Mars rover finds evidence of ancient water

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Mars rover finds evidence of ancient water

One of NASA's robotic rovers has found evidence that part of Mars was once soaked with enough water to sustain life, scientists said Tuesday.

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One of NASA's robotic rovers has found evidence that part of Mars was once soaked with enough water to sustain life, scientists said Tuesday.

"Opportunity has landed in an area of Mars where water once drenched the surface," said Ed Weiler, a NASA space science administrator.

The conclusion is based in part on salts found in ancient bedrock. Scientists hope to tell in coming weeks whether saltwater once filled an open sea or simply percolated through the rock as groundwater.

At a Tuesday briefing at the space agency's headquarters, scientists released results from the rover's investigation of a bedrock outcrop. A piece of the outcrop, named "El Capitan," has caused much interest among the scientists.

Now dry, the rock shows evidence of having been submerged in water, conditions friendly to the existence of microbial life.

"This was a habitable place in Mars at one point in time," said rover science chief Steve Squyres of Cornell University. However, he cautioned, "that doesn't mean there was life."

The rover landed inside the small crater crowned with layered rock on Jan. 24. NASA designed the $820 million twin rover mission, Opportunity and the Spirit probe on the other side of Mars, to investigate the possible existence of long-ago habitable conditions. Scientists have long known that Mars holds water ice in its poles and likely under its surface, but they have been uncertain about the role water played in the planet's geology.

The NASA team tested the chemistry of two holes drilled into the bedrock. The rocks hold sulfur and bromine salts in as much as 40% of their material, an unmistakable sign of water weathering the rock, Squyres said. Also, the rock showed signs of crystals left by water and spherical "blueberry" rocks left in the bedrock that precipitated in place, like pearls formed by oysters.

Another rover team scientist, Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, remarked that salt-eating microbes exist now on Earth that are capable of living in the water-drenched conditions that once existed at Opportunity's landing site, so it's possible that similar microbes existed on Mars.

Discovery of the salt-laced rocks came as a surprise at Meridiani Planum, the Oklahoma-size plain where Opportunity's crater resides, said geologist Victoria Hamilton of the University of Hawaii, who is not on the rover team. Orbiting spacecraft had seen no signs of the material, she said.

Deposits of hematite, an iron mineral associated with hot springs, appear to lie on the broader plain above Opportunity's crater, and will be explored in coming weeks.

Source: Agencies

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