Mars had a long-lasting series of lakes, NASA’s Curiosity rover finds

A new study from the team behind NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity has confirmed that Mars was once, billions of years ago, capable of storing water in lakes over an extended period of time. It’s “leaked” NASA footage, and the conspiracy theorists think that the USA government have kept it hidden from the world, as they’re keeping their contact with aliens a secret.

The discovery fills in the gaps between the watery Mars of 3.8 billion years ago and the Mars of today, where the only surface water is thin, seasonal, brackish trickles fed by an unknown source. 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.

The rover has found geological evidence that lakes of liquid water existed in the crater 3.5 billion years ago. The team will train the vehicles’ cameras on rocks further up the slope. “It changes the question about the biology of Mars, from looking for fossils to perhaps living organisms”.

“The paradox is that where today there was a mountain, there was once a basin”, he says.

The new study strongly supports the water hypothesis.

“These finely laminated mudstones are very similar to those we see on Earth”, says Woody Fischer, professor of geobiology at Caltech and coauthor of the paper. These were not catastrophic floods, he notes, but were ankle-deep to waist-high flows “probably akin to a vigorous canoe ride”.

The lakes formed as the water table rose and rivers trickled down to the lowest point in the crater, only for them to dry up again when the water table subsided. That inference comes from the sloping deposits whose layers dip southward, away from the crater wall, at angles between 10° and 20°. The thickness of these sediment deposits gives a good indication of the lifespan of the lake.

An area of Gale Crater where mudstone, pebbles and other deposits suggest the onetime presence of flowing and standing water. “The idea was that we need to be the most vigilant on the early missions, when we don’t have any knowledge of Mars, and we can relax when we know more”, Conley said. “This really seems to have been an ideal place: perpetual sustained water, either as lakes or groundwater, and add it up for ten of millions of years, it brings up an interesting scenario”. It offers researchers loads to puzzle over as they work to kind out the planet’s geologic make-up and the processes that type dramatic panorama options just like the dunes and fractures. These could be spots where running water carried sediment downhill and dropped it when the streams entered still water and slowed. Altogether, the sediments analyzed by Curiosity may have taken millions of years to pile up.

According to NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki, his company Planetary Resources – a Seattle-based firm where he is chief engineer – can accomplish the hard and highly expensive task and establish the first asteroid mine in five to 10 years. With an average temperature of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, it makes you wonder if life could actually survive on the planet – even with water.