Mars once had wet-dry climate conducive to supporting life: Study

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the primary proof that Mars as soon as had a local weather which alternated between moist and dry seasons much like Earth, a research mentioned on Wednesday, suggesting the pink planet could have as soon as had the proper situations to help life.

Although the floor of Mars is now an arid desert, billions of years in the past rivers and huge lakes are thought to have stretched throughout its floor.

Since 2012, the Curiosity rover has been exploring the massive Gale crater, which is believed to be house of a former lake and has an enormous mountain of sediment almost six kilometers (4 miles) excessive in its heart.

“We shortly realized that we have been working in lakes and rivers deposits, however didn’t know what kind of local weather they have been linked to,” William Rapin, a researcher at France’s CNRS scientific analysis heart and the research’s lead writer, instructed AFP.

Whereas climbing the slope of the sediment mountain in 2021, Curiosity discovered salt deposits forming a hexagonal sample in soil dated to almost 4 billion years in the past.

The rover’s devices recognized the patterns as cracks in dried mud, based on the research printed within the journal Nature.

“When a lake dries up the mud cracks, and when it fills again up, the cracks heal,” Rapin defined.

Repeat this course of sufficient instances, and the cracks prepare themselves in hexagons.

Subsequently, that is “the primary tangible proof that Mars had a cyclical local weather,” Rapin mentioned.

Recurrently occurring moist and dry seasons, as on Earth, may have supplied the situations wanted for all times to type, the researchers mentioned.

‘Fairly fortunate’

Curiosity has already detected the presence of natural compounds thought of the building blocks of life on Mars, which could possibly be one other piece of the puzzle.

However these constructing blocks want the proper situations to turn into the precursors of life.

“In a world that is too dry, these molecules by no means have the chance to type—nor do they in a world that is too moist,” Rapin mentioned.

However banish ideas of big-headed inexperienced males—if Mars did help life, it was probably primitive single-celled microorganisms.

“Over 11 years, we have discovered ample proof that historical Mars may have supported microbial life” because of the Curiosity rover, mentioned Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Now, the mission has discovered proof of situations which will have promoted the origin of life, too,” he mentioned in a press release.

The invention of such historical terrain may by no means have been potential on Earth, the place tectonic plates consistently reshuffle the floor, sifting away such lingering traces of the previous.

That implies that learning Mars—which lacks tectonic plates—may assist scientists remedy the thriller of how life started on our house planet.

“It is fairly fortunate of us to have a planet like Mars close by that also holds a reminiscence of the pure processes which can have led to life,” Rapin mentioned.

© 2023 AFP