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12/25/2015

Curiosity uncovers mysterious minerals in Martian drillholes

9:07:00 AM  NEWS  No comments

curiosity silica 
 The first manned mission to Mars is still a goal for the future, so the best we can do to explore the Red Planet is to send robots. Curiosity has proven itself to be a good stand-in for boots on the ground, though. After rolling farther than any rover before it, Curiosity has found something new on Mars — silica. There’s silica everywhere on Earth, but we haven’t seen much of it on Mars before no, and that’s what makes this find so important.

Our story starts seven months ago when Curiosity was passing through an area called Marias Pass. It stopped and used its ChemCam laser drill into the rock to perform a mineral analysis, as it had done at many points since landing on Mars in 2012. The data was acquired and Curiosity went along its way up Mount Sharp. Then, NASA did something it almost never does — it turned the rover around and sent it back to do more science in Marias Pass.

It was the presence of silica in the sample that got scientists so excited. That sample analyzed by Curiosity showed concentrations of up to 90 percent silica, which is a big change from seeing only traces of silica in all previous samples. Curiosity spent the next four months checking various areas around Marias Pass, which is where two different sediment layers converge, to see how extensive the silica enrichment was. It turns out, pretty extensive.

marias pass

The presence of silica is important because it points to the presence of water in Mars’ geologic past. Of course, we now know that Mars has a little flowing water now, and that it had large lakes and flowing rivers in the past. Curiosity has found the dried lake and river beds, after all. All those dry lake beds only tell us there was water, not whether or not it would have been suitable for life. The water could have been too salty or acidic for live to develop, and it’s hard to know what conditions were like millions of years ago. A high concentration of silica could, however, help us make draw some conclusions about the nature of Martian water from ages ago.
Silica in these concentrations would probably end up there because of other minerals dissolving (acidic environment) or deposition of silica (neutral pH). Silica precipitates out of water at pH 7 or 8, so the layer of strata in Marias Pass and surrounding areas could have been ideal for living organisms. Scientists are still examining the data from Curiosity’s stop-off in Marias Pass in hopes of determining how the silica got there, which might change the way we imagine an ancient Martian environment.

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