblasting by winds for billions of years,” a NASA representative wrote in a statement.
According to the statement, the coral-like rocks on Mars began to form billions of years ago when the red planet was still water. Just like the water on Earth, this water was full of dissolved minerals. It penetrated through small cracks in the rocks on Mars, gradually depositing the minerals, forming solid “veins” inside the rocks.
These veins form strange branches of coral-shaped objects found in today’s curiosity photographs after millions of years of erosion from sandy winds have exhausted the rocks.
Related: 32 things on Mars that don’t seem to be there
Other examples of rare rocks found on Mars include “Paposo.” This is a strangely shaped rock about 2 inches (5 cm) across curiosity discovered on July 24th, and a small flower-shaped object, photographed in the 2022 Gale shooting.
Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and landed on Gale Crater. It is a meteor impact crater located on the border of the southern highlands of Red Planet crater and its smooth North Plain. The mission of the rover, led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is to scan the surface of Mars for indications that it was habitable at any point in the distant past.
So far, curiosity has crossed approximately 22 miles (35 kilometers) of the 96-mile (154 km) wide crater. The path is meandering and slow. Because it needs to be drilled into rocks, collected samples and stopped to collect data.
The rover exploration reveals a wealth of evidence that there was once a possibility of life on Mars, including long carbon chains from rocks 3.7 billion years ago and signs that Mars once had a carbon cycle.
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