Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories say they have discovered Earth-like environments on Mars.
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico – Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories say they have discovered Earth-like environments on Mars.
The Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of Mars since 2015, when it landed in Gale Crater along the planet’s equator.
The goal of the mission is to find out what the planet’s surface is made of and whether it could support life.
“After we landed we found a lot of evidence of running water like rivers emptying into lakes. It appears that the lake rock that represents the lake has been there for a very long time in Gale Crater,” said Patrick Gasda, a research scientist at LANL.
Images sent back from the Curiosity spacecraft show the large field of manganese rocks.
Jasda said: “We can see that the rocks are layers, and they are all flat, and this is the characteristic of rocks formed in lakes. Moreover, these rocks are clay minerals or rocks that can only form in water.”
While that water is long gone, that doesn’t necessarily mean all of life is gone as well.
“All the observations we have so far indicate that if there are microbes on Mars like Earth, then it would be perfectly fine to live on Mars,” Gasda said.
Gasda published his findings in the Journal of Geophysical Research, detailing what his team observed while working on the Curiosity rover. They learned a lot from pictures.
“Every time we look at an image from Mars, we are the first to look at the image, and we can use our scientific expertise to try to understand what is going on,” Gasda said.
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