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NASA's Curiosity Likes Big Buttes - But Only On Mars, As Captured In This Incredible Panorama
NASA’s Curiosity rover has recently been traveling up a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande”, and has come across some very intriguing geological features. A "sea of polygons" In a 360-degree panorama, the roaming robot captured the Martian surface covered in a honeycomb-like pattern, with each polygon measuring 4 to 8 centimeters (1.5 to 3 inches) across. On the very same day, it took an incredible panorama of a butte. But first, polygons. Scientists at mission control don't yet have a clear explanation for what formed these so-called "polygonal fractures," but they suspect the cause is similar to mud cracks created by cycles of warm and cold temperatures that squeeze water out of the sediment. This is the largest "sea of polygons" Curiosity has come across yet. To find out for certain, the team carried out some scientific snooping around the site. “We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” Ashwin Vasavada, the mission’s project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. “We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed,”...
