Figure AScientists think that ancient groundwater formed this weblike pattern of ridges, called boxwork, that were captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Dec. 10, 2006. The agency's Curiosity rover will study ridges similar to these up close in 2025.
Boxwork can form on Earth when groundwater flows through a web of rock fractures underground. Minerals carried by the water can coat the cracks and be deposited within the rock nearby. Eons later, if the rock erodes away, the minerals filling the cracks or the hardened rock leave a weblike pattern of ridges exposed. In the area captured by HiRISE, dark sand filled the spaces between these ridges, making them stand out more dramatically in the black-and-white image.
The Martian boxwork Curiosity is headed toward formed in the foothills of lower Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain the rover has been ascending since 2014. Mount Sharp's boxwork structures stand apart from those on Earth, both because they formed as water was disappearing from Mars and because they're so extensive, running as long as 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers).
Scientists are eager to study them up close because minerals in the Martian boxwork crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with liquid flowing through. The rover's science team will study whether microbes could have survived in that ancient environment.
Figure A shows the same image with a scale bar.
Curiosity was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. JPL manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information, visit:
science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity.
science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-reconnaissance-orbiter.
