WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient lake – wave-tossed rocks in an area of the planet, the US space agency said Wednesday.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2012, returned stunning images of rock formations blasted by the waves of a shallow lake billions of years ago.
Curiosity had previously found evidence that lakes once covered parts of Mars in salty minerals when they dried up. But NASA scientists were surprised to find such clear evidence of water in Gale Crater that the rover is now looking for.
“We have climbed many reservoirs in the lake during our missions but have never seen tidal waves so clearly,” Wasawada said in a statement. “This was particularly surprising because the region we’re in probably formed at a time when Mars was getting drier,” he said.
Curiosity is exploring the foothills of a three-mile (five-kilometer) tall mountain known as Mount Sharp. NASA said the rover also spotted debris in a canyon that was washed away by a wet landslide on Mount Sharp.
“This mudflat is probably the most recent evidence of water we’ll ever see,” Wasawada said. “This will allow us to study layers higher up on Mount Sharp that we cannot reach.” Mount Sharp provides scientists with a sort of “Martian timeline” with the oldest layer at the bottom and the youngest at the bottom, NASA said.
This allows them to “study how Mars evolved from a planet that was more Earth-like in its ancient past, with a warm climate and abundant water, to the frozen desert it is today”. Another Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 to look for signs of past microbial life.
The multitasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes that will be returned to Earth for laboratory analysis in the 2030s.