In 2012 NASA‘s Curiosity rover went to Mars to explore Gale Crater. Gale Crater is the ancient remnant of a massive impact. Sediment carried by water and wind filled in the crater floor, layer by layer.
After the sediment hardened, wind carved the layered rock into the towering Mount Sharp, which Curiosity is climbing today.
Now exposed on the mountain’s slopes, each layer reveals a different era of Martian history and holds clues about the prevailing environment at the time.
Lead scientist William Rapin said: “We went to Gale Crater because it preserves this unique record of a changing Mars.
“Understanding when and how the planet’s climate started evolving is a piece of another puzzle.”
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He continued: “When and how long was Mars capable of supporting microbial life at the surface?”
He and his co-scientists describe salts found across a 150-metre-tall section of sedimentary rocks called “Sutton Island,” which Curiosity visited in 2017.
Based on a series of mud cracks at a location named “Old Soaker,” the team already knew the area had intermittent drier periods.
Given that Earth and Mars were similar in their early days, NASA speculated that Sutton Island might have resembled saline lakes on South America’s Altiplano.
Taken together, the evidence points to Gale Crater, and Mars in general, as a place where life might have survived for some time.
With the primary mission fulfilled, the NASA rover will continue exploring.
They aim to uncover the history of Mars and to learn more about how and where future missions can search for the signatures that ancient life may have left behind.
