NASA's Curiosity rover has been climbing a Martian valley nicknamed Valle Grande and sent back images on June 19 and 20 that stopped the mission science team cold, a sea of honeycomb-like polygonal fractures spreading in all directions as far as the rover's cameras could see, covering the landscape and wrapping around the sides of a nearby 20-foot butte nicknamed Miraflores.
Each polygon measures roughly 1.5 to 3 inches across.
"We've seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity's eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away," said the mission's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed."
Curiosity has spotted small patches of these polygonal fractures before, they often form as mud cracks when wet sediment dries out, though cycles of temperature change or compression squeezing water from buried sediment can also produce them.
The discovery in Valle Grande is different entirely in scale. Nothing like this field of honeycombs has been seen on the mission before.
Curiosity landed on Mars on August 5, 2012, 14 years ago. It has spent the years since climbing Mount Sharp, a three-mile-tall mountain, uncovering evidence that ancient Mars had water, chemistry and nutrients capable of supporting microbial life.
The honeycombs are the latest mystery in a planet that keeps producing them.