Curiosity mars rover has captured extraordinary picture of mineral rocks looking like Ice Cream Sandwich on Mars. This however hints at water existence on Mars. The captured images stunned NASA scientists.
The mineral rocks, which lie at a site dubbed Garden City near the base of Mars' 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp, harbor ridges up to 2.5 inches (6 centimeters) tall that are composed of bright and dark mineral veins.
"Some of them look like ice-cream sandwiches: dark on both edges and white in the middle," Curiosity science team member Linda Kah of the University of Tennessee said in a statement. "These materials tell us about secondary fluids that were transported through the region after the host rock formed."
The car-size Curiosity rover touched down in August 2012, on a mission to determine if Mars could ever have supported microbial life. The rover found evidence of an ancient, habitable lake-and-stream system at a spot near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay.
The fluid movement responsible for the Garden City veins was likely more recent than the conditions that formed the Yellowknife Bay lake, which probably existed around 3.5 billion years ago.
Team of Scientists believe this fluid movement occurred in a wet environment that formed deposits in lake beds.
Curiosity analyzed numerous rock samples from three different locations found in the lower regions of Mount Sharp that revealed different mineral compositions. Along with the discovery of minerals, there were also prominent veins that reveal the mountain's layers, showing records of different stages of weathering.
These two toned mineral veins found in ridges were discovered at a site called "Garden City" where bedrock eroded and exposed these veins. The ridges measured around 2.5 inches tall and also feature light and dark rocks and soil.
These ridges are similar to "ice cream sandwiches" where there is white material in the center and darker ones on the edges, according to Linda Kah from the Curiosity science team of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
She said these materials are evidence of how secondary fluids were transported around the region after the formation of the host rock.
These mineral veins found in Garden City were apparently formed when fluids seeped through the cracks in rocks, depositing minerals that changed the rock's chemical structure inside the cracks and fractures.
The Curiosity team is now planning to learn more about the timeline of how these mineral rocks and veins were formed, including the chemical composition of the fluids that changed them and moved along the terrain in Garden City.
Researchers also discovered the area is now covered in dried mud that hardened before the fractures of the mineral veins formed. The darker material shows evidence of earlier fluid flowing within the white veins occurred after the formation of the cracks.
Garden City is 39 feet above Pahrump Hills' bottom edge where a bedrock outcrop had formed in Mount Sharp's basal layer in the center of Gale Crater. Curiosity spent six months analyzing 33 feet of Pahrump Hills' elevation to measure and learn more about the rock chemistry of the region and look for the presence of microbial life.
via Science - Google News http://ift.tt/1aw2AHS
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