Ancient Mars May Have Been Habitable for Hundreds of Millions of Years

By
Rimla Batool
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Mars may have once been capable of supporting microbial life for hundreds of millions of years in the distant past, new findings from a long-lived Red Planet rover suggest.
NASA’s Opportunity rover, which celebrated 10 years of Mars exploration on Friday (Jan. 24), has uncovered evidence that benign, nearly neutral-pH water flowed on the Red Planet around 4 billion years ago.
These results, reported on January 23 in the journal Science, complement the recent work of NASA’s bigger, newer Curiosity rover, which discovered a potentially habitable lake and groundwater system in a different Martian locale dating from about 3.7 billion years ago.
“These [benign] water conditions existed over a long period of time,” said Ray Arvidson, lead author of the new study and Opportunity deputy principal investigator.
Therefore, primitive organisms may have been able to survive on Mars for long stretches during a period when life was getting a foothold on Earth, said Arvidson, director of the Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

– COURTESY SPACE

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1 COMMENT

  1. Then, perhaps, is there fossils or life elsewhere? But, isn’t the emergence and maintenance of life a process of radical contingency? That is, is a unique and unrepeatable past totally necessary? Or does life emerge through space like mushrooms when some conditions are present? So, how many conditions are necessary: three, four, trillions, infinite? Only one, water or any sort of God? Is God the word that means infinite conditions, absolute necessity? Anyway, how did the life that emerge in a given conditions resist when switching to a different moment? How does life resist time itself, the effects of entropy? But, is it possible for human beings to recognise a simpler life than their own brain only? On the other hand, beyond likeness, is it possible to recognise a complex life than their brain, is this the extra-terrestrial life that some people are searching unsuccessfully? However, is there an origin of life or would it be as finding a cut in the material history of the universe, an infinite void that human language patches now? Along these lines, there is a peculiar book, a short preview in http://goo.gl/rfVqw6 Just another suggestion, far away from dogmas or axioms.

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