NASA Rover finds various minerals in Martin rocks

Washington, June 12: Observing the earliest models of rocks collected by NASA's Mars Reality Rover, scientists have discovered a wide variety of ores in the lower layers of Mount Sharp, suggesting that the conditions in the water environment in the Red Red Planet have changed. Curiosity landed at Mount Sharp in Gale Crater in August 2012. It reached the base of the mountain in 2014. The stone layers of Mount Sharp are collected as a sediment within the ancient lakes about 3.5 billion years ago. Orbital infrared spectroscopy had shown that the mountain's lower-most layers have variations in minerals.

"We went to Gale Crater to investigate these lower layers of Mount Sharp that have these minerals that precipitated from water and suggest different environments," said Elizabeth Rampe of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston who is the first author of the study. "These layers were deposited about 3.5 billion years ago, coinciding with a time on Earth when life was beginning to take hold. We think early Mars may have been similar to early Earth, and so these environments might have been habitable," Rampe added. The minerals found in the four samples drilled near the base of Mount Sharp suggest several different environments were present in ancient Gale Crater, according to the study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 

At the base there are minerals from a primordial clinker origin;They are rich in iron and magnesium, equivalent to basalts in Hawaii.Moving higher in the section, scientists saw more silica-rich minerals. In the "Telegraph Peak" sample, scientists found minerals similar to quartz. In the sample of "Buck Skin", scientists found tridymite. Tridymite is found on Earth in rocks that formed from partial melting of the Earth's crust or in the continental crust -- a strange finding because Mars never had plate tectonics. In the "Confidence Hills" and "Mojave 2" samples, scientists found clay minerals, which generally form in the presence of liquid water with a near-neutral pH, and therefore could be good indicators of past environments that were conducive to life.