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Far away on the surface of Mars, NASA’s Curiosity Rover took a side quest this weekend and captured images of a mysterious roadside attraction: a rocky surface that resembles the scales of a cosmically large reptile that has scientists stumped on its origin.
Kevin M. Gill, engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, posted the images showing this distinctive polygonal rock surface from the vantage point of the trusty rover that’s been exploring the Red Planet since 2012; the rover was on its way to investigate a small crater when it happened upon the intriguing landscape feature.
“We’ve seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn’t seem quite this dramatically abundant, stretching across the ground for meters and meters in our Mastcam mosaics,” read a statement from the space agency. “This week we continued to collect lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed.”
One intriguing theory on the origin of these textured scales is that they’re ancient cracked mud banks that went through frequent seasonal cycles of being wet and dry over and over again due to the influence of flowing water, back around 3.8 to 3.6 billion years ago when Mars was wetter and warmer, according to a Nature paper in 2022.
Curiosity came across the scaly formation as it was on its way towards a 32-foot-diameter crater that scientists have dubbed Antofagasta, after a city and region in Chile. Researchers think the crater could hold traces of organic chemicals — major keys to the existence of ancient organisms, according to the space agency.
Evidence of life on Mars is growing, albeit slowly. Last year, NASA announced that its Perseverance Mars rover had found leopard spots on some rocks in the Jezero Crater that may indicate the biosignatures of long-dead microbes.
More on Mars: Scientists Intrigued by “Negative Mass Anomaly” Under Surface of Mars