The rover was moving through a region of Mars known as the sulfate-bearing unit, which scientists had predicted would have only tiny trickles of water due to the theory that the rocks there developed as the surface of the red planet dried out. Instead, they discovered some of the oldest waters that were the purest.
Source: NASA
Ashwin Vasavada, the project scientist for Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement that this is the greatest evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission. Thousands of feet of lake deposits were climbed through.
According to NASA, material at the lake’s bottom was churned up by waves on the lake’s surface billions of years ago, leaving rippling textures in the granite.
The rover discovered these wavy rock textures preserved in what is known as the Marker Band, a small layer of black rock that sticks out from the rest of Mount Sharp, after ascending nearly half a mile above the mountain’s base, the agency said. It passed across rocks that would have formed more recently as it went higher. Because of this, the organization claimed, scientists weren’t expecting to find such obvious signs of a vast body of water.
Some of the rocks were attempted to be sampled by Curiosity, but the rover’s drill was unable to penetrate them.
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