ONLINE-
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