Intelligent and extraterrestrial beings could be staring towards Earth right this moment from Mars and wondering themselves, “could life exist on that blue marvel?”. Astronomers have always been suspecting that some forms of life exist on Mars or have existed there in the distant past. If that’s true, why didn’t humanity encounter any aliens yet?
According to a new study that Gizmodo writes about, there could be a pretty comprehensive explanation. Evidence of life dwelling on Mars might have been there all along, but supersalty water might have erased a part of it.
NASA’s Curiosity rover does it again!
A new discovery made by the Curiosity rover of NASA shows that some patches of rock from Mars have gotten their histories erased. Curiosity has the main purpose of analyzing how much potential for habitability there is on Mars.
The rover has been analyzing sedimentary rocks from the Gale crater of the Red Planet, and they are rich in clay minerals. The presence of clay also suggests the existence of liquid water on Mars, which is a basic ingredient for life as we know it. No life forms from Earth would be able to exist without liquid water. The Curiosity rover had been using its Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument to analyze drill samples of sedimentary layers.
Tom Bristow from the Ames Research Center of NASA declared as quoted by the American space agency on jpl.nasa.gov:
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,
But later brines broke down these clay minerals in some places—essentially resetting the rock record.
The Curiosity rover operates as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, and it was launched in November 2011 from Cape Canaveral.
