Images reveal ‘boxwork’ patterns suggesting Mars once had a flowing underground water system.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has sent back detailed close-up images of Martian rock formations that the space agency’s scientists say offer some of the strongest evidence yet of ancient groundwater flow on the red planet.
The images, taken from the slopes of a mountain inside Mars’ Gale Crater, show a network of low ridges etched in a striking crisscross pattern. According to NASA, these ridges likely formed when mineral-rich groundwater moved through the bedrock, depositing material that eventually hardened into the structures now captured by Curiosity.
“The bedrock below these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickling through the rock left behind minerals… hardening and becoming cementlike,” the agency said in a statement.
“The rover found dramatic evidence of that groundwater when it encountered crisscrossing low ridges, some just a few inches tall, arranged in what geologists call a boxwork pattern,” NASA said in a blogpost on its site.
NASA first released the video and the images in a blog post on its website on Monday.
“A big mystery is why the ridges were hardened into these big patterns and why only here. As we drive on, we’ll be studying the ridges and mineral cements to make sure our idea of how they formed is on target,” Ashwin Vasavada, a scientist of the Curiosity Project and a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, was quoted as saying in the space agency’s blog post.
Scientists believe Mars once had rivers, lakes and perhaps even an ocean, but the planet gradually dried up as it lost its atmosphere.
