Mars’ Curiosity rovers path through ancient Gale Crater indicates that Mars’s climate ‘dried out’ over the long term, on a way that still allowed for the cyclical presence of a lake, says Marion Nachon, at Texas A&M, member of a team that examined Mars’ geological terrains from Gale Crater, an immense 95-mile-wide rocky basin that is being explored with the NASA Curiosity rover since 2012 as part of the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) mission.
A new animated video shows what it would be like to soar over Mount Sharp, which NASA’s Curiosity rover has been climbing since 2014. Each region displayed represents a different period in the history of Mount Sharp, which rises about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the base of Gale Crater. Curiosity’s scientists want to visit these places to learn more about the history of water on the mountain, which slowly dried up as the climate changed.
“To me, Mars is the uncanny valley of Earth,” said planetary geophysicist Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University. “It’s similar but was shaped by different processes. It feels so unnatural to our terrestrial experience.”