Ancient Mars 'Surprisingly' Like Earth, NASA Rover Reveals
A photo shows the surface of Mars and manganese. The chemical was recently found in lakebed samples on the red planet.
Ancient Mars may have been surprisingly similar to planet Earth, a NASA rover has revealed.
Using the ChemCam instrument on NASA’s Curiosity rover, research teams from the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Space Science in New Mexico, and Applications group, made a strange discovery in the lakebed rocks of the red planet’s Gale Crater. This crater is likely part of a dry lake, and is estimated to be around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years old.
They found a high amount of the chemical element manganese. This chemical is vital for the human body to stay healthy and is commonly found in shallow waters on the Earth’s lake shores.
The ChemCam technology used in this study was developed by Los Alamos and French space agency CNES. It works by using a laser to create plasma on rock samples. It then collects the light, where it is able to determine the elemental composition within.
“The Gale lake environment, as revealed by these ancient rocks, gives us a window into a habitable environment that looks surprisingly similar to places on Earth today,” Nina Lanza, principal investigator for the ChemCam instrument said in a statement. “It’s remarkable to find such recognizable features on ancient Mars.”
So, the presence of this element on Mars suggests that it formed in a river, delta or near the shores of an ancient lake, the study authors report. It also adds to growing evidence that the planet could sustain life.
“It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn’t expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit,” Patrick Gasda, of the Los Alamos group and lead author on the study said in a statement.
“On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions.”
The rocks studied vary from sands, silts and muds, which are typically more porous. This allows groundwater to pass through more easily. So at first it was not clear how manganese developed in this material.
On Earth, the chemical develops through oxygen in the atmosphere. It enriches itself further with microbes, which use manganese as an energy source. This indicates that if life was indeed living on Mars at some point, this manganese would have been highly useful.
“On Mars, we don’t have evidence for life, and the mechanism to produce oxygen in Mars’ ancient atmosphere is unclear, so how the manganese oxide was formed and concentrated here is really puzzling. These findings point to larger processes occurring in the Martian atmosphere or surface water and shows that more work needs to be done to understand oxidation on Mars,” Gasda said.
These findings suggest that ancient Mars was not completely dissimilar to places on Earth.
The study is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
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