The latest data from the Mars Curiosity Rover suggests that Mars had a continental crust similar to the one Earth has. Researchers analyzed data collected with the rover’s ChemCam instrument (short for Chemistry and Camera) and determined that the composition of the rocks on Mars was reminiscent of Earth’s crust.
Mars More Like Earth Than Ever
The new evidence from the Mars Curiosity Rover supports the notion that many scientists have held lately, that Mars was once much more like Earth than previously thought. Because of what researchers had previously known of the Martian surface–namely, that it was covered in dark igneous rocks, similar to the ones that make up the underwater crust of the Earth.
Mars was thought of as being a basaltic planet. Due to this latest discovery from the data gathered by the Mars Curiosity Rover, however, this notion is changing.
The ChemCam on Mars Curiosity Rover
Having recently arrived at Gale Crater, the rover began employing its ChemCam instrument to analyze the rocks in the area. This device works simultaneously as a camera and a laser to study the rocks on Mars through the Mars Curiosity Rover. The ChemCam uses its laser component to vaporize materials that it needs to analyze, and then the camera component analyzes the chemical composition of the newly vaporized material. The Mars Curiosity Rover’s ChemCam also contains a spectrograph, which it uses to analyze details of the various minerals that it comes into contact with before and after the laser does its job.
A Lighter Martian Crust
The lead scientist of the ChemCam instrument, Roger Wiens from the Los Alamos National Library, reported that what they saw was unexpected on Mars. Usually they would expect to find dark rocks, but in this instance they saw large, bright crystals on the rocks analyzed by the Mars Curiosity Rover’s ChemCam instrument. Researchers who observed the pictures and chemical data from the rover determined that the rocks were abundant with feldspar and maybe even quartz, which is very similar to the Earth’s continental crust.
According to Violane Sautter, the first author of the paper which was published in Nature Geoscience, these components of Martian crust resemble a rock type found on Earth known to geologists as Tonalite-Trondhjemite-Granodiorite, or TTG, rocks that were predominant in the Earth’s crust from 2.5 billion years ago in the Archean Era. This latest discovery from the Mars Curiosity Rover brings us closer to our nearest neighboring planet than ever.
