from Press TV: NASA’s Curiosity rover has sent back scientific data suggesting new evidence of water on Mars.
The rover released pictures indicating that the Gale Crater on Mars used to be a huge lake of water far back in history.
With the new evidence of water, the Red Planet must have been suitable for some form of life in ancient times.
NASA also maintains that Mount Sharp in Mars was shaped by sediments within a lake bed.
This interpretation of the rover’s findings suggest that the Red
Planet used to have a climate which could produce long-lasting lakes at
different locations, Curiosity deputy project scientist, Ashwin
Vasavada, and his colleagues said in a statement.
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,” explained Vasavada, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.
Curiosity project scientist, John Grotzinger, from the California
Institute of Technology, also said, “We are making headway in solving
the mystery of Mount Sharp. Where there’s now a mountain, there may have
once been a series of lakes.”
He added, “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.”
From its 2012 landing site to its current work site, the rover
Curiosity is going 500 feet or 150 meters deep into the lowest
sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, providing more data about the crater
floor that gives indication of past lakes existing at about 5 miles or 8
kilometers.
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