Curiosity reveals a mysterious variety of land at Vera Rubin Ridge

Panoramic view of the surroundings of Curiosity. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

NASA's Curiosity rover has imaged the Martian terrain with an unprecedented variety of colors and textures at Vera Rubin Ridge, a 250-mile-wide outcrop that forms a distinctive layer on Mount Sharp. The rover has explored this Martian mountain since arriving in 2012.

One of the four unique terrains of the Vera Rubin Ridge contains the mineral hematite of iron oxide, a type of rock that usually forms in the water and contains clues to the ancient environment of the region. This makes it an ideal site to look for evidence that liquid water once ran on the surface of the red planet.

From a height of about eight storeys, the ridge lies in front of a hollow containing clay minerals.

While Mars reconnaissance Orbiter flies about 300 kilometers above the surface of Mars, it almost continuously sweeps the Martian terrain and the edge of the atmosphere with the Mars climate sounder to get a view "Four-dimensional" temperature. , pressure and composition of the 50 miles (80 km) lower of the Mars atmosphere. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

More than a year after the closure of a drilling by a mechanical problem, the mission engineers were able to develop a new method to resume drilling earlier this year (2018). Before successfully collecting drill samples last month, Curiosity twice encountered extremely hard rocks that he could not penetrate.

Scientists having no way of determining the hardness of the rock before the start of drilling, they must choose sampling sites based on enlightened assumptions.

Hard and soft rocks were found at Vera Rubin Ridge. A long ledge is composed of very hard stones that resist wind erosion, while an area below is made up of softer rocks, vulnerable to such erosion.

"This ridge is not this monolithic thing – it has two distinct sections, each with a variety of colors. Some are visible to the eye, and even more so when we look in the near infrared, just beyond what our eyes can see. Some seem to be related to the hardness of the rocks, "said NASA's Curiosity project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada. Jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The stones with a reddish hue in the area seem to be the most difficult.

Vera Rubin Ridge was chosen for exploration by the rover after NASA Mars Orbiter of Recognition (MRO) detected that the area had a high hematite content.

Scientists are not sure that variations in hematite in the regions of Vera Rubin Ridge can be responsible for the different levels of hardness in rocks in the region.

The collected samples will be crushed into powder and studied by CuriosityTwo scientific laboratories. Scientists at the mission hope that laboratory analyzes will indicate a substance in the rocks that hardens them and act as a type of cement.

Vasaveda suspects that the rocks were hardened and reinforced in the ancient past of Mars by the groundwater that crossed the ridge and carried this hardening substance.

Vera Rubin Ridge is located near the Opportunity landing site. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Curiosity will drill two more holes at Vera Rubin Ridge in September before climbing further up Mount Sharp.

The nuclear-powered rover Mast Camera (MastCam) took a panoramic photo of Vera Rubin Ridge in which Curiosity and its latest drilling site, named "Stoer" after a Scottish town in which sediments from the lake bed have revealed clues to early terrestrial life, are visible.

The varied terrain of Vera Rubin Ridge is just the last strange discovery of the rover on Mount Sharp. In June, CuriosityS Analysis of samples on Mars (SAM) instrument detected organic matter in sedimentary rocks aged three billion years near the Martian surface. These molecules could have been produced by biological or geological processes.

Significantly, the concentration of organic compounds measured by SAT, a little more than 10 parts per million, correspond to the quantities of these compounds detected in the Martian meteorites on Earth.

Data collected by Curiosity indicates that a water lake existed several billion years ago in the Gale Crater, with the chemical building blocks and energy sources necessary for the existence of A microbial life.

SAT have also detected seasonal variations in atmospheric methane, with levels increasing during the Martian summers and decreasing during the winters. These variations could have both biological and / or geological origins.

August 18, the cameras of the rover reproduced a strange fragment of stone on the surface Martian Chemistry and camera (ChemCam) instrument found to be a thin piece of rock.

The rover also monitored the global dust storm on Mars, which began at the end of May and is just coming up.

Video courtesy of NASA

Tagged: Mars NASA Curiosity The Vera Rubin Ridge Water Range

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Laurel Kornfeld

Laurel Kornfeld is an amateur astronomer and freelance writer from Highland Park, New Jersey, who loves writing about astronomy and planetary science. She studied journalism at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a scientific certificate from Astronomy Online at Swinburne University. His writings have been published online in The Atlantic, the Astronomy magazine's blog section, the British Space Conference, the 2009 IAU General Assembly Journal, The Space Reporter, and bulletins from various astronomy clubs. She is a member of Amateur Astronomers, Inc. based in Cranford, New Jersey. Particularly interested in the outdoor solar system, Laurel made a short presentation at Great Planet Debate 2008 at the Applied Physics Laboratory