Large impacts on the Moon can form wide craters and turn surface rock liquid. Geophysicists once assumed that liquid rock would be homogenous when it cooled. Now researchers have found evidence that pre-existing mineralogy can survive impact melt. Pre-existing mineral deposits on the Moon (sinuous melt, above) survived impacts powerful enough to melt [continue reading]
A NASA spacecraft is providing new evidence of a wet underground environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet’s early evolution. This view of layered rocks on the floor of McLaughlin Crater shows sedimentary rocks that contain spectroscopic evidence for minerals formed through interaction with water. Image Credit: [continue reading]
Instrument confirms presence of gypsum and related minerals Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the French Space Agency have tracked a trail of minerals that point to the prior presence of water at the Curiosity rover site on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity Rover recently took this photo of the [continue reading]
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has ingested its first solid sample into an analytical instrument inside the rover, a capability at the core of the two-year mission. The rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument is analyzing this sample to determine what minerals it contains. This image shows part of the small pit or bite created when [continue reading]
A researcher at The Open University in the UK will take part in a mission to explore the chemistry of Mars when Curiosity lands on the planet. The area where NASA’s Curiosity rover will land has a geological diversity that scientists are eager to investigate, as seen in this false-color map based on data from NASA’s [continue reading]
By studying rocks blasted out of impact craters, ESA’s Mars Express has found evidence that underground water persisted at depth for prolonged periods during the first billion years of the Red Planet’s existence. The large 25 km-diameter crater in the foreground has excavated rocks which have been altered by groundwater in the crust before [continue reading]