By studying the clay deposits in the vicinity of the Huygens crater on Mars, a team of scientists from the Search Institute for Extraterrestrial Civilizations SETI found new evidence that 3.8 billion years ago, the Red Planet was warmer and more habitable in general, and probably inhabited by primitive microorganisms.
Planetary scientists have discovered that the sediments contain large amounts of iron and chalk. Iron-rich clay, according to experts, could only be formed with the help of water, and chalk, or calcium carbonate, on Earth is directly associated with life in the oceans. All these discoveries, according to lead author of the study Janice Bishop, make it possible to reaffirm that Mars was not the cold and dry desert as it seems today, but a planet much more like Earth - with an ocean and a rather dense atmosphere.
Recently, experts have managed to find a lot of evidence that in the distant past on Mars there was subsequently a completely evaporated ocean of liquid water. For example, one of the most recent such evidence was the traces of two large-scale sea tsunamis caused by falling meteorites. Various experts hold different versions as to how exactly Mars in the past warmed up so much that the existence of an ocean of liquid water on it became possible. According to one version, this was facilitated by the meteorite bombardment of Mars that took place four billion years ago, according to the other - the eruption of subglacial volcanoes.
A week ago it became known that the first manned flight into orbit of the Red Planet is scheduled for 2028, although it was previously assumed that it will take place no earlier than 2033. Experts hope that such an expedition will speed up the pace of Mars exploration by orders of magnitude, since the exchange of signals between the Earth and Mars takes a long time due to the large distance between the planets, while for specialists in Martian orbit this problem will not arise.
Dmitry Erusalimsky