This illustration depicts a lake of water partially filling Mars' Gale Crater, receiving runoff from snow melting on the crater's northern rim
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSSDuring its epic observational quest to see if life existed on
Mars, and to prepare for humanity's eventual mission to the planet
in the 2030s -- Nasa's Curiosity
Rover has found out how water helped shape the Martian
landscape.
Curiosity Rover has observed that Mars' Mount Sharp was built by
sediments that accumulated in a large lakebed on the planet over
tens of millions of years. These findings suggest that ancient
Mars' climate allowed lakes to exist throughout the Martian
landscape.
"We are making the headway in solving the mystery of Mount
Sharp," commented Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger from
the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena.
Researchers still remain stumped as to how ancient Mars'
atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing to allow for the
existence of water. Nonetheless, Ashwin Pasadena, Curiosity deputy
project scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena
asserts that: "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."
The Curiosity Rover is busily investigating the lowest
sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, comprising of a rock 150 metres
high and known as the Murray formation. "The great thing about a
lake that occurs repeatedly, over and over, is that each time it
comes back it is another experiment to tell you how the environment works," Grotzinger
said.
Don't
miss
Grotzinger asserts that patterns showing how the atmosphere,
water and sediments interacted on Mars will emerge as the Curiosity
Rover continues its ascent up Mount Sharp. "We may see how the chemistry changed in the lakes over time," he
said.
Since rocking up on the Red Planet in 2012, the Curiosity Rover
has uncovered many a fact throughout its 5-mile journey from its
landing site to its current work site at the base of Mount Sharp.
One key finding, according to a Curiosity science team member
Sanjeev Gupta from Imperial College London, has been the Rover's
transition from "an environment dominated by rivers to an
environment dominated by lakes."
Previous Mars missions have already flagged up the existence of
wet environments on ancient Mars. Curiosity's main purpose,
however, is to evaluate how the Martian environment has changed
over millions of years, and to glean whether future human
habitation of the Red Planet will be possible.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-12/09/curiosity-rover-life-on-mars http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/k_n/Mars_16.jpg
Curiosity Rover uncovers how water shaped Mars
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