NASA’s Curiosity rover is traversing its way to Mount Sharp on the Martian surface, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to fully exploit the potential scientific discoveries all around on its way there. In fact, NASA’s just revealed that the rover’s discovered evidence of an old streambed. There’s been other evidence pointing to the previous existence of water on Mars, but Curiosity’s captured images of ancient gravels that formed due to a streambed, which has never been done before.
Even better than merely capturing images of the gravel, NASA scientists can extrapolate the speed and distance of a previous stream’s flow based on the size and shape of them. “From the size of gravels it carried,” says William Dietrich, Curiosity science co-investigator, “we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep.”
via GeekOSystem
