NASA’s curiosity rover made an surprising and thrilling discovery when it arrived on the “sulfate-bearing unit” of Mars: rippled rock textures that point out lakes as soon as existed on this supposedly dry area.
In line with worldwide media reviews, researchers anticipated to seek out salty minerals leftover from water drying up; as a substitute, they uncovered proof that these areas had been moist for for much longer than beforehand thought. Who is aware of what different secrets and techniques lie hidden beneath the Crimson Planet’s dusty floor?
After its profitable mission, the Curiosity staff was astounded to uncover a snapshot of Mars’ distant previous: proof that historical lakes as soon as existed and lapped at sandy shores.
Billions of years in the past, waves created patterns in sediment beneath Martian lakes – leaving ripples etched into the rock for researchers to find at the moment.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” mentioned Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s mission scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this – and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.”
