NASA revealed a surprise about the planet Mars, because rock samples are present at the bottom of an ancient lake and long dry on the surface of the red planet, showing amazing conditions similar to the planet Earth.
A team of scientists, using an instrument on NASA’s Curiosity, found higher than normal amounts of manganese in the rocks of Gale Crater lake on the Red Planet, a metal that is usually found in lakes on Earth due to conditions high oxidation, which causes the formation of manganese crystals in the presence of oxygen.
The presence of manganese in large quantities also indicates that the sediments formed in a river, delta, or near the shore of an ancient lake, implying that similar soil conditions may have persisted in Gale Crater, when which was filled with water in ancient times. .
For her part, the lead researcher on the NASA spacecraft team, Nina Lanza, said, “The environment of Gale Crater Lake, as revealed by these ancient rocks, gives us a window into a habitable environment that looks remarkably like places on Earth today. ,” indicates that the manganese mines are a rumor.
For his part, Pádraig Gasda, a geochemist and member of the Space Sciences and Applications Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said, “It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we did not expect to find it . in such high concentrations in beach sediments.”
“On Earth, these types of deposits occur all the time from high levels of oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze oxidation reactions manganese,” said Gasda. On Mars, we have no evidence of life, and it is not clear how oxygen in the ancient Martian atmosphere forms, so it is very interesting how manganese oxide is formed and focus here. “These results indicate larger processes occurring on Mars.”
He continued: “The atmosphere or surface waters seem to indicate that more work needs to be done to understand oxidation on Mars.
The team concluded that the most likely scenario was manganese oxide deposition on the lakeshore in the presence of an oxygen-rich atmosphere.
They say this is further evidence of a long-lived lake environment in ancient Gale Crater on Mars, where the formation of manganese oxide can take thousands of years, depending on oxygen levels.
But the question of where this oxygen came from remains unanswered, although it is possible that meteorite impacts early in Mars’ history released oxygen from surface ice deposits.
Oxidation by microbes may have left biological traces and organic materials in the manganese-bearing rocks.
It should be noted that the sedimentary rocks explored by the rover are a mixture of sand, silt and clay.
Sandstone is harder, and groundwater can easily penetrate sand compared to the clay that makes up most of the bedrock in Gale Crater.
