More than 6.5 operations on Mars, NASA has come up with a new way to take advantage of the Curiosity robot

In August 2012, NASA sent it to Mars, whose main task was to investigate the climate and geology at Mars.

For more than six years, NASA's self-propelled rover has done a very good job of sending valuable documents and images from the Red Planet. But recently NASA realized that Curiosity's capabilities were not just that.

We still have another way to take advantage of it, and that is to measure gravity at places where robots pass . This is also the first time experts can accurately calculate the density of rock under the wheel of Curiosity.

"Curiosity recently had a new mission after a 6.5-year mission," said Kevin Lewis, a geologist from Johns Hopkins University.

The robot has a new mission after a length of 6.5 years.

"It gives us new information about the surface of Mars - information that is different from its inherent mission."

This is the first time NASA has conducted gravity measurements on another planet with Earth. However, considering the scope of outer space, 1972 Apollo 17 astronauts tried to measure gravity on the Moon.

It is worth mentioning that Curiosity is not equipped with gravitation. In return, this robot possesses a very sensitive accelerometer, located in its positioning system. And the next attraction is actually an accelerometer, because it measures the acceleration of gravity.

Experts then realized that just by changing the function of this accelerometer, we could actually calculate the gravitational force on Mars. And if so, over the past six years, Curiosity has made that measurement hundreds of times already at each location where it stopped.

In total, we have data at more than 700 locations at Gale Crater and . Experts then calculated the gravitational acceleration of the Red planet, and corrected both the shaft and temperature data.

The density of rock in Gale crater is not as thick as we thought.

Not to mention, they also calculated the density of rock on the surface of this planet."We can measure the density of Gale materials in the crater. And the result is that the density of the rock here is not as thick as we thought," said Travis Gabriel, a geological expert.

What does the soil density mean?

When the density of rock was confirmed to be thinner than previous data, this meant that NASA had mistaken about the formation process of some Martian mountains, namely Sharp Mountain. More precisely, the theory of that mountain was wrong.

Gale and Mount M. Crater Crater.

Previous theories suggest that the Gale crater was once full of sediment, after which severe weather conditions on Mars eroded and created a giant mountain - the Sharp mountain itself. But if so, the sediment layers must be compressed to the lower layer, meaning the density must be higher. Over here, the evidence shows the opposite.

"Sharp's low-lying soil has a very high level of deflection. According to the theory, this soil layer should be thicker and harder," Lewis said.

As for the fact that the soil layer at the foot of Sharp Mountain is more porous, it is likely that sediment layers are distributed by the wind and padded high, instead of compressed downwards.

"There are many questions about the geological formation of Sharp Mountain, but this study has brought about an important piece" - quoted Ashwin Vasavada, expert of Curiosity project.

The study is published in the journal Science.