Image courtesy of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Joel Kontinen
NASA says it has found a multi-billion year old coral
on Mars, but life on created on earth, not on Mars.
“NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back intriguing
images of what looks like a piece of coral on Mars.
The strange object is in fact a small, light-colored,
wind-eroded rock, which the rover found inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater on
July 24 — but it looks remarkably similar to the reef-building creatures found
in Earth's oceans.
A black and white picture taken with Curiosity's
Remote Micro Imager — a high-resolution, telescopic camera that is mounted on
the rover — and shared by NASA in a statement on Aug. 4 shows the
approximately 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) rock with its intricate branches.
"Curiosity
has found many rocks like this one, which were formed by ancient water combined
with billions of years of sandblasting by the wind," NASA representatives
wrote in the statement.
Coral-shaped
rocks on Mars started forming billions of years ago, when the Red Planet still
had water, according to the statement. Just like water on Earth, this water was
full of dissolved minerals. It percolated through small cracks in Martian
rocks, gradually depositing minerals and forming solid "veins" inside
the rocks.
These
veins form the strange branches of the coral-shaped object that we see in
Curiosity's picture today, after millions of years of erosion by sand-laden
winds wore away the rock.
Other examples of unusual rocks found on Mars include
"Paposo" — a strangely-shaped rock measuring about 2 inches (5 cm)
across that Curiosity also discovered on July 24 — and a tiny,
flower-shaped object, which the rover photographed in Gale Crater in 2022.
Curiosity
landed on Mars in 2012, touching down in the Gale Crater — a meteor impact
crater on the boundary between the Red Planet's cratered southern highlands and
its smooth northern plains. The rover's mission, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in California, is to scan the Martian surface for any signs that it
was habitable at any point in the distant past.
So far,
Curiosity has traversed roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) of the 96-mile-wide
(154 km) crater. Its path is meandering and slow, because it has to stop to
drill into rocks, collect samples and gather data.
The rover's explorations have uncovered abundant
evidence that the potential for life once existed on Mars, including long
carbon chains from 3.7 billion-year-old rocks and signs that Mars
once had a carbon cycle.”
The dates in this story are false.
Source:
Sascha Pare 2025 NASA finds multi-billion-year-old 'coral' on Mars | Live Science 7 August
Posts
