[Rockhounds] NASA's Curiosity rover discovers a surprise in a Martian rock

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars
rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the
Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals.

Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with
sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur
<https://phys.org/tags/sulfur/> and forms as water evaporates. But where
past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals—in other words, a mix of
sulfur and other materials—the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made
of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the
elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.

While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of
hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a
narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the
history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it—an entire field
of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed.

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-nasa-curiosity-rover-martian.html