The Curiosity rover is in luck after discovering wavy rock textures that suggest the existence of lakes in a region of ancient Mars that scientists expected to be drier. The discovery says that there was a sea there.
when the rover Curiosity mission arrived at the “sulfated unit” last fall, scientists thought they had seen the latest evidence that lakes once covered this region of Mars.
This is because the rock layers formed in drier environments than regions explored earlier in the mission. And it is believed that the sulfates in the area -salty minerals- were left behind when the water it was slowly drying up.
So the Curiosity team was surprised to discover the clearest evidence to date of ancient water ripples forming inside lakes. Billions of years ago, the waves of the surface from a shallow lake stirred up bottom sediments and, over time, created rippled textures in the rocks.
The greatest evidence of water ever discovered
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we have seen in the entire missionsaid Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
“After visiting and recording thousands of meters of lake deposits, we have never seen evidence like this and now we found it in a place that we expected to be dry“, concludes the NASA expert.
Since 2014, the rover has been climbing the foothills of Mount Sharp.a 5 kilometer high mountain that was once crisscrossed by lakes and streams that would have provided a rich environment for microbial life, if it ever formed on the Red Planet.
Mount Sharp is made up of layers, the oldest at the bottom and the youngest at the top. As the rover ascends, it moves along a Martian timeline, allowing scientists to study how Mars evolved. from a more Earth-like planet to the frozen desert it is today.
Scientists will search for softer rocks over the next week. But what is clear is that on Mars there were seas and, therefore, there were beaches.