NASA’s Opportunity Rover continues to surprise and excite, and recently there has been a new discovery of striped rocks on Mars which would not look at all out of place in Hawaii. This new revelation came just shortly before Opportunity’s 5,000th day in operation on the Red Planet and occurred when the rover cast a glance at the channel of Perseverance Valley which is located in the Endeavor Crater.

Ray Arvidson, who is the deputy principal investigator for NASA’s Opportunity Rover, excitingly described the newest find of the oddly striped rocks, and related just how different the area was to others that Opportunity had previously explored, as the International Business Times reports.

“We already knew it was unlike any place any Mars rover has seen before, even if we don’t yet know how it formed, and now we’re seeing surfaces that look like stone stripes.”

On NASA’s official website, they explain that the most recent images obtained by the rover show rocks that very strongly resemble ones normally placed on mountainous regions of Earth. The unique patterns embedded in these rocks are formed after the soil in which they are placed has gone through numerous cycles of first freezing and then thawing out completely.

Nasa’s Opportunity rover captures ‘surprising’ Earth-like rock features on Mars – International Business Times UK https://t.co/2TwVk4iStr — Press Science (@PressSci) February 17, 2018

Opportunity has been exploring Mars since it first landed on the Red Planet in 2004 and is now conducting an in-depth survey of Perseverance Valley. NASA has said that they are currently not certain about how this valley was first created and are investigating results from the rover which suggest wind, ice, or water may have played a part.

As far as the mysterious stripes found on these rocks on Mars, scientists are currently open to many different possibilities and aren’t certain yet whether the processes which created them would have occurred in the far distant past of Mars or more recently.

Ray Arvidson has suggested, however, that it is perfectly feasible that these special rocks could have come from a time when Mars had snow in the area and the soil became frozen and then thawed out again, much like similar rocks found here on Earth.

“One possible explanation of these stripes is that they are relics from a time of greater obliquity when snow packs on the rim seasonally melted enough to moisten the soil, and then freeze-thaw cycles organized the small rocks into stripes. Gravitational downhill movement may be diffusing them so they don’t look as crisp as when they were fresh.”

Featured image credit: NASA AP Images

NASA will continue to examine data from the Opportunity Rover to figure out the answer to just how these mysterious and very Earth-like striped rocks were originally formed.