NASA’s curiosity has been looking into an interesting part of Mount Sharp for the past 10 months. It shows signs of a violent watery past, and chemical tests have shown that it contains many minerals, such as sulfates. The rover also broke open a rock by accident as it moved around. And inside it were crystals of pure sulfur.

On Mars, people had never seen pure sulfur before. Even though sulfates contain sulfur, there isn’t a clear link between how those molecules form and how the pure crystals form. Crystals of elemental sulfur can only form in a few different situations. And none of those were thought to happen in this area.

To find a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the middle of the desert, said Ashwin Vasavada, the project scientist for Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “That thing shouldn’t be there, so we need to explain it.” It’s so exciting to find strange and unexpected things when exploring other planets.

The Gediz Vallis channel is the name of the area that Curiosity is exploring. A groove across Mount Sharp has been interesting for a long time, even before the rover started climbing it in 2014. From space, scientists could see that there were big piles of debris. But it wasn’t clear what caused them. Was it landslides or floodwaters from a long time ago that moved the stuff along the channel?

The answer has been found through curiosity. Some column A and some column B. Water-moved rocks are smoother and rounder. Sharp and angular are those that dry avalanches moved. There are both kinds of rocks in the mounds.

“This was not a quiet time on Mars,” said Becky Williams, a scientist from Tucson, Arizona, who works for the Planetary Science Institute and is the deputy principal investigator of Mastcam on Curiosity. “There was a lot of exciting stuff going on here.” We expect a number of different flows to happen down the channel, such as strong floods and flows with lots of rocks.

Curiosity is still looking into the Gediz Valley. When the ball rolls around and shows off its unique features, we can get very excited about the science being done here.

To figure out if there is life in other parts of the universe, we start with Earth, where there is life now. Finding another Earth is a good way to find aliens. We have found more than 5,000 exoplanets, but we haven’t found Earth’s twin yet. This could change soon, though. Here comes the PLATO mission from the European Space Agency (ESA).

What does PLATO stand for? It stands for PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars. Its goal is very clear. It will look for nearby stars like the Sun that might have habitable worlds like Earth.

“One of the main goals is to find a way to compare Earth and the Sun.” The size of Earth is in the habitable zone of a star like the Sun. “We want to find it around a star that’s bright enough that we can really figure out how heavy it is and how big it is,” Dr. David Brown from the University of Warwick told IFLScience. “If you like, that’s our main goal.”

The telescope is not only an observatory for looking for planets, but it is also an observatory for collecting data on a huge number of stars. The mission team thinks that the fact that it can do both is a key part of why this telescope will be so important.

“You have two parts of the mission.” One is exoplanets, and the other is the stars. “From a scientific point of view, I think it’s pretty cool that these two parts are working together to make the best science we can,” Dr. Brown said.

One of the secondary goals is to make a list of all the planets that are Earth-like and all the star systems that are out there. One more goal is to find other solar systems that are like ours. Even though we don’t know for sure if our little part of the universe is truly unique, it does seem to be different from everything else.

Dr. Brown told IFLScience, “We have a bunch of other scientific goals.” “Really, how well do we know how planetary systems change and grow over time?” Planetary systems are something we’re trying to understand as a whole, not just one planet at a time.

PLATO is different in more ways than just the goals. It is not just one telescope. In fact, it’s made up of 26 different ones. Two of the cameras are fast, and the other 24 are normal cameras set up in groups of six with a small gap between them. This makes the telescope work better, has a wider field of view, and lets you quickly rule out false positives.

It can be hard to tell which of the things you find when you transit exoplanets are real and which ones are not. With the help of several telescopes, we were able to block out some of the mimics that we would have seen otherwise. “Plus, it looks pretty cool,” Dr. Brown said with excitement. “This big square with all of these telescopes pointing at you looks really cool!”

This week, Dr. Brown gave an update on PLATO at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull. The telescope is being put together and has recently passed important tests. There are no changes to the planned launch date for December 2026. An Ariane 6 rocket, the same kind that made its first launch last week, will take off from French Guiana.

Building a permanent base on the Moon out of things found there is one of the main goals for future exploration. Scientists have attempted to make bricks using a variety of materials, including blood and potatoes. Researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA) have just tried out a new method. They 3D-printed LEGO bricks from stuff that was formed in space billions of years ago. They work just like regular LEGO bricks, which means that stepping on one would still hurt.

Regolith, which is soil made of sharp rocks, covers the moon’s surface. It was formed by meteor impacts and charged particles from the sun and other places over billions of years. We don’t have that on Earth, but we can make something that looks like it by mixing it with polylactide, a bio-based polymer that breaks down naturally.

The mix was more realistic because it had a third ingredient. They ground up a meteorite that fell in North Africa in 2000 and added it to the mix. Meteorite dust is the closest thing to regolith that we have on Earth. The end result is a strong brick that looks great in space gray.

Even though the 3D printing process adds flaws that regular bricks don’t have, the space LEGO bricks work the same way as regular ones and click together. But the experiment does show that it is possible to make structures from Moon materials that can fit together. This gives us a lot of options when we think about building bases for a possible future mission.

“No one has ever built something on the Moon, so it was fun to be able to try out different designs and building methods with our space bricks.” ESA Science Officer Aidan Cowley said in a statement, “It was fun and helpful for learning about the limits of these techniques from a scientific point of view.”

“I love creative building, and so did my team. We thought it would be fun to see if space dust could be shaped into a brick like a LEGO brick so we could try out different ways to build.” “It’s amazing, and the bricks may look a little rougher than usual, but the clutch power still works, so we can play with and test our designs,” Cowley said in a second statement.

The test will now be used to get younger people interested in science and engineering. The bricks will be on display at many LEGO stores in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia until September 20.

“Everyone knows that scientists and engineers in the real world sometimes use LEGO bricks to test their ideas. An ESA official, Emmet Fletcher, said, “ESA’s space bricks are a great way to get young people interested in space science and show them that play and imagination are also important in space science.”