Mars has been on a bit of a press junket the past couple of weeks. But instead of promoting a blockbuster movie, the Red Planet is settling a centuries-old debate: Is there liquid water on Mars?
A new study from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory and the team operating the Curiosity rover – which has been gathering data on Mars since it landed three years ago – confirmed that the planet, billions of years ago, had lakes of water over an extended period of time.
"Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and co-author of the new Science article (paywall) published Friday, adding that the presence of water long ago allowed sediment, “delivered” by rivers and lakes, to slowly build the lower layers of Mount Sharp, the central peak located in Gale Crater, where the Curiosity rover is focusing its data-mining.
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