The Mars Curiosity Rover Finds Evidence of Ancient Water in a Surprising Spot

There’s a very good reason NASA planners chose Mars’s Gale Crater as the landing site for the Curiosity Rover when it touched down on the Red Planet in the summer of 2012. Gale Crater was once Gale Lake, a brimming body of water that could have given rise to microbial life in the first billion years of Martian history, before the planet lost most of its atmosphere and water to space. If you want to find clues to exobiology, a place like Gale is where to start looking. Now, as NASA reports, Gale Crater is proving itself to be an even more fertile spelunking spot than once believed. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] While researchers have long known of the crater’s watery past, no one was ever certain of the depth of the water, or how long it persisted before the great drying began. To find that out, Curiosity has, since 2014, been painstakingly climbing Gale Crater’s Mount Sharp, a 5-km (3 mi.) tall peak in the center of the crater that serves as something of a geological history book. Mt. Sharp is made up of visible layers, with the oldest at the bottom, progressing to younger and younger layers as the mountain ascends. To drive up Mt. Sharp is to drive from Mars’s past, forward in time. That fact serves as something of a marker for how long water was present on the planet, with the lowest parts of the mountain rich in hydrated salts like magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate that are markers of a wet enviro...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news