Curiosity rover spots field of giant honeycomb on Mars – but no giant space bees

Posisbly cracked mud, therefore more evidence Red Planet was once less horrible

NASA has shared new snaps captured by its Curiosity rover that show a large “field of honeycomb textures” on Mars.

Here’s the best of the images Curiosity captured. It shows the honeycomb field, each element of which is four to eight centimeters across.

NASA doesn’t know how the honeycomb formed, but The Register is willing to rule out space bees because Curiosity has seen this sort of thing before and scientists are pretty sure the patterns are the result of mud drying and cracking during some unknowably distant Martian event.

Curiosity spotted the polygonal features after starting its climb up a Martian valley that mission scientists have nicknamed “Valle Grande.” NASA’s post about the find says the rover has seen “small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.”

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