A Sea of Tiny Honeycomb Cracks on Mars Could Show How Water Hold Clues to Ancient Water
NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered a vast field of polygonal ridges on Mars near Mount Sharp. Scientists believe these formations could provide critical evidence regarding the planet's ancient water history and potential for past life.
Why it matters
Understanding Martian geological history helps scientists determine if the planet was once habitable and how its climate evolved over time.
For years, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been climbing Mount Sharp, the enormous mountain rising from the center of Mars’ Gale Crater. Along the way, it’s explored ancient lake deposits, water-altered minerals, and organic compounds preserved in Martian rock.
Now it has reached something unlike any landscape it has encountered at this scale before.
A vast network of tiny polygonal ridges covers the ground around the rover, creating what looks like a stone honeycomb stretching toward the horizon. Curiosity has seen similar patterns before, but only in smaller patches. This field appears to cover an entire band of terrain near a channel called Valle Grande.
“We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes , but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” Ashwin Vasavada, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said .
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