Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found more evidence of water on ancient Mars during a recent pit stop along the way towards a huge Red Planet mountain. The one-tonne Curiosity rover resumed a trek of many months toward its mountain-slope destination, Mount Sharp. The rover used instruments on its arm to inspect rocks at its first way-point along the route inside Gale Crater.
The location, originally chosen on the basis of images taken from Nasa’s Mars Reconnaiss-ance Orbiter, paid off with investigation of targets that bear evidence of ancient wet environments, the US space agency said. “We examined pebbly sandstone deposited by water flowing over the surface, and veins or fractures in the rock,” said Dawn Sumner of Univer-sity of California, Davis. “We know the veins are younger than the sandstone because they cut through it, but they appear to be filled with grains like the sandstone,” said Sumner. The rover departed Waypoint 1 on Sunday with a westward drive of about 22.8 metres.