Recently, Curiosity discovered a giant lake on Mars that was once suitable for life. According to a new research published recently, the Curiosity Rover managed to stumble across the site in the Gale Crater that is believed to be a place once teeming with life, according to scientists.
Some 3.6 billion years ago, the newly discovered site would have been overflowing with water. Furthermore, the findings concluded that this special spot had all the main building blocks for life such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur.
The findings are detailed in the latest edition of Science and were discussed in San Francisco at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The papers went on to add that life on Mars could be little critters that are capable of living in thermal vents at the bottom of water.
This isn't the first time we've learnt of possible life on Mars. Earlier in the year, Curiosity found evidence of clay minerals that can only be formed in water. In other words, water that could support life, which means it is highly possible Mars was a planet teeming with life in it early days.
The newly discovered lake in the Gale Crater projects similar signs, alongside life friendly chemical signatures, according to the project scientist on the Curiosity mission, John Grotzinger.
Grotzinger stated "the whole thing just seems extremely Earthlike."
"We show here that Gale crater once contained an ancient lake that would have been well suited to support a Martian biosphere founded on chemolithoautotrophy," Grotzinger wrote.
"Episodic drying of this lake environment seems certain over this long time scale if not over shorter spans," he wrote. "However, even if the lake was dry periodically ... the presence of former groundwater-well documented for many ancient Mars phenomena-may have provided a refugium to sustain a chemolithotrophic biosphere."
Unfortunately, the papers weren't enough to propose that life is or was on Mars. However, it has paved the way for a possible discovery in the future to come that might shock the world and leave us to believe in alien life on other planet.
The team did not come across a single fossil or anything related to that, but the discovery is a big one nonetheless, says co-author Sanjeev Gupta, a member of the MSL mission from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London.
"We have not found signs of ancient life on Mars. What we have found is that Gale Crater was able to sustain a lake on its surface at least once in its ancient past that may have been favorable for microbial life, billions of years ago," said Gupta in a statement. "It is exciting to think that billions of years ago, ancient microbial life may have existed in the lake's calm waters, converting a rich array of elements into energy. The next phase of the mission, where we will be exploring more rocky outcrops on the crater's surface, could hold the key to whether life did exist on the red planet."
