It
was 2005 when a European space probe first found evidence
that there was water on Mars. 9 years later NASA's Curiosity Rover
made a startling discover that suggest that not only was there water
but enough water to affect the landscape of the planet. It seems that
the 3.5-mile high Mount Sharp is actually a sedimentary rock
formation. Meaning that the 96-mile wide Gale crater must have had
enough water to form the mountain.
“This
lake was large enough, it could have lasted millions of years —
sufficient time for life to get started and thrive, sufficient time
for lake sediment to build up to form Mount Sharp,” said Michael
Meyer, lead scientist of NASA’s Mars exploration program.
The
revelation means that millions of years in its past Mars had a lake,
probably more, bigger than than the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The
water had to have been around long enough to produce the amount of
sediment need to create such a formation larger than Mount
Whitney. Estimates of the amount of time it must have taken for
the mountain to form range anywhere from one to ten million years.
“This
was a complete surprise,” said Grotzinger, a Caltech geologist.
“There was no way to have recognized this from orbit.”
On
November 26, 2011 NASA launched the Boeing and Lockheed Martin built
Curiosity
from Cape Canaveral. It spent the next 23 months traveling to Mars
where it was look in to the possibility of the planet at one time
having sustainable life. On August
6, 2012 the rover touched down at the Gale Crater site on the Red
Planet. It has been using its portable laboratory to explore the
crater since that time. A month ago it finally started climbing Mount
Sharp where one of the core samples it took showed that it was formed
from these sedimentary deposits.
"If
our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion
that warm and wet conditions were transient, local or only
underground on Mars," Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity mission's
deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in
a news release. "A more radical explanation is that Mars'
ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing
globally, but so far we don't know how the atmosphere did that."
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