The Curiosity rover spent much of March climbing Greenhew's Fronton, a gentle slope
But on March 18, the mission team saw aheadan unexpected change in terrain and realized that they would have to turn around: the path in front of the Curiosity was littered with a large number of wind-pointed stones or ventifacts. In such numbers, scientists have not seen them even once in almost 10 years of the rover's work on the Red Planet.
The mission team called this area "the backalligator" due to the external similarity of the pattern of stones with the back of a reptile. Previously, scientists explored the area using orbital images. Now for shooting an unusual rocky landscape, the Curiosity mast camera. The goal is to study the rocks and understand how dangerous they are for the wheels of the rover.
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. In high resolution - follow the link
Study Finds 'Alligator Rocks'are not impassable. However, the mission team decided not to do this. The road will be too difficult for the rover, and it will quickly wear out the rover's wheels.
As a result, the NASA team began to lay a newcourse for the rover, in which it will continue to study Mount Sharp 5.5 km high. Recall that Curiosity has been climbing it since 2014 to study the various sedimentary layers that were formed by water billions of years ago. The data is helping scientists understand whether microscopic life could have survived in the ancient Martian environment.
Read more:
There is another “planet” inside the Earth: how it saved nascent life
New study refutes light energy transfer theory
Scientists added silicon to a quantum computer: calculations became record-breakingly accurate