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Curiosity rover celebrates its 7th birthday by investigating a clay mystery

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Geekz Snow
Curiosity rover celebrates its 7th birthday by investigating a clay mystery

The Mars rover Curiosity just celebrated its seventh birthday, having been exploring Mars for seven years since it landed on August 6, 2012.

And it has been busy as ever, recently drilling its 22nd hole in the Martian rock.

Curiosity is halfway along its path through a region called the “clay-bearing unit” because the area has a high level of clay minerals.

Clay minerals are of particular interest to scientists because they form in the presence of water, suggesting that there used to be water in this location thousands of years ago.

The clay-bearing unit is located on one slope of Mount Sharp, a large mountain located inside the Gale Crater.

“This area is one of the reasons we came to Gale Crater,” Kristen Bennett of the U.S. Geological Survey, one of the co-leads for Curiosity’s clay-unit campaign, said in a statement.

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