New color images of sandstone buttes and mesas taken by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity late last week “arguably rival photos taken in US National Parks” and reveal the various layers of the Red Planet’s geologic past, officials at the space agency revealed in a Sept. 10 statement.
The stunning new photographs feature the “Murray Buttes” region of lower Mount Sharp, NASA said, and were taken on last Thursday using Curiosity’s Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. The plan is to combine many of the images into large color mosaics in the near future, they added.
Gale Crater is visible in the distance, through the haze in this Curiosity view of a sloping hillside on Mount Sharp. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California said that the rover’s science team “has been just thrilled to go on this road trip through a bit of the American desert Southwest on Mars… Studying these buttes up close has given us a better understanding of ancient sand dunes that formed and were buried, chemically changed by groundwater, exhumed and eroded to form the landscape that we see today.”
The buttes and mesas are the eroded remains of ancient sandstone formed when the Martian winds deposited sand following the formation of lower Mount Sharp. The rover had been visiting the Murray Buttes region for the past month, but last week, it began exiting the area, stopping to begin its latest drilling campaign at the base of the final butte on Sept. 9.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity attempting to explain climate change on the Red Planet
Once it has finished drilling, Curiosity will continue heading further to the south, where the rover will start heading to higher destinations on Mount Sharp. It is currently searching to find out how and when the planet’s conditions changed from favorable to life to dry and largely inhabitable.
“Early in its mission on Mars, Curiosity accomplished its main goal when it found and examined an ancient habitable environment,” JPL said in an August press release. “In an extended mission, the rover is examining successively younger layers as it climbs the lower part of Mount Sharp.”
Scientists refer to these dramatic layers as “cross-bedding.” Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“A key goal is to learn how freshwater lake conditions, which would have been favorable for microbes billions of years ago if Mars has ever had life, evolved into harsher, arid conditions much less suited to supporting life,” they added. “The mission is also monitoring the modern environment of Mars. These findings have been addressing high-priority goals for planetary science and further aid NASA’s preparations for a human mission to the Red Planet.”
Curiosity originally landed near Mount Sharp in 2012 and reached the base of the mountain two years later after discovering evidence that ancient lakes on Mars provided an environment which would have been conducive to microbial life. The Murray Buttes region that is has been exploring was given its informal name in 2013 in honor of former JPL director and Caltech planetary scientist Bruce Murray, the agency noted.
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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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