On Mars, you’ll be able to’t judge a book-shaped rock by its cover.
NASA’s Curiosity rover ran across the hardcover-shaped feature on April 15, which happened to be the three,800th Martian day (or sol) of the long-running mission.
Very similar to librarians, geologists must fastidiously read the clues around them. The strange shape of Mars rocks like this one are frequently as a consequence of water trickling in the world billions of years ago, when the Red Planet was much wetter, NASA officials said.
Now the planet is way drier, and windier. “After eons of being sand-blasted by the wind, softer rock is carved away, and the harder materials are all that is left,” officials with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Curiosity’s mission, stated on Thursday (opens in latest tab) (May 11) of the find.
Related: Curiosity rover: 15 awe-inspiring photos of Mars (gallery)
While writing is assumed to have originated in ancient Sumer (near the modern-day Persian Gulf) some 5,400 years ago, in accordance with the J. Paul Getty Museum (opens in latest tab), the ways through which humans record information is diverse.
One 2023 study suggests a cave painting’s “dots” could also be a type of writing from 20,000 years ago, although the conclusion is controversial. And more modern types of writing have been placed on rock partitions, in clay tablets or in scrolls, to call quite a few forms of reading formats.
What many individuals now call “books” originated with codices, first as wax tablets after which as parchment within the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian areas, in accordance with the British Library (opens in latest tab). Dating is difficult, however the format appears to be fairly prevalent no less than by Greco-Roman times — if not earlier.
Curiosity has been exploring Mars’ Gale Crater since August 2012, with key leads to science papers including the invention of persistent liquid water on ancient Mars, potential evidence of ancient life through organics, and examinations of radiation on the surface, in accordance with JPL (opens in latest tab).
A successor mission, Perseverance, is working within the Jezero Crater area of Mars and caching tubes (or lightsabers) of samples for future return to Earth. The sample return effort is predicted to ramp up within the late 2020s with the launch of a set of relay spacecraft and a few mini-helicopters.
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