NASA's Curiosity rover ran across the hardcover-shaped feature on April 15, which happened to be the 3,800th Martian day (or sol) of the long-running mission.
Much like librarians, geologists need to carefully read the clues around them. The strange shape of Mars rocks like this one are usually due to water trickling in the area billions of years ago, when the Red Planet was much wetter, NASA officials said.
Now the planet is much drier, and windier. "After eons of being sand-blasted by the wind, softer rock is carved away, and the harder materials are all that's left," officials with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Curiosity's mission, stated on Thursday (May 11) of the find.
Source: www.space.com
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