On Mars, you can’t judge a book-shaped rock by its cover.
from NASA Curiosity Rover passed through the hardcover-like feature on April 15, which turned out to be the 3,800th Martian (or sol) day of the long-duration mission.
Like librarians, geologists must carefully read the clues around them. The strange shape of March Rocks like this are usually due to water flowing through the area billions of years ago, when the Red Planet was much wetter, NASA officials said.
Now the planet is much drier and windier. “After eons of blasting by the wind, the softer rock is gouged out and the hardest materials are all that’s left,” officials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the mission from Curiosity, declared Thursday (opens in a new tab) (May 11) of the find.
Related: Rover Curiosity: 15 impressive photos of Mars (gallery)
While writing is thought to have originated in ancient Sumer (near the present-day Persian Gulf) around 5,400 years ago, according to the J. Paul Getty Museum (opens in a new tab)the ways in which humans record information are diverse.
A 2023 study suggests the ‘dots’ in a cave painting could be a form of writing from 20,000 years ago, although the conclusion is controversial. And more modern forms of writing have been placed on rock faces, in clay tablets or scrolls, to name many types of reading formats.
What many people today call “books” originated in codices, first as wax tablets, then as parchment in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions, according to the British Library (opens in a new tab). Dating is tricky, but the format seems to be fairly widespread at least in Greco-Roman times – if not earlier.
Curiosity has been exploring Mars’ Gale Crater since August 2012, with key findings in scientific papers including the discovery of persistent liquid water on ancient Mars, potential evidence for ancient life through organic matter, and examinations of surface radiation, according to JPL (opens in a new tab).
A successor mission, Perseveranceworks in the Jezero Crater area of Mars and caches tubes (or lightsabers) of samples for a future return to Earth. The sample return effort is expected to ramp up in the late 2020s with the launch of a set of relay spacecraft and a couple of mini-helicopters.
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or Facebook (opens in a new tab).