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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover weighed the mountain it’s climbing

Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News

Curiosity rover
HIGH AND DRY NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took this selfie on January 15. The rover has been climbing a Martian mountain that was once in the middle of a lake, but new research suggests most of the mountaintop was built during drier times.

For the first time, a Mars rover has measured the mass of the rocks beneath its wheels.

By taking gravity measurements as it climbed a Martian mountain, Curiosity discovered something surprising: Mount Sharp appears to have been built in two phases — one soggy, one dry.

The rover found that the rocks it is driving over are less densely packed than scientists expected. That suggests the mountain was not formed just from compressed lake sediments, which would have crushed the rocks at its base more thoroughly.

“I had no idea what to expect,” says planetary scientist Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University, who reports the results in the Feb. 1 Science. “This is the first measurement of its type on Mars.”

Since landing on Mars in 2012, Curiosity has been driving across Gale Crater, which scientists think used to be a lake (SN Online: 12/8/14). After 753 Martian days, the rover began climbing the 5-kilometer-high Mount Sharp, also called Aeolis Mons, in the crater’s center.

“Mount Sharp is a big puzzle,” Lewis says. One idea is that the mountain could have been laid down layer by layer in the ancient lake, until it filled the entire crater. The weight of all those layers of rock would densely compact the rocks at the base.

But some features of Mount Sharp suggest that’s not what happened — the mountaintop rises above…

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