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NASA's Curiosity rover starts Red Planet road trip up Martian mountain - Space.com

NASA's Curiosity rover starts Red Planet road trip up Martian mountain - Space.com

NASA's Curiosity rover starts Red Planet road trip up Martian mountain - Space.com
Jul 10, 2020 1 min, 17 secs

Like many Americans this summer, NASA's Curiosity rover is embarking on a road trip — but on Mars.

Curiosity is on its way to an area on the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 km) Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) nicknamed the "sulfate-bearing unit." Sulfates are usually formed around water as it evaporates, and these leftovers could provide more information about how the surface of Mars changed roughly three billion years ago, when the planet lost most of its atmosphere and running water was no longer possible on the surface.

Rover drivers working from home — a pandemic containment measure keeping them from their usual offices at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California — will send commands to keep Curiosity on track.

Curiosity's last stop from 2019 to this year was the "clay-bearing unit", another environment that was formed in water.

Scientists are also interested in a feature between the clay unit and the sulfate unit, nicknamed the "Greenheugh pediment.".

The pediment, however, formed a little later — scientists aren't even sure if it was made using water or wind erosion6

"Nodules like these require water in order to form," Alexander Bryk, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley who led the pediment detour, in the statement.

At some point after the pediment formed, water seems to have returned, altering the rock as it flowed through it.".

If all goes to plan, Curiosity will reach the sulfate unit later this year, during Earth's Northern Hemisphere fall!

Like any road trip, however, rover drivers may stop their machine along the way if they spot something interesting.

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