NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a ‘sea of ​​polygons’ on Mars

The latest discoveries from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover are a field of honeycomb-shaped polygons covering the Martian valley called Valle Grande. Like Gizmodo According to reports, Curiosity has photographed unusual areas in the past, called polygonal fractures, each about 1.5 to 3 inches wide, but NASA says it only found them in small pieces, “none of the scale found in Valle Grande.”

Curiosity captured the 360-degree panorama of the “sea of ​​polygons” on June 19th and 20th (Martian sols 4,930 and 4,931) which shows the appearance spreading in all directions. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada says the Curiosity team “examined their structure and chemistry carefully and believe there are clues to how these elements formed.”

NASA says that billions of years ago, “seas and rivers eroded Mount Sharp, a 5-kilometer (5-mile) mountain that Curiosity has been climbing since 2014.” This location may also indicate that there was water in the Valle Grande, based on previous polygons:

Some of the polygons that the mission had previously seen were clearly formed as cracks in the mud, although a number of methods could have created the honeycombs, including heat and cold or squeezing that produced water from the mud where the surface was buried.