A mysterious ‘oasis’ has been found on the surface of Mars, raising hopes that evidence of life may also one day be found on the Red Planet.
The Nasa Curiosity Rover has found traces of ‘shallow, salty ponds that went through episodes of overflow and drying’.
It made the astonishing find within Gale Crater, a 100-mile-wide dry lakebed, using a tool which allows it to zap Martian rocks with a laser to work out their chemical make-up.
The discovery is more proof that Mars was once able to support life – but is not quite the smoking gun which proves extraterrestrial organisms thrived on the now-barren planet.
‘We’ve learned over the years of Curiosity’s traverse across Gale Crater that Mars’ climate was habitable once, long ago,’ said Roger Wiens, the principal investigator of the ChemCam instrument at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of a paper on the research.
‘What these new findings show is that the climate on Mars was not as stable as we thought it was.
‘There were very wet periods and very dry periods.’
Currently, Mars is a ‘freezing desert’, but it was once wetter and therefore more hospitable.
Analysis of the rocks in the desiccated oasis suggest its rocks dried out completely at times but were soaked at others, indicating huge ‘fluctuations in the Martian climate’.
Gale Crater was formed in a massive impact and was eventually filled with sediment.
Over the aeons, the wind carved out a large hill which has been named Mount Sharp, which Curiosity is currently climbing up.
‘We went to Gale Crater because it preserves this unique record of a changing Mars,” said lead author William Rapin of Caltech.
‘Understanding when and how the planet’s climate started evolving is a piece of another puzzle: When and how long was Mars capable of supporting microbial life at the surface?’