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Scientists find evidence of ancient lake on Mars
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Scientists have found proof of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars suited to support microbial life, they said on Monday.
The lake, located inside Gale Crater where NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity landed in August 2012, likely covered an area 50 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide, though its size varied over time.
Analysis of sedimentary deposits gathered by the rover shows the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years, and possibly longer, geologist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
“We’ve come to appreciate that is a habitable system of environments that includes the lake, the associated streams and, at times when the lake was dry, the groundwater,” he said.
Analysis of clays drilled out from two rock samples in the area known as Yellowknife Bay show the freshwater lake existed at a time when other parts of Mars were dried up or dotted with shallow, acidic, salty pools ill-suited for life.
In contrast, the lake in Gale Crater could have supported a simple class of rock-eating microbes, known as chemolithoautotrophs, which on Earth are commonly found in caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, Grotzinger said.
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