NASA’s Curiosity rover found a ‘sea of polygons’ on Mars

美国国家航空航天局（NASA）的“好奇号”火星车在火星上发现了“多边形之海”

The latest discovery from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is a field of honeycomb-shaped polygons covering a Martian valley called Valle Grande. As Gizmodo reports, Curiosity has snapped pictures of the unusual terrain texture before, called polygonal fractures, each about 1.5 to 3 inches wide, but NASA says it’s previously only found them in small patches, “nothing on the scale discovered in Valle Grande.”

NASA“好奇号”火星车的最新发现是一片覆盖在名为“Valle Grande”火星山谷中的蜂窝状多边形区域。据 Gizmodo 报道，“好奇号”此前曾拍摄过这种被称为“多边形裂缝”的独特地形纹理，每个裂缝宽约 1.5 到 3 英寸（约 3.8 到 7.6 厘米），但 NASA 表示，此前仅在小范围内发现过它们，“规模远不及在 Valle Grande 发现的程度。”

Curiosity captured a 360-degree panorama of the “sea of polygons” on June 19th and 20th (Martian sols 4,930 and 4,931) that shows the texture spreading out in all directions. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada says the Curiosity team “measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”

“好奇号”于 6 月 19 日和 20 日（火星日第 4930 和 4931 天）拍摄了一张“多边形之海”的 360 度全景图，显示这种纹理向四面八方延伸。项目科学家阿什温·瓦萨瓦达（Ashwin Vasavada）表示，“好奇号”团队“仔细测量了它们的形状和化学成分，并希望数据中能提供关于这些地貌如何形成的线索。”

NASA says billions of years ago, “lakes and streams dappled the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been ascending since 2014.” This terrain could also indicate there was once water in Valle Grande, based on previous polygon patches:

NASA 表示，数十亿年前，“湖泊和溪流点缀在夏普山（Mount Sharp）的低矮山麓上，这是一座 3 英里（5 公里）高的山峰，‘好奇号’自 2014 年以来一直在攀登。”根据此前发现的多边形斑块推断，这种地形也可能表明 Valle Grande 曾经存在过水：

Some of the polygons that the mission has spotted in the past clearly formed as mud cracks, though a variety of processes can contribute to their honeycomb textures, including cycles of warm and cold temperatures or compression that squeezed water out of the sediment when the surface was buried.

该任务过去发现的一些多边形显然是作为泥裂形成的，尽管多种过程都可能导致其呈现蜂窝状纹理，包括冷热温度循环，或者当表面被掩埋时，沉积物受压挤出水分的过程。