Images show evidence of lakes once on Mars, NASA says

Professor Sanjeev Gupta, co-author of the study from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: “This study provides stunning evidence that Mars really did sustain a water world for what could have been many thousands or even millions of years”. The findings hint that the Red Planet once had a climate hospitable enough for microbial life to develop and evolve.

The latest study, reported October 8 in the journal Science, describes a system of deltas and lakes that dominated the Martian landscape more than 3 billion years ago. Scientists came up with that figure by analyzing the size and number of craters that now blemish the blanket of material tossed out of the crater when the impact occurred. Teams were chosen based on a comprehensive review of their proposal, which outlines their vehicle, its recovery system, payload, safety and educational engagement plans.

A photo from the orbiter shows a fascinating view of a Mars sand dune curling around the surface and looking like a giant leech.

“The paradox is that where today there was a mountain, there was once a basin”, he says. After the water was gone, wind likely continued to deposit sediment to form the brunt of the peak. These were not catastrophic floods, he notes, but were ankle-deep to waist-high flows “probably akin to a vigorous canoe ride”.

The lake may have been fed by ice from the northern rim of the crater, which rose 2 or 3 kilometres above the water level. These silty layers in the strata are interpreted as ancient lake deposits.

Furthermore, the total thickness of sedimentary deposits in Gale Crater that indicate interaction with water could extend higher still, perhaps up to one-half mile (800 meters) above the crater floor. “But if you were add or subtract just an inch per second of velocity to the asteroid, that will over time change the position of the asteroid in its orbit enough that in a couple of years the asteroid will miss the Earth rather than hit”.

“Since I was a child, I liked toys with batteries and movement”, San Martin said, recalling a time when his heroes were inventors like Thomas Edison and German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. “That must be reconciled with claims that we have a lake forming and that it endures”.

A few of those “lakes”, as the scientists termed them, could actually have been as big as oceans, thereby “implying greater availability of water on a global basis and enhanced potential for global habitability”, they said. Altogether, the sediments analyzed by Curiosity may have taken millions of years to pile up.

Those salty streaks are remnants of a far wetter early Mars, Grotzinger says.

Since the start of the mission in 2012, the six-wheeled Curiosity has enabled the NASA team to accumulate a wealth of knowledge about the past and present conditions in Gale crater and their implications for the past habitability of Mars. Ever since Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli declared there were canalis on the Red Planet in 1877, people have thought that meant the planet had intelligent life. The new analysis not only proves that water existed above ground, but also that it was long-lasting.