The Curiosity rover found unusual sand deposits on Mount Sharp, suggesting that liquid water has existed on the surface of the Red Planet for much longer than scientists thought, according to an article published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“Today we know that Gale Crater was a lake in the distant past, the water of which was even drinkable. On the other hand, we do not know how long life could exist in it. Our latest discovery suggests that even when the lake completely evaporated, there was still significant moisture in the soil of Mars, which widens the window of possible life on Mars,”says Jens Frydenvang of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
In early February 2013, Curiosity used a drill to drill a flat stone in a small depression, which was named "John Klein". A study of rock dust samples showed that conditions on ancient Mars were favorable for the existence of microorganisms.
Two years later, John Grotzinger, head of the Curiosity mission, and his colleagues proved that there were "permanent" lakes at the bottom of Gale Crater that had not dried up for hundreds of thousands of years. This confirmed the hypothetical possibility of the origin of life in these reservoirs.
Freidenwang and his colleagues found that the water in Gale Crater could have existed for much longer than the members of the Curiosity research team expected, drawing attention to the photographs that the rover received in a place called the Naukluft Plateau near the summit of Mount Sharp in the beginning of the past and at the end of 2015 of the year.
In these images, scientists noticed unusual crevices in the rocks filled with an unknown white material, similar to sedimentary rocks of water origin. The Naukluft Plateau, as scientists previously believed, was formed in the "waterless" era of Mars, and therefore the discovery of these veins forced the Curiosity scientific team to study their composition in detail, "firing" them with a ChemIn laser gun and an APXS spectrometer.
As it turned out, the cracks in the rocks were filled with fine sand, which, according to scientists, got there, along with water, which could periodically fill the soil and cracks in the rocks in Gale Crater at a time when Mars was no longer able to support the existence of "permanent" lakes …
Traces of such sands, as noted by scientists, are found almost throughout the Naukluft plateau and in the higher regions of Mount Sharp at an altitude of several tens of meters from the line where the history of the "water" era of Mars supposedly ends.
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This means that liquid water was present on Mars in one form or another for a very long time after the Red Planet lost all its oceans and other bodies of water. Accordingly, life could have existed on Mars much longer than the billion years that geologists and planetary scientists now "allocate" to it.