In 2016, the Curiosity rover came across something really peculiar in Gale Crater on Mars.
On the slope of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity labored, were large quantities of a rare mineral; rare, at least, here on Earth. Tridymite, a form of quartz, only seems to form extremely seldom, and under high temperatures, such as those you might find in magma.is not one of those regions, leading scientists to puzzle about how the mineral came to be there.
"The discovery of tridymite in a mudstone in Gale Crater is one of the most surprising observations that the Curiosity rover has made in 10 years of exploring Mars,""Tridymite is usually associated with quartz-forming, explosive, evolved volcanic systems on Earth, but we found it in the bottom of an ancient lake on Mars, where most of the volcanoes are very primitive."
Then, they sifted through the data collected by Curiosity on the composition of the long-ago dried-up sedimentary lakebed in the Gale Crater. When the chamber eventually erupted, it did so in a huge explosion that spewed ash containing the silica – now in the form of tridymite – into the air to rain back down into the lake in the Gale Crater and its surrounding tributaries.These waters would have weathered and sorted the ash to produce the chemical composition of the layer as observed by Curiosity, the team said.
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