Mars used to have lakes and streams, NASA
NASA confirmed that Gale Crater in Mars, used to have lakes and streams. The Curiosity Rover landed in Gale Crater last 2012. NASA's scientists first hypothesized that the crater once has a massive lake according to the rover's data. A paper published on October 9, 2015 in the journal Science provides more evidence that Mars used to be a home of ancient bodies of water. In September 2014, Curiosity Rover reached Aeolis Mons or a three-mile-high mountain nicknamed "Mount Sharp" in honor of the late geologist Robert Sharp.
"Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago, delivering sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp," said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, and co-author of the new Science article in a press release.
The researchers found three different rocky sediments that are evidence that there is flowing water. The first sediment is gravel that is often found in the bottom of stream beds. The second is sandstone and last is fine, silty rock that could be mud formed at the bottom of water.
"During the traverse of Gale, we have noticed patterns in the geology where we saw evidence of ancient fast-moving streams with coarser gravel, as well as places where streams appear to have emptied out into bodies of standing water. The prediction was that we should start seeing water-deposited, fine-grained rocks closer to Mount Sharp. Now that we've arrived, we're seeing finely laminated mudstones in abundance that looks like lake deposits." Vasvada said.
"It's clear that the Mars of billions of years ago more closely resembled Earth than it does today. Our challenge is to figure out how this more clement Mars was even possible and what happened to that wetter Mars." said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. For the water to have existed Mars must have had a thicker atmosphere and a warmer climate.
"There are still many kilometers of Mars history to explore," said Woody Fischer, professor of geobiology at Caltech and coauthor of the paper. "The strata will reveal Gale's early history, its story. We know there are rocks that were deposited underwater, in the lake. What is the chemistry of these rocks? That lake represented an interface between the water and the atmosphere, and should tell us important things about the environment of the time."
