Great floods once poured down a towering Martian mountain. NASA’s Curiosity rover has proof. The rover spent much of 2024 exploring the Gediz Vallis channel, a dried-up waterway on Mount Sharp. Although Mars is very dry today, the rover found clues that long ago the planet experienced huge floods.
“This was not a quiet period on Mars,” said Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. “There was an exciting amount of activity here. We’re looking at multiple flows down the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows.”
The images below show what Curiosity has recently found. A wide-view photo shows rocks and boulders in the foreground, likely formed by large floods that piled up rocks into mounds within the channel.
Curiosity also studied water-tumbled rocks with “halo” markings. These markings were created when water soaked into the material and chemical reactions bleached white shapes into some of the rocks.
Mars no longer has an insulating atmosphere because its hot metallic core cooled long ago, and without a heated interior to generate a protective magnetic field, the planet was exposed to solar wind, which stripped away its thick atmosphere. The Curiosity rover continues to explore Mars to determine if the planet could have ever had habitable conditions for microbial life.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Perseverance rover is equipped with instruments that search for hints of past life called “biosignatures” – elements or structures providing evidence of ancient organisms.
Source: https://mashable.com/article/mars-nasa-curiosity-discovery