NASA’s Curiosity rover has entered a Martian valley covered by an astonishing “sea” of tiny polygon-shaped fractures. The honeycomb patterns, each only a few inches wide, stretch across the landscape and even wrap around a nearby 20-foot-tall butte.
Columnar basalt! That means flowing lava at one point on Mars!
That’s a conclusion the article doesn’t leap to:
What Created the Honeycomb Patterns?
Some polygonal formations previously examined by Curiosity clearly began as cracks in drying mud. However, several different processes can produce this kind of honeycomb appearance.
Repeated warming and cooling can fracture the ground into geometric shapes. Compression may also create similar patterns by forcing water out of sediment after the material becomes buried beneath the surface.
Scientists are now studying the newly discovered formations to determine which of these processes, or possibly a combination of them, shaped the landscape in Valle Grande.
Boooo! I was going with my Aliens on Mars theory and you ruined it.
Does that mean this mountain could be a volcano?
Billions of years ago, lakes and streams were scattered across the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been climbing since 2014.
Also has this rover been climbing the same mountain for 12 years? How close is it to the top?
The rover’s speed is measured in meters per day I’m pretty sure, it goes at a very slow pace.
Edit: yes. Given tests I imagine it frequently travels a lot less than that.
Based on variables including power levels, terrain difficulty, slippage and visibility, the maximum terrain-traverse speed is estimated to be 200 m (660 ft) per day by automatic navigation.
Further edit: NASA has an interactive map of its journey so far, neat.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/location-map/Gonna have a hell of a view at the summit
The image doesn’t really look like columnar basalt, but I could be wrong.
Even Mars knows that hexagons are bestagons.
Hell yeah, that five sided fistagon.
It’s probably aliens.
400,000 years ago, the aliens were like “you know what’ll really blow those ape fuckers minds one day?”
inches, foot
Why are we still using dumbass units?
Because you’re American. The rest of the world has moved on.
I remember an engineer tasked to redesign a piece for a military jet. It was a piece used to refuel the jet while in flight.
Apparently on jet had to perform an emergency landing as they went out of fuel. The injector and the hole were designed by two different teams, one in the US and one in Europe. Apparently nobody told the Europeans that measurements were in inches…
It’s NASA. By law, they have to use metric.
They might optionally convert it to stupid units for the public. Blame the press.
They found the Honeycomb Hideout! Scooby will be thrilled!
