NASA finds "coral" billions of years old on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover sends photos to Earth an unusual object, that looks like a piece of coral.

The strange object is actually a small, light and a weathered rock, found by Curiosity in Gale Crater. This rock looks remarkably similar to Earth’s corals. 

The photo was taken by with a high-resolution Remote Micro Imager telescopic camera, mounted on the rover. The 2.5 cm thick stone has complex branches.

NASA adds, that similar stones began to appear on Mars billions of years ago, when there was still water on the Red Planet. As on Earth, this water contained many soluble minerals. It seeped through small cracks in the Martian rock, contributing to the gradual appearance of mineral deposits that formed solid “veins” inside the rocks.

These veins form unusual branches on the stone, making it look like a coral. Other examples of unusual rocks, found on Mars, include «Paposo» — stone of a strange shape measuring about 5 cm in diameter, which Curiosity also detected on July 24, — and a tiny flower-shaped object, which was photographed by the rover in Gale Crater in 2012.

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater back in 2012. This is a meteorite crater on the border of the between the cratered southern highlands of the Red Planet and its smooth northern plains. The mission of the rover is to in scanning the surface of Mars for signs, that it was habitable in the distant past.

At the moment, Curiosity has covered about 35 km of the 154 km wide crater. Its path is winding and slow, as it has to stop to drill rocks, collect samples and data. 

Mars rover research has uncovered abundant evidence that Mars once had the potential for life, including long carbon chains from 3.7 billion-year-old rocks. And signs that a carbon cycle once existed on Mars.

Source: LiveScience