• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

NASA’s Curiosity Rover About To Enter “Spiderweb” Region Of Mars’ Mount Sharp

November 20, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

NASA’s Curiosity rover is ready to move out of the valley of Gediz Vallis and travel slow and steady for a month to a fascinating new area of great interest on Mount Sharp, a 5-kilometer (3-mile) tall mountain at the center of Gale crater. The new area has been called the boxwork, and views from orbit show it to have a web-like structure.

It was not a Shelob-like creature that spun this intricate web – scientists believe that it was the water on Mars’ last hurrah in the region that carved the complex pattern. As the Red Planet was transitioning from a wet world into the dry one of today, some of the water flowing off Mount Sharp carried minerals that settled into fractures in the surface rock and subsequently hardened.

Advertisement

Over eons, the relentless action of the thin Martian atmosphere eroded some of the rock away, revealing the hard minerals that had cemented in the fractures, giving this beautiful spider web-like pattern.

There are boxwork structures on Earth too in cliffsides and caves, but they are different. Firstly, on Mars, they formed as  water was disappearing. Secondly, they are enormous, spanning an area of 10 to 20 kilometers (6 to 12 miles) – and it might be an intriguing place for Curiosity to look for traces of ancient life.

“These ridges will include minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with salty liquid water flowing through,” said Kirsten Siebach of Rice University in Houston, a Curiosity scientist studying the region. “Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment. That makes this an exciting place to explore.”

Advertisement

This is not the only spider-related feature on the Martian surface. At the South Pole, there are the “spiders on Mars” – unrelated to Bowie’s band – related to the current freezing and sublimation of ice rather than ancient water as researchers have found recently.  

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Twitter accelerates again with Bitcoin tips, NFTs, recorded Spaces, creator fund and more
  2. Elon Musk announces Tesla to move headquarters to Austin
  3. Rebound Relationships: What They Are And Why They Can Work Better Than You Think
  4. At Least 11 Donkeys Have Dropped Dead In Death Valley From Toxic Algae Bloom

Source Link: NASA's Curiosity Rover About To Enter “Spiderweb” Region Of Mars' Mount Sharp

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Man Broke Down Wall In His Basement And Discovered An Ancient Underground City That Once Housed 20,000 People
  • Same-Sex Penguin Couple Adopt And Raise Chick – And They’ve All Got 10/10 Names
  • Dolphins May Not “See” With Echolocation, But Instead “Feel” With It
  • Confirmed! Comet 3I/ATLAS Is Indeed An Interstellar Visitor, Quite Different From Its Predecessors
  • At 192, Jonathan – The Oldest Living Land Animal – Has Lived Through 40 US Presidents
  • 300,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools “Made By Denisovans” Discovered In China
  • Why Do Cats Eyes Glow? For The Same Reason Great White Sharks’ Do, Silly
  • G-astronomical News: Michelin-Starred Meal To Be Served On The ISS
  • In 2032, Earth May Witness A Once-In-5,000-Year Event On The Moon
  • Brand New Microscope Designed For Underwater Reveals Stunning Details Of Corals
  • The Atlantic’s Major Circulation Current Is Showing Worrying Signs, But Is Collapse Near?
  • “The Rings Held The Answer”: How We Finally Figured Out Saturn’s Day Length In 2019
  • Mystery Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” Solved By A Dentist And A Protractor
  • Asteroid Ryugu’s Latest Mineral Is As Weird As Finding “A Tropical Seed In The Arctic”
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: Are We Living Through A Sixth Mass Extinction?
  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version