NASA’s Curiosity rover may encounter seemingly insurmountable obstacles during its journey to Mars. One of these obstacles is the Gediz Vallis Ridge (named after the Gediz River), which is called the “Bermuda Triangle” of Mars. Now Curiosity is preparing to make another attempt to overcome this challenging area.
Gediz Vallis is a piece where water once flowed in the Mount Sharp region of Mars. As such, it contains rocks from much higher up the mountain that the rover would otherwise not be able to reach. Curiosity tried to reach this point three times and failed. The first of these was in 2020, during his first arduous ascent to the Greenheugh Pediment; the second was in an attempt last year that was thwarted by “crocodile-back” ridges; the third was done with climbing work from the Marker Band Valley.
“The Gediz Vallis Ridge has been a long-term and sometimes seemingly impossible goal of the Curiosity Rover mission,” the vehicle’s latest mission update states.
As a result, the hard-to-reach area of the Red Planet has been dubbed Mount Sharp’s “Bermuda Triangle” by the team, in reference to the region of the North Atlantic Ocean where ships, planes and people have allegedly disappeared mysteriously.
According to the mission update, Curiosity is approaching the ridge and is just meters away from reaching out and making contact with the tread material.
Ooh, more rocks!
I'm working my way uphill toward Gediz Vallis Ridge, a new area of interest for my team. There's so much variety in these rocks – which means there's so much to learn. pic.twitter.com/cK4B20vgsn
— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 17, 2023
As you can imagine when facing such a formidable opponent, getting to this point hasn’t been easy, as the rocky terrain has created unreliable ground for Curiosity’s wheels. However, with a little luck, the rover will soon reach its destination, where it will perform imaging to document the location’s geology, followed by atmospheric observations, including dust measurement and sky surveys.
The mission update continues, “Assuming our drive was successful and we didn’t leave our wheels on the boulders of this steep slope, we hope with [this] plan that Curiosity can finally perform contact science on the various [Gediz Vallis] Ridge rocks cluster.”
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