Honeycomb pattern on Mars – Curiosity rover / NASA
As NASA’s Curiosity rover ascended the Martian valley named Valle Grande back in June, it sent back images of a landscape covered in honeycomb-like textures.
“We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” said the mission’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Called polygonal fractures, small patches of these geometric shapes have been spotted several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.
In a 360-degree panorama that the rover captured on June 19-20, the polygonal shapes spread in all directions for as far as the rover can see. They even wrap around the sides of a nearby butte nicknamed “Miraflores,” which stands 20 feet tall (6 meters) and is topped with a thick cap of sand.
“We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”
A variety of processes can contribute to these honeycomb textures. Some of the polygons the rover has spotted in the past clearly formed as mud cracks. Other possibilities include cycles of warm and cold temperatures or compression that squeezed water out of the sediment when the surface was buried.
These newly discovered polygons are among the many surprises Curiosity has trundled across since landing on Mars fourteen years ago, in 2012. Besides sulfur crystals, shiny meteorites, and other interesting geologic features, the rover has made major discoveries about the ancient Martian environment — most importantly, that it had the water, chemistry, and nutrients to support microbial life.
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Billions of years ago, lakes and streams dappled the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been ascending since 2014.
The rover has previously uncovered chemistry left over from Mars’ watery history—a discovery that reconfirmed ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support life.
Mars discoveries also included carbon-based molecules believed to be precursors to RNA and DNA, two nucleic acids that carry genetic information.
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