The Curiosity rover has discovered rocks similar to those on Earth on the surface of the Red Planet.
As scientists have established, the components of the Martian crust have a strong resemblance to tonalite-trondhlemitic-granodiorites - rocks that prevailed in the continental crust more than 2.5 billion years ago, writes Sci-News.
“Mars was viewed as an almost entirely basaltic planet with dark and relatively dense igneous rocks similar to those that form the Earth's oceanic crust,” said scientist Roger Vince of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “However, Gale Crater, where NASA's Curiosity rover landed, contains fragments of very ancient igneous rocks (3.6 billion years old) of a distinctly light color. They were analyzed using the ChemCam rover instrument.”
Researchers examined the images and chemical analysis data from 22 fragments and concluded that the pale-colored rocks are composed of feldspar and possibly quartz, making them look like Earth's granite continental crust.
Earlier, Dutch researchers suggested that in the past, liquid water and even peculiar rivers were present on the surface of Mars - by cosmic standards, this was not so long ago, about a million years ago.