(ORDO NEWS) — The rover of the American space agency NASA – Curiosity – is now exploring the Martian Mount Sharp 5 km high.
The rover transmitted to Earth a video released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. According to scientists, Curiosity has found new compelling evidence that there was once water on Mars.
Now there is no doubt that there were rivers, lakes, seas and oceans on the Red Planet. The Curiosity rover has collected the necessary evidence.
Now it is located at the foot of Mount Sharp, 5 km high. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a video of the rover in action.
The device detected wavy textures that arose due to waves in a shallow lake a billion years ago.
As the researchers said, the existence of water in the history of Mars was almost beyond doubt, but they were still surprised to find such ripples in the area.
Ashwin Vasawada, Curiosity Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the rover explored many lake sediments during its mission, but had never encountered wave ripples.
The scientist noted that this is the best evidence that there was water on Mars, which he saw during the entire Curiosity mission. But even more surprising was the discovery of stones with repeating patterns.
According to preliminary estimates, this may be due to certain climatic phenomena – for example, dust storms that occur at periodic intervals.
In addition to being the best evidence of water, the rover found a metallic meteorite on the planet. On January 28, Curiosity’s mast camera took 19 panoramic shots of the meteorite and sent it back to Earth.
As Plus-one.ru reported, about 4.5 billion years ago, there could have been oceans on Mars. This was reported by scientists from the University of Copenhagen.
They believe that the water was delivered by asteroids consisting of ice. They also profited and important for the creation of living organisms amino acids.
According to researchers, all this happened during the first 100 million years of the existence of the Red Planet.
To come to such conclusions, scientists subjected to a thorough analysis of the meteorite, whose age is billions of years. It is a fragment of the original crust of Mars.
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