NASA Curiosity rover finds largest-ever field of honeycomb rock polygons on Mars in Valle Grande valley
NASA's Curiosity rover has found a field of honeycomb-shaped rock fractures on Mars far larger than anything the mission has seen before, in a valley nicknamed Valle Grande. Each polygon spans 4 to 8 centimeters. Scientists are analyzing their chemistry for clues on how they form
NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered a vast field of honeycomb-shaped rock fractures on Mars, unlike anything the mission has documented in nearly 14 years of exploring the planet. The rover spotted the pattern while climbing a Martian valley nicknamed Valle Grande. Each polygon measures 4 to 8 centimeters across, and in a 360-degree panorama captured in June, the shapes spread in every direction as far as the rover's cameras can see, even wrapping around the sides of a nearby sand-capped butte called Miraflores, roughly 6 meters tall. Curiosity has spotted small patches of these polygonal fractures before, but never at this scale, according to the mission's project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team measured the shapes and their chemistry, hoping to find clues about how they formed. Some polygons found elsewhere on Mars are known to have formed as mud cracks, though the mission notes several processes can create the honeycomb texture, including cycles of warm and cold temperatures or compression that squeezed water out of buried sediment. The find adds to a long list of surprises for Curiosity, which has spent more than a decade climbing Mount Sharp and has previously found organic molecules that could be precursors to RNA and DNA, evidence that ancient Mars once had the water and chemistry to potentially support microbial life, even though scientists cannot yet say whether those molecules came from biological or geological processes.