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Images released by Nasa show the Curiosity rover taking a scoop of dirt from the surface of Mars. The rover uses an X-ray imager to analyse the atomic structure of crystals discovered in the soil. Photo: AP

Curiosity discovers soil on Mars is like sand in Hawaii

Curiosity X-rays scoops of dirt to reveal crystals similar to those found in volcanic areas on earth

In the first inventory of minerals on another planet, Nasa's Mars rover Curiosity found soil that bears a striking resemblance to weathered, volcanic sand in Hawaii, scientists said.

The rover employs an X-ray imager to reveal the atomic structures of crystals in the Martian soil, the first time the technology has been used to analyse soil beyond earth.

"This was a 22-year journey and a magical moment," said the US space agency's David Blake, lead scientist for the rover's mineralogical instrument.

Curiosity found the Martian sand grains have crystals similar to basaltic soils found in volcanic regions on earth, like Hawaii.

Scientists plan to use the information about Mars' minerals to figure out if the planet most like earth in the solar system could have supported and preserved microbial life.

"The mineralogy of Mars' soil has been a source of conjecture until now," said Curiosity scientist David Vaniman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. "This interest isn't just academic. Soils on planets' surfaces are a reflection of surface exposure processes and history, with information on present and past climates."

Specifically, scientists want to understand what conditions existed to allow the particular minerals to form. The first Martian soil scoop is mineralogically similar to basaltic materials and comprised primarily of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine.

About half the soil is non-crystalline materials, like volcanic glass, that form from the breakdown of rocks. Several processes can account for this weathering, including interaction with water or oxygen, similar to how rust forms on iron-metal surfaces.

Brute force, such as sandstorms or meteorite impacts, could also account for the soil's weathered components, said Douglas Ming of Nasa's Johnson Space Centre in Houston.

The Curiosity rover landed inside a giant impact crater near the Martian equator in August for a two-year, US$2.5 billion mission, Nasa's first astrobiology expedition since the 1970s-era Viking probes. Next year, scientists plan to drive it over to a five-kilometre mound of sediment, named Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of the crater.

"We're hopeful that once we get into the truly ancient materials on Mount Sharp, we will find minerals that suggest there was a habitable environment of some kind there. We haven't had that happen yet, but we have a lot of time left," Blake said.

While X-ray diffraction has been around for a century, using the technology on Mars required years of work to scale down refrigerator-sized equipment into something that would fit into the space of a shoe box.

The miniaturised, low-power instrument is used in the mining, oil and gas industries and is being evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration to screen for counterfeit pharmaceuticals.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Mars soil 'just like sand in Hawaii'
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