Apart from presenting a puzzle about the history of the region where Curiosity is working, the recent findings on Mount Sharp have intriguing threads linked to what an earlier NASA rover, Spirit, found halfway around Mars. Alkaline or neutral water could bring in dissolved silica that would be deposited from the solution. Water that is acidic would tend to carry other ingredients away and leave silica behind. If we can determine which happened, we'll learn more about other conditions in those ancient wet environments." "Either of those processes involve water. You can boost the concentration of silica either by leaching away other ingredients while leaving the silica behind, or by bringing in silica from somewhere else," said Albert Yen, a Curiosity science team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "These high-silica compositions are a puzzle. It is a rock-forming chemical combining the elements silicon and oxygen, commonly seen on Earth as quartz, but also in many other minerals. Silica makes up nine-tenths of the composition of some of the rocks. NASA's Curiosity rover has found much higher concentrations of silica at some sites it has investigated in the past seven months than anywhere else it has visited since landing on Mars 40 months ago. The sleuths: a savvy band of Earthbound researchers whose agent on Mars is NASA's laser-flashing, one-armed mobile laboratory, Curiosity. In this case, the scene is a mountain on Mars. In detective stories, as the plot thickens, an unexpected clue often delivers more questions than answers.
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