NASA's Curiosity rover accidentally drove over and crushed a rock on Mars on May 30, 2024, exposing sulfur crystals that had never before been observed on the planet.
The discovery was unplanned. Curiosity was not executing a scientific maneuver when its wheels broke open the rock, NASA said. The find came about purely by chance.
In the days that followed, Curiosity turned a camera mounted on its robotic arm toward the fragments and photographed them at close range. The images, according to NASA, show pieces of sulfur crystals inside what had been an intact rock.