By: Kevin  Wang

On the dry and rocky Red Planet, NASA’s Curiosity rover has wandered around for more than a decade. Since October 2023, Curiosity has been adventuring in an area of Mars rich with a kind of salt that contains sulfur. Up until May 30th, the rover had only found minerals that contained a mix of sulfur and other materials.

On May 30th, in the Gediz Vallis Channel on Mars, Curiosity cracked a rock that it drove over. Scientists were surprised to find something that had never been seen before on Mars: pure yellow sulfur crystals.

This sulfur forms in very specialized conditions, and Curiosity found a whole field of rocks similar to the one it crushed. According to Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California, “Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert. It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.” These sulfur crystals are just one of several discoveries made in the Gediz Vallis Channel, a channel that twists along Mount Sharp, a large mountain inside a crater.

As Nasa.gov stated, the main reason why scientists wanted to visit this channel is because scientists have speculated that the channel was created by a flow of water and debris that left sediment and boulders below the channel. Their goal is to develop a better understanding of how the landscape changed in the past, and despite the recent information gained, there’s still much more to learn from the area.