NASA's Curiosity rover discovers a surprise in a Martian rock

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-discovers-a-surprise-in-a-martian-rock

by Ozarkian • 2 years ago

186 99 2 years ago

jpl.nasa.gov

lawlessone• 2 years ago

between this and the iron nuggets sitting out in the open on Mars,..No Mans Sky is more realistic than i thought.

chankstein38• 2 years ago

This was my first thought too lol "I've mind a million of those yellow veins of sulfur in NMS"

darby_nine• 2 years ago

I wonder if it also has negative implications for finding life there—one of many possible explanations is the lack of biological forces breaking down and heterogenizing the surface.

ronnier• 2 years ago

yellow crystals were revealed after NASA’s Curiosity happened to drive over a rock and crack it open on May 30. Using an instrument on the rover’s arm, scientists later determined these crystals are elemental sulfur — and it’s the first time this kind of sulfur has been found on the Red Planet

sircastor• 2 years ago

We’ve found more stuff on Mars by driving over it than I would’ve expected.

dylan604• 2 years ago

Definitely more than just orbiting it. Even with the rovers having such an extended mission, it's still just a small fraction of the surface.

dotancohen3• 2 years ago

Just wait until we're stepping on it. That's when the real discoveries that will be recorded in the textbooks will begin.

netcraft• 2 years ago

When we figure out how this formed, I wonder if that will have any impact on the feasibility of sulfur based lifeforms?

solardev2• 2 years ago

I wish NASA wouldn't use clickbait headlines :/ "Curiosity rover discovers sulfur crystals in Martian rock" would be nice.

its_ethan3• 2 years ago

Very, very few people are going to click on the headline you've suggested, and engagement with the public is pretty important for NASA. "Martian surprise" is something that will get people interested, if only to click the link to see the picture of sulfur crystals and then leave the page 5 seconds later. Other news sites will also run with that headline, spreading the engagement far more than just a NASA article.

Getting public engagement is a part of how they defend (and increase) their budget, so it makes sense that they would be more likely to use click-baity headlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

solardev2• 2 years ago

Gosh, I really hope our premier scientific entities don't have to rely on page visits (ignoring bounce rate) to measure their impact or get funding :/

II2II3• 2 years ago

They need the right type of public engagement. That hypothetical person who sees the picture of sulphur crystals then leaves 5 seconds later is unlikely to support NASA. If they have enough negative interactions, I would suggest that it would achieve the opposite.

There is also a difference between a clickbait headline and a headline that genuinely engages someone. Something like "Unexpected discovery of sulphur crystals provides hints about Martian past" provides vastly more useful information and will probably be more appealing to people who have at least some interest in science. (Or at least rock collecting!)

At least in my case, I decided to read the comments here before even considering a look at the article. Not only did the idea of a "surprise" leave me thoroughly disinterested, but I have been bitten by NASA's hyperbole often enough to be hesitant about pursuing a clickbait link. Which is sad, because planetary science is interesting and the article itself wasn't that bad for something directed towards a general audience.

jkestner• 2 years ago

I just visited the Johnson Space Center, and boy, was there a lot of PR for SLS and Mars on exhibit. I shouldn't have felt weird about it given the artists' depictions of planetary probes and spacecraft concepts I grew up with, but I've read too much about the reality of the program to get into a Mars expedition in a decade.

Meanwhile the miracle that was the asteroid hunter probe got an easily-overlooked station with an actual sample it brought back from Bennu in an inadequate magnifying display case.

dotancohen3• 2 years ago

Even more likely, the user won't click to the article.

But two days later she'll mention to either me or another space nut like me "Hey, what was that surprise that NASA found on Mars?". And the conversation that sparks will be engaging and interesting for her.

conception• 2 years ago

Hate the game not the player.

batch12• 2 years ago

It's only a game if people play. Disliking both works fine.

amelius3• 2 years ago

The law allows people to be total jerks. Should we now hate the law instead of those people?

rambojohnson• 2 years ago

when the majority of the population in America suffers from brain rot, it behooves Nasa to engage the public with clickbait. it's not like Nasa gets the best funding in the world from our government compared to military and all our other genocidal ventures.

layer83• 2 years ago

The prevalence of clickbait contributes to the brain rot.

kjkjadksj4• 2 years ago

They don't get their funding from writing articles. They get it by marrying scientific goals with defense goals.

harry_ord• 2 years ago

I was hoping for japanium.

Tao33002• 2 years ago

That doesn't sound unique or interesting. Sulfur? So what. Not clicking.

Surprise? Well, I was already pretty sure if it was water or life they'd have said so, but now I'm intrigued. I clicked and now I know why the find is actually pretty interesting after all.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Or even more boring to prevent people from clicking “There are sulfur crystals on Mars”

vitaut• 2 years ago

I couldn't believe what happened next.

bamboozled• 2 years ago

…after using "this one weird trick"

IncreasePosts3• 2 years ago

That's why I have a chrome extension which sends hyperlinks for certain sites through a local llama3 instance, fetching the content of the link, asking if the link text is clickbait based on the content, and for an alternate objective headline, which the chrome extension then replaced the link text with.

jsbisviewtiful• 2 years ago

I'll bite - What's the extension?

GuB-42• 2 years ago

But it is breaking news. The rover drove over a rock and cracked it. Using the drill would have been boring.

CuriousCosmic2• 2 years ago

I'm not really seeing what's so clickbait about the title? They discovered something very surprising in the area. The area has an incredible amount of sulfates but I don't think anyone actually expected to find elemental sulfur in a natural environment, i.e. native sulfur formations.

If anything the article actually understates how wild it is to not only find this but that many of the surrounding rocks also show the same.

This region is believed to have been formed predominantly by erosion from flows of water or landslides. Native sulfur really only comes from 3 things:

1. Geothermal environments (ex: volcanos)

2. Hydrothermal environments (ex: hotsprings, geysers, etc).

3. Reduction of sulfates into sulfides by bacteria under specific conditions that result in the production of elemental sulfur as a byproduct.

Given that none of these 3 were expected from this area, that leaves a pretty substantial question of how it got there, how it was produced, and if it wasn't produced locally, where it came from.

So again I'm not really sure if it was clickbait by any means.

codeflo• 2 years ago

That took me a moment, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one. Breaking news indeed. Well done.

ant6n• 2 years ago

If it was unexpected, add in “unexpected”.

Zondartul• 2 years ago

It's cool how some minerals are just lying out in the open on Mars. On Earth this would have been washed away or buried under the soil.

timmg• 2 years ago

As I was reading the article just now it made me wonder: does Mars have a really diverse landscape -- that just happens to be all covered in layers of red dust?

I have no idea. But I'd always thought it looked so homogeneous from the photos. But maybe it's just that the dust covers everything?

jjk166• 2 years ago

It's worth considering that most of the diversity of environments on earth are really diversity of ecosystems. Strip away the trees and the grass and the topsoil and then Earth would look like a desert wasteland pretty much everywhere.

Tao33002• 2 years ago

I'm wondering what that channel would have looked like when there was water flowing in it.

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

I have a hunch this valley is hiding many more geological secrets. If you look at the map, Curiosity is finally arriving at the more interesting bits of Mt. Sharp.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/location-map/

ravjo• 2 years ago

I'll be interested to hear more about this.

fusslo• 2 years ago

so cool. First time I've seen that map

It struck me that I have no idea how curiosity is instructed to move

I suspect someone can't be sitting in front of a computer with a joystick, moving a foot, waiting for curiosity to move a foot, then move another foot...

My next thought is nasa creates a route based on the map and then provides route data to curiosity. But there's no GPS (again, I assume). So is it all dead-reckoning? NASA somehow calculates 'move 100 ft forward, turn left 80 degrees, move 10 ft forward", etc?

(I am also assuming NASA uses metric)

OR does curiosity make its own decisions somehow?

I gotta go google some stuff now

coryfklein• 2 years ago

So, what did you find?

mcswell2• 2 years ago

That would be a long time between joystick commands, seeing as Mars varies from four to twenty four minutes away at the speed of light. Double that for round-trip (video to Earth, command to Mars).

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

That's how the BigTrak was programmed. Didn't realize I'm qualified for that job. :-D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak

floxy• 2 years ago

That's a pretty cool map. Someone should do a "street-view" version.

dotancohen3• 2 years ago

Had it already been 12 years?

The last time that I looked at a map of Curiosity's location it was somewhere around Darwin and I suppose Cooperstown hadn't been named yet. And the map was certainly not interactive.

morning-coffee• 2 years ago

They could've gotten more mileage out of a headline like "Was an alien crystalline life form just discovered, or...!?"

Symmetry• 2 years ago

Chemosynthesis often does produce pure sulfur as a byproduct but so do volcanoes. a priori I'd put the most likely scenario for Mars at chemosynthetic life with photosynthesis never evolving, but this press release doesn't really move the dial on that with the information so far.

jonhohle• 2 years ago

“It shouldn’t be there.”

What hubris. “We didn’t expect it to be there,” or similar would be more appropriate. I really would like to see more uncertainty and humility from scientists that base their work on theory.

dzonga• 2 years ago

I would rather know why water on mars evaporated and if there was life on mars when there was water on mars

layer83• 2 years ago

For the first question, see https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/uyaogu/comment/....

layer83• 2 years ago

Found the Martian hellmouth. ;)

vinnie-io• 2 years ago

what's that perfect white circle in the bottom left

mcswell2• 2 years ago

Must have come from Io. Lots of sulfur volcanos there.

delsarto• 2 years ago

Check out Mars Guy https://youtube.com/@marsguy?si=AFAci3mConZv1L5- Dr. Steve Ruff. Excellent videos from an expert, but one terrific thing is the use of common objects (like mars guy cutout) that gives you some better perspective on the images.

aatd86• 2 years ago

So martians are into rock n roll huh? :o)

olliej• 2 years ago

oh boo, it wasn't part of a soviet probe :( :D

klyrs• 2 years ago

Tl,dr: not a furby

NASA's Curiosity rover discovers a surprise in a Martian rock

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