NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars has made a discovery that left scientists stunned

From the search for water on Mars to ambitions of colonizing the red planet and grand designs for entire cities out there, Earth's neighbor has been in the spotlight as part of the global space race for a while now. It's been more than a decade since NASA's Curiosity rover was sent to Mars to investigate a key area of interest on the planet and scientists have now come across stone made of pure sulfur on the Red Planet. 

"I think it's the strangest find of the whole mission and the most unexpected," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, told CNN. "I have to say, there's a lot of luck involved here. Not every rock has something interesting inside," Mr Vasavada added.

It was on May 30, 2024, that the rover made the extraordinary revelation by driving over a rock and cracking it to discover pure or elemental yellow sulfur crystals inside.

According to scientists, pure sulfur forms only in a narrow range of conditions that scientists had not associated with the Mount Sharp location where the Curiosity Rover was deployed, and yet the vehicle was able to find an entire field of bright rocks that looked similar to the one that it had crushed. 

According to NASA's official statement, the Gediz Vallis channel, where the rocks were found may have been formed by floods and debris that led to rocks and sediment piling into the mounds and creating a long ridge downhill.

Sharing the news on X, the Mars Curiosity handle wrote, "*Cronch* I ran over a rock and found crystals inside! It's pure sulfur. (And no, it doesn't smell.) Elemental sulfur is something we've never seen before on Mars. We don't know much about these yellow crystals yet, but my team is excited to investigate." 

While people associate sulfur with the odor that also comes from rotten eggs, elemental or pure sulfur is essentially odorless. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. 

This is not the only discovery that the Curiosity Rover has made while off-roading within the Gediz Vallis channel that is part of the 3-mile-tall Mount Sharp. The rover has been in the foothills since 2014 and has explored essential aspects of the terrain, including the fact that Mount Sharp is made up of layers. Some other major discoveries of the mission include the detection of organic compounds in Martian rocks and evidence of past lake environments that could have supported microbial life. The mission has been a great step forward in the exploration of the planet with the rover's main goal being to investigate the Martian climate and geology, and asses whether the selected field site inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. The car-sized rover weighs about 1,982 pounds (899 kilograms) and is equipped with scientific instruments to analyze the Martian surface.