Tag Archives: Water on Mars

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An Ancient Asteroid Impact May Have Caused a Megatsunami on Mars

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The Viking 1 lander arrived on the Martian surface 46 years ago to investigate the planet. It dropped down into what was thought to be an ancient outflow channel. Now, a team of researchers believes they’ve found evidence of an ancient megatsunami that swept across the planet billions of years ago, less than 600 miles from where Viking landed.

In a new paper published today in Scientific Reports, a team identified a 68-mile-wide impact crater in Mars’ northern lowlands that they suspect is leftover from an asteroid strike in the planet’s ancient past.

“The simulation clearly shows that the megatsunami was enormous, with an initial height of approximately 250 meters, and highly turbulent,” said Alexis Rodriguez, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and lead author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “Furthermore, our modeling shows some radically different behavior of the megatsunami to what we are accustomed to imagining.”

Rodriguez’s team studied maps of the Martian surface and found the large crater, now named Pohl. Based on Pohl’s position on previously dated rocks, the team believes the crater is about 3.4 billion years old—an extraordinarily long time ago, shortly after the first signs of life we know of appeared on Earth.

According to the research team’s models, the asteroid impact could have been so intense that material from the seafloor may have dislodged and been carried in the water’s debris flows. Based on the size of the crater, the team believes the impacting asteroid could have been 1.86 miles wide or 6 miles wide, depending on the amount of ground resistance the asteroid encountered.

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The impact could have released between 500,000 megatons and 13 million megatons of TNT energy (for comparison, the Tsar Bomba nuclear test was about 57 megatons of TNT energy.)

“A clear next step is to propose a landing site to investigate these deposits in detail to understand the ocean’s evolution and potential habitability,” Rodriguez said. “First, we would need a detailed geologic mapping of the area to reconstruct the stratigraphy. Then, we need to connect the surface modification history to specific processes through numerical modeling and analog studies, including identifying possible mud volcanoes and glacier landforms.”

Both lines of investigation are noble pursuits, but it may be some time before a new Mars lander gets off the ground. NASA is always juggling missions, but its main planetary focus in the future is Venus. The DAVINCI+ and Veritas missions would see two spacecraft arrive at the second planet from the Sun at the turn of the decade.

There are no plans for a future Mars lander, besides the Mars Sample Return mission, which will retrieve the rock core samples currently being extracted by the Perseverance rover on the western edge of the planet’s Jezero Crater.

NASA is canceling and delaying missions as it deals with a budget crunch, so exactly when the agency could turn its attention to the Pohl crater is unclear. With the InSight lander on its last legs, we will soon lose one of our best interrogators of the Martian interior.

More: Stunning New View of Mars Shows Where Ancient Flowing Water Once Carved Its Surface

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The Water-Lakes-on-Mars Debate Just Got More Interesting

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This image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows ice sheets at Mars’ south pole.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/JHU

Scientists have been arguing for years about ambiguous radar scans of Mars’ south pole. Do they reveal underground lakes of liquid water? Or something else? Two new papers out this week have added even more intrigue to the controversy.

In 2018, a team of Italian scientists claimed to have discovered a subglacial lake near the Martian south pole using radar data from the Mars Express satellite. The discovery was met with skepticism, with other scientists suggesting alternatives like lumps of clay that could have produced the same reflection patterns. It’s a heady debate, because of water’s implications for life. While most scientists agree that Mars used to be very wet, the H2O it has left seems to be all ice.

The debate is reignited this week with new evidence from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor satellite that supports the liquid water hypothesis. The radar signals from the 2018 study pointed to a 12-mile-wide (20-kilometer) region around a mile beneath the surface, which the researchers interpreted as a subglacial lake or a patch of liquid water. In order to confirm that interpretation, a different team examined satellite data of the surface topography of the same region. Their analysis, published this week in Nature Astronomy, revealed a 6- to 15-mile (10-15 kilometer) undulation that’s made up of a depression and a corresponding raised area, which is similar to undulations found over subglacial lakes here on Earth.

The team then ran a computer simulation of ice flow that’s consistent with the conditions on Mars, and the simulations generated undulations of similar size and shape to those observed on Mars’ ice cap surface. The study suggests that there is indeed an accumulation of liquid water beneath the planet’s south polar ice cap. “The combination of the new topographic evidence, our computer model results, and the radar data make it much more likely that at least one area of subglacial liquid water exists on Mars today,” Neil Arnold, a researcher at Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

But a separate new paper suggests that the liquid water radar data was in fact a result of interaction between different geological layers on Mars, producing a reflection pattern that could have been misinterpreted as liquid water. That study, also published this week in Nature Astronomy, provides an alternative explanation to the 2018 finding. The team behind this study created a simulation of layers made up of four materials—atmosphere, water ice, carbon dioxide ice, and basalt—and measured the layers’ interaction with electromagnetic radiation as it passes through them.

They found that, depending on the thickness of the layers and how far apart they are, they produced similar reflections to the ones observed in the radar data of 2018. “On Earth, reflections that bright are often an indication of liquid water, even buried lakes like Lake Vostok [under the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet],” Dan Lalich, research associate with Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “But on Mars, the prevailing opinion was that it should be too cold for similar lakes to form.”

“None of the work we’ve done disproves the possible existence of liquid water down there,” Lalich added. “We just think the interference hypothesis is more consistent with other observations. I’m not sure anything short of a drill could prove either side of this debate definitively right or wrong.”

Temperatures on Mars can dip to around -220 degrees Fahrenheit (-140 degrees Celsius). Those frigid conditions comprise the main argument against any liquid water flowing on the Red Planet. But the researchers behind the latest pro-water study argue that geothermal heat from within the planet could be enough to keep the water in liquid form.

Water is a main ingredient for life on Earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean our sacred life juice would sprout lifeforms elsewhere in the universe. The debate over water does have implications for future crewed missions to Mars, though, especially if we ever want to set up a sustained presence there.

More: NASA Refines Its Strategy for Getting Humans to Mars

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New Map of Mars Shows Where It Was Once Covered in Water

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A map of hydrated mineral deposits on Mars. Green represents hydrated sulphates; red is hydrous clays; orange is carbonate salts; and blue is hydrated silica and aluminosilicate clays.

The history of water on Mars flows a lot deeper than scientists once believed. A new project has mapped hundreds of thousands of rock formations on the Red Planet that may have been altered by large amounts of water in the past.

Data from two Mars orbiters was used to create a detailed global map of mineral deposits on Mars, pinpointing where water may have once flowed across the planet. “I think we have collectively oversimplified Mars,” planetary scientist John Carter from the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris, and lead author of a paper published in the journal Icarus, said in a statement.

Observations from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter allowed researchers to create the map, a project that took a decade, according to the ESA. Before this work, scientists only knew of about 1,000 rock formations on Mars that contain hydrated minerals. But the new map reveals hundreds of thousands of such outcrops. “This work has now established that when you are studying the ancient terrains in detail, not seeing these minerals is actually the oddity,” said Carter.

This image shows hydrated minerals at Jezero Crater (the larger red and orange area at upper left) and Gale Crater (small green circle at middle right). Both craters have been explored by robotic rovers.
Image: ESA/Mars Express (OMEGA) and NASA/Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (CRISM)

Mars is a dry planet today, but various evidence suggests it once had flowing water across its surface. Aqueous minerals can be found in rocks that were chemically altered by water in the past, and typically turned into clays and salts. When small amounts of water interact with the rocks, they remain relatively unchanged and retain the same minerals found in the original volcanic rocks. But if large amounts of water interact with the rocks, then soluble elements are dissolved by the water, leaving behind more aluminum-rich clays.

The new findings suggest that water played a much bigger role in shaping Mars’ geology over the course of its history. However, it’s still not clear whether the presence of water was consistent over time or if there was an ebb and flow of water on Mars over shorter periods in its early history. “The evolution from lots of water to no water is not as clear cut as we thought, the water didn’t just stop overnight,” said Carter. “We see a huge diversity of geological contexts, so that no one process or simple timeline can explain the evolution of the mineralogy of Mars.”

Although the map doesn’t provide all the answers, it does point to places where more clues can be found. The areas identified here will be excellent candidate landing sites for future missions to Mars; some of them may even still have water ice buried beneath the surface.

More: Mars Is Hiding Its ‘Lost’ Water Beneath the Surface, New Research Suggests

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Mars Spacecraft Finally Upgrading From Windows 98 Era Software

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An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft which launched in 2003.
Illustration: ESA

The days of dial-up internet, AOL Instant Messenger, and Myspace may be over on Earth, but on Mars, the early years of the internet still live on. A Martian spacecraft has been running on software designed more than 20 years ago in a proprietary environment based on Microsoft Windows 98, and is long overdue for an upgrade.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is updating its Mars Express orbiter’s MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ioniospheric Sounding) software, 19 years after the spacecraft launched. The MARSIS instrument, the first radar sounder to orbit another planet, aided in the discovery of evidence for water on Mars in 2018. MARSIS sends low-frequency radio waves towards the planet using a huge, 131 foot long (40 meters) antenna, as the Mars Express spacecraft orbits around Mars.

The MARSIS does all of that using highly outdated software that hasn’t been updated since the spacecraft launched in June 2003. The software was designed in an environment based on Windows 98, which doesn’t work with the modern-day internet unless you jump through a lot of hoops. “After decades of fruitful science and having gained a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to push the instrument’s performance beyond some of the limitations required back when the mission began,” Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS deputy principal investigator, who led the development of the upgrade, said in a statement.

The new software was designed by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, which operates the spacecraft. The team behind the new software implemented a number of upgrades that would improve the instrument’s ability to send and receive signals, as well as its on-board data processing “to increase the amount and quality of science data sent to Earth,” according to ESA.

“Previously, to study the most important features on Mars, and to study its moon Phobos at all, we relied on a complex technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and filled up the instrument’s on-board memory very quickly,” Cicchetti said. “By discarding data that we don’t need, the new software allows us to switch MARSIS on for five times as long and explore a much larger area with each pass.”

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The new software will be used to study regions near the south pole on Mars, where signs of liquid water on the Red Planet were previously detected in lower-resolution data. With MARSIS ditching its Windows 98 era software, it will be able to examine those regions much quicker, using high resolution data. Figuring out whether Mars had liquid water is crucial to knowing whether the planet was ever habitable during its early history, and if it could have possibly hosted some form of life.

Mars Express has been hard at work for the past 19 years, with the spacecraft’s mission being extended seven times so far. Although it is currently ESA’s lowest-cost mission, Mars Express has been delivering valuable data on Mars, and its moon Phobos. And with the new software update, the team behind the spacecraft is expecting greater things from this retro orbiter. “It really is like having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express almost 20 years after launch,” Cicchetti said.

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Rolls Past Evidence of Ancient Water

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For the past 10 years, the Curiosity rover has traveled across the Martian terrain, looking for clues to the planet’s potentially habitable past. Recently, the car-sized robot drove through a transition zone, going from an area that may have once hosted lakes on the surface to one that signifies drier conditions for the Red Planet.

NASA’s Curiosity rover took note of the change in scenery higher up on a Martian mountaintop, which the robot has been climbing since 2014. The 3.4-mile-tall (5-kilometer) Mount Sharp is the central peak in Mars’ Gale Crater, which the rover is exploring for signs of ancient water. At the base of Mount Sharp, Curiosity collected evidence for clay minerals that formed from lakes and streams that once ran through Gale Crater. But higher up on the mountain, those streams had seemingly dried up into trickles and sand dunes, which had formed above the lake sediments.

This so-called transition zone is marked by a shift from a clay-rich region to one filled with the salty mineral sulfate, and could potentially signify a major shift in Mars’ climate that took place billions of years ago. The higher up Curiosity goes on Mount Sharp, it detects less clay, and more sulfate. Curiosity will soon start drilling the last rock sample collected in the transition zone in hopes of learning more about the change in the mineral composition of the rocks in that area.

“We no longer see the lake deposits that we saw for years lower on Mount Sharp,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA news release. “Instead, we see lots of evidence of drier climates, like dry dunes that occasionally had streams running around them. That’s a big change from the lakes that persisted for perhaps millions of years before.”

The Curiosity rover captured this panorama of a sulfate-bearing region on Mars.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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The area that Curiosity is currently exploring also boasts hills that may have formed in dry conditions, and those hills are marked by large, wind-swept sand dunes that likely hardened into rock over time, according to NASA. Meanwhile, the rover also found evidence of sediments that were carried over by streams of water through the sand dunes. Those sediments now appear as stacked layers of flaky-looking rocks.

Although Mars is a desolate, dry planet today, scientists believe that it may have once been habitable, hosting lakes and other bodies of water on its surface. Early on in its history, Mars somehow lost some of its atmosphere, and its water dried up. Various robotic missions, from NASA and other space agencies, have worked to piece together this ancient history. A newer Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the planet in February 2021 and has been searching for microfossils—preserved evidence of ancient microbial life.

As it inches closer to its 10-year anniversary on Mars, Curiosity has started to show some signs of aging. On June 7, Curiosity went into the dreaded safe mode when a temperature reading showed warmer temperatures than usual, according to NASA. The rover was back in action two days later, but NASA engineers are still looking into the cause of the issue, hoping that it won’t affect the rover’s operations as it climbs to the top of a new era of Martian history.

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Scientists Just Found a ‘Significant’ Volume of Water Inside Mars’ Grand Canyon

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The Red Planet is hiding an appealing secret.

Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars: “significant amounts of water” are hiding inside the Red Planet’s Valles Marineris, its version of our grand canyon system, according to a recent press release from the European Space Agency (ESA).

And up to 40% of material near the surface of the canyon could be water molecules.

Mars’ Valles Marineris canyon system is hiding water

The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Signs of water were picked up by the orbiter’s Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which is designed to survey the Red Planet’s landscape and map the presence and concentration of hydrogen hiding in Mars’ soil. It works like this: while high-energy cosmic rays plunge into the surface, the soil emits neutrons. And wet soil emits fewer neutrons than dry soil, which enables scientists to analyze and assess the water content of soil, hidden beneath its ancient surface. “FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water,” said Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science’s lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, in the ESA press release.

Scientists have already discovered water on Mars, but most earlier discoveries detected the substance crucial to life as we know it near the poles of the Red Planet, subsisting as ice. Only very small pockets of water had shown up at lower latitudes, which was a big downer because future astronauts on Mars will need a lot of water, and there are better prospects for settling the planet at lower latitudes. But now, with what seems like a comparative abundance of water in Valles Marineris, we’ve taken a major step toward establishing a reliable source of water on the closest alien world.

Mars’ canyon water could be liquid, ice, or a messy mix

“The reservoir is large, not too deep below ground, & could be easily exploitable for future explorers,” read a tweet on the announcement from ExoMars. That sounds basically great! But it’s too soon for Musk to pack up his bags and fly to the site, since much work is left to be done. A study accompanying the announcement, published in the journal Icarus, shows that neutron detection doesn’t distinguish between ice and water molecules. This means geochemists need to enter the scientific fray to reveal more details. But several features of the canyon, including its topology, have led the researchers to speculate that the water is probably in solid form (ice). But it could also be a mixture of solid and liquid.

“We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water — far more water than we expected,” said Alexey Malakhov, co-author of the study, in the ESA release. “This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.” So while we don’t yet know the specific form of water is lying under Mars’ vast system of canyons, the first human mission to Mars may consider exploring this area a major priority.

This was a breaking story and was regularly updated as new information became available.



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Underground ‘Lakes’ on Mars May Just Be Big Globs of Clay

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Recent hubbub about subsurface lakes detected on Mars has a new twist, as new research argues that the underground structures aren’t lakes at all. The researchers behind the study say that, rather than liquid water, the Martian south pole contains smectites, a class of clays that have been misinterpreted in the data.

Water on Mars is interesting to planetary scientists and astrobiologists because of its importance to life. The planet held water in its ancient history, like in the dried-up lakebed currently being explored by the Perseverance rover, but many have held out hope that liquid water still exists in significant amounts on the Red Planet. Some research had identified what appeared to be subsurface lakes, but now a paper published this month in the Geophysical Research Letters argues the conditions around the south pole aren’t right for liquid water and that smectites are a more likely culprit for signals in the radar data.

“I really don’t believe that the lake idea holds water, so an alternative was needed … smectites are abundant on Mars and heavily studied by spectroscopists, but they’ve been mostly neglected by the radar community. My hope is that we consider them more fully in the future and even revisit some of our previous work in light of these new results,” said Isaac Smith, a planetary scientist at York University and lead author of the new paper, in an email.

The data in question is from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) onboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. The radar sounding equipment detected very bright regions that indicated a subsurface substance with greater electrical conductivity than Martian rock or ice, both of which are abundant in the planet’s south pole. Some researchers believed it was evidence of water below the frozen surface; others felt the conditions weren’t right.

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The new research follows up on another paper published in the Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month, which identified a larger number of these subsurface bright spots than previously found. This finding indicated that the south pole could be peppered with subsurface lakes; as study co-author and research scientist at NASA Jeffrey Plaut put it in a NASA press release at the time, “Either liquid water is common beneath Mars’ south pole or these signals are indicative of something else.” The recent paper suggests the latter.

Aditya Khuller, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and that paper’s other author, said in an email that the radar-bright spots “could actually be regions containing clays or similar materials that are causing the bright reflections previously interpreted to be indicative of a liquid water component … The work by Smith et al. (2021) provides experimental and theoretical framework in support of this scenario.”

There were immediately two problems with the idea that the subsurface structures could be liquid water lakes, as the new paper discussed. The first problem was salt: It lowers the melting point of water, but a lot more salt than is expected in Mars would be needed in the south pole to help melt the ice. The second problem was heat. Mars is very cold; temperatures average -81° Fahrenheit, well below the freezing point of water.

A 2019 paper by a different team posited that local heat anomalies would be necessary to warm up Martian ice enough to form water in the area, with magmatism being the most likely answer if water did indeed lie below the pole. Michael Sori, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who authored that paper and is unaffiliated with the new one, said in an email that “one thing that would be nice to see in the future is for their lab experiments to be performed at cooler temperatures. They performed the experiments at 230 K [-46°F], but as the authors admit, this temperature is probably much too warm for the bottom of the [south pole’s layered] ice.”

“Ultimately, I don’t think the liquid water hypothesis has been completely ‘disproven,’ but these authors and others in the community have nicely shown that there are possible alternative explanations that need to be taken very seriously,” Sori added.

The proof will be in the pudding (those bright areas around the south pole), but unfortunately we don’t have instruments that can dip into them right now. The Mars Express orbiter has been collecting data from above for nearly 20 years, but we may require more direct examination to know for sure what underground chemistry is going on.

“I would never rule out liquids in the Martian subsurface, but the MARSIS instrument was sent to find aquifers, and this was the best candidate in 18 years,” Smith said. “Everyone would love to find liquid water, but unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to find any with current instrumentation.”

More: If Mars Had Water, Where Did It Go?

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Supersalty Water Could’ve Erased Some Evidence of Life on Mars

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The Martian landscape near where Curiosity took the rock samples in 2019.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Rocks on Mars preserve a record of the planet’s ancient past, but a surprising discovery made by NASA’s Curiosity rover shows some patches of Martian rock have had their histories completely erased.

The primary purpose of NASA’s Curiosity mission is to evaluate the prior potential for habitability on Mars, while the newly arrived Perseverance mission aims to find actual remnants or signs of prior life. To that end, Curiosity has been investigating sedimentary rocks in Gale crater, which are filled with clay minerals. Clay is an important marker of habitability, as it suggests the past presence of liquid water—a key ingredient for life.

Using its Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, also known as CheMin, the six-wheeled rover has been analyzing drill samples of sedimentary layers along the lower reaches of Mount Sharp. In 2019, a fortuitous pathway from Vera Rubin ridge to Glen Torridon made it possible for Curiosity to examine a mudstone layer that formed in a Martian lake some 3.5 billion years ago.

Sedimentary rock at the site of a former lake in Gale crater.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The rover took samples from two areas located less than 1,310 feet (400 meters) apart. Research published today in Science describes unexpected differences in these two areas, as one patch featured only half of the expected amount of clay minerals. Instead, these ancient mudstones were packed with iron oxides, which, interestingly enough, is the stuff that gives Mars its iconic red hue.

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The mudstone from both patches dates back to the same time and place, so they should contain similar amounts of clay minerals. This surprising observation required the researchers, led by Tom Bristow from NASA’s Ames Research Center, to conjure an explanation for the missing clay. Indeed, ancient rocks are known for being repositories of history, but as the new research shows, natural geological processes can undo this record.

To explain what happened, the team posited a scenario in which water leaked down into the clay from a sulfate deposit located directly above. The supersalty brines seeped through grains of sand at the bottom of the former lake and, by doing so, forever changed the mineral-rich layers below.

Cracks in this Martian rock, called “Old Soaker,” likely formed from the drying of a mud layer.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

“We used to think that once these layers of clay minerals formed at the bottom of the lake in Gale Crater, they stayed that way, preserving the moment in time they formed for billions of years,” Bristow explained in a NASA statement. “But later brines broke down these clay minerals in some places—essentially resetting the rock record.”

In an email, Bristow said the new research adds to the steadily emerging picture of ancient Martian habitability.

“It backs up previous evidence that showed fluids continued to move through Gale crater rocks long after they were deposited,” he explained. “It also shows that there were geochemical gradients—some parts of the rocks were affected more than others and fluid chemistry changed,” said Bristow, adding that biological organisms “can use geochemical gradients to capture energy.”

This process wasn’t uniform across the bottom of the former lake, as it happened after the lake lost its liquid water, according to the research. Groundwater in Gale crater continued to flow—and also transport and dissolve chemicals—beneath the surface. As a consequence, some pockets of subsurface mudstone were exposed to different conditions. Those pockets exposed to the salty water underwent a process called “diagenesis,” in which the changing mineralogy wiped out the geological—and possibly biological—record.

Interestingly, if not ironically, diagenesis could create environments friendly to microbes even as it erased potential evidence of life, according to John Grotzinger, a co-author of the study and a professor of geology at Caltech.

“These are excellent places to look for evidence of ancient life and gauge habitability,” Grotzinger said in the statement. “Even though diagenesis may erase the signs of life in the original lake, it creates the chemical gradients necessary to support subsurface life, so we are really excited to have discovered this.”

I like this paper for several reasons. First, it improves our understanding of the geological processes on the Red Planet and its unanticipated complexities. Second, it’s a reminder that Curiosity is still doing important work on Mars, even nine years after it first started rolling and as Perseverance begins to steal the limelight.

This study can now inform the Perseverance team as they evaluate targets for investigation and choose rock samples that could eventually be brought to Earth for closer analysis. Excitingly, the two rovers are now working as a team (even though they’re 2,300 miles apart), and, in so doing, they can influence each other’s work.

More: NASA’s ‘other’ Mars rover sends back a selfie to remind us it still exists.

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