JoAnna Wendel is a freelance science writer living in Portland, Oregon. She mainly covers Earth and planetary science but also loves the ocean, invertebrates, lichen and moss. JoAnna's work has appeared in Eos, Smithsonian Magazine, Knowable Magazine, Popular Science and more. JoAnna is also a science cartoonist and has published comics with Gizmodo, NASA, Science News for Students and more. She graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in general sciences because she couldn't decide on her favorite area of science. In her spare time, JoAnna likes to hike, read, paint, do crossword puzzles and hang out with her cat, Pancake.
An ancient, dried-up lake bed on Mars may be teeming with opal gemstones, new data from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover suggests.
Researchers spotted one such sign in the past few years around fractures in the Martian surface. Surrounding some of these fractures are"halos" of lighter-colored rock, which researchers found are likely rich in opal. For opal to form, silica-rich rocks must interact with water. Gabriel and his colleagues were studying old images from Curiosity's traverse around Gale Crater and noticed, in an image taken much earlier in the mission, a light halo of rock surrounding a fracture. That halo looked almost exactly like halos found more recently. Data from Curiosity's ChemCam instrument, which analyzes rocks using images and spectrometry, showed that those recently studied light rocks likely contained silica-rich opals.
At the Lubango site, the DAN results confirmed that the lighter-colored halos on the ground do indeed contain opal, just like other sites around Gale Crater.
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