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Clay is a big problem on Mars because it often forms on contact with water. Find clay and you have usually found traces of water. And nature, history, and the current water balance on Mars are all important to understanding this planet and, if so, supporting life.
Right now, MSL Curiosity is at Mt. Sharp inspecting rocks looking for clay. The orbiters were the first to find traces of clay at Mt. Tranchant. When NASA chose Gale Crater as the landing site of MSL Curiosity, the clay at Mt. One of the goals was to be sharp inside the crater. Curiosity has now sampled two of the rocks from what NASA has called "the unit containing clay" and confirmed the presence of clay.
In fact, both rocks have the highest clay concentrations that Curiosity has found so far. The rocks are called "Aberlady" and "Kilmarie". They are located in the lower part of the mount. Sharp, which is the main objective of the mission.
Sharp climbs 5.5 km above the crater floor, making it an accessible layered record of Martian geology. Over time, the wind exposed its various layers, making them easy targets for the Curiosity exercise.
Scientists are interested in Mt. Sharp, also called Aeolis Mons, because of the way it was created. Gale Crater is an old crater of impact that was probably filled with water, and they think that Mount. It has formed over a period of two billion years, sediments have settled at the bottom of the lake. It is possible that at some point the crater was filled with sediment that gradually eroded, leaving Mount Sharp behind.
There is some uncertainty around the timeline of Mt. Sharp's training, which is one of the things that MSL Curiosity hopes to discover. In any case, the mount. Sharp itself appears to be an eroded mountain of sediment and, as Curiosity continues its work, scientists may finally have a more accurate idea of how exactly it is formed.
New discoveries at Curiosity show that there was once an abundance of water in the crater of Gale, as expected. But aside from that, the details remain to be determined. It appears that these clay-rich rocks in the lower part of the mountain have formed sediments at the bottom of a lake. Over geological periods, water and sediments interact to form clays.
Searching for specific types of clays on specific layers informs scientists of the chronology of Martian water. We know that the mountain has different layers containing different minerals. As mentioned, the lower layers contain clays, but above are layers containing sulfur, and above, layers containing minerals containing oxygen. Sulfur indicates that the area has dried out or that the water has become more acidic.
The Gale crater also contains a river channel called Gediz Vallis Channel, which formed after the layers of clay and sulfur. This channel is also a piece of the puzzle and the task of Curiosity is to continue its way to Mt. Enjoy samples as you go and complete the picture of the geology and history of the mountain. By extension, we will learn something about Martian history.
Curiosity will also give us a much more detailed view of the unit containing clay than that given by the orbiter. The orbital readings did not conclusively determine whether the clay he had detected was in the rock of the mountain, or whether it was pebbles and eroded rocks that had eroded from the upper layers of the rock. the mountain and collapsed to the floor of the crater. . Curiosity has clarified this to some extent, with the discovery of clay in Aberlady and Kilmarlie, but there is still much work to be done.
"Every layer of this mountain is a puzzle," said Ashwin Vasavada, scientific lead for the Curiosity project at JPL. "They each hold clues about a different era of Martian history."
Curiosity does a great job of rebuilding everything.
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