New information regarding Mars’ habitability that astronomers have discovered may prove auspicious for tech billionaire and space enthusiast Elon Musk, who intends to set foot on the red planet.
Elon Musk has been constructing his Starship rocket, which he claims will ultimately transport people to Mars.
Researchers claim that before water, the primary source of life, disappeared millions of years ago, there was life on the red planet.
According to The Sunday Times, the scientific team determined that the landscape of Mars, which formerly included lakes, rivers, and seas, resembled Earth’s early solar system.
Scientists have been wondering how water disappeared from the earth.
Their research, which was published in the journal Geology, disproved theories that water vanished at that time, some 2.9 billion years ago, by showing that water was present even in the late Hesperian epoch.
Researchers from Imperial College London have reported finding “signs that water was abundant in Mars’s Gale crater, a 92-mile diameter basin just south of the equator, long after the planet was thought to have become dry and inhospitable.”
These water-only-forming strata were also found by the Curiosity rover’s management team.
According to Dr. Steven Banham, the study principal author, “… by which process did the water leave these clues?”
“This water might have been pressurized liquid, forced into and deforming the sediment; frozen, with the repeat freezing and thawing process causing the deformation; or briny, and subject to large temperature swings,” said Dr. Banham, who is also a teaching fellow at Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering.
“What’s clear is that behind each of these potential ways to deform this sandstone, water is the common link,” he said.
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