New evidence of water found on Mars: NASA
10 Dec 2014 12:12 AM GMT
Led by a team of scientists of Indian-origin, NASA’s Curiosity rover has found new evidence of water on Mars, indicating that the planet most like Earth in the solar system was suitable for microbial life.
Pictures and other data collected by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity show that rivers once flowed into a lake or lakes at the bottom of Gale Crate, an enormous dimple carved out by an incoming space rock.NASA said its interpretation of Curiosity’s finds in Gale Crater suggests ancient Mars maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting lakes at many locations on the Red Planet.
The American space agency said Mars’s Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years. “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,” said Indian- American Ashwin Vasavada, who is the Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.The thickness of the rock outcrops indicates that the lake or lakes must have sloshed around the bottom of 154-km Gale Crater over the course of millions of years.
Pictures and other data collected by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity show that rivers once flowed into a lake or lakes at the bottom of Gale Crate, an enormous dimple carved out by an incoming space rock.NASA said its interpretation of Curiosity’s finds in Gale Crater suggests ancient Mars maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting lakes at many locations on the Red Planet.
The American space agency said Mars’s Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years. “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,” said Indian- American Ashwin Vasavada, who is the Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.The thickness of the rock outcrops indicates that the lake or lakes must have sloshed around the bottom of 154-km Gale Crater over the course of millions of years.
Next Story
