NASA’s Perseverance rover may be hogging the headlines, but its predecessor is also capturing new insights about Mars.
Since August 2012, the Curiosity buggy has been studying whether the red planet could have once supported microbial life.
To mark the rover’s ninth year on Mars, NASA has created a 360-degree tour of Curiosity’s current home on Mount Sharp.
The 5-kilometer tall mountain lies within the 54-kilometer-wide basin of Mars’ Gale Crater. NASA believes the area could contain clues about how the planet dried up.
Spacecraft monitoring the mission show that Curiosity is currently between an area enriched with clay material and another one full of sulfates. The mountain’s layers in this region may reveal how the environment lost its water over time.
“The rocks here will begin to tell us how this once-wet planet changed into the dry Mars of today, and how long habitable environments persisted even after that happened,” said Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity’s deputy project scientist.
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