Was Mars ever habitable by living creatures? That’s a question NASA’s Curiosity rover has been trying to determine for years. Recently, according to new evidence gathered in the Gale Crater where the rover has been exploring, the red planet may have been able to harbor life billions of years ago.
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00:00Was Mars ever habitable by living creatures?
00:06That's a question NASA's Curiosity rover has been trying to determine for years.
00:10And recently, according to new evidence gathered in the Gale crater, where the rover has been exploring,
00:14the red planet may have been able to harbor life billions of years ago.
00:18The rover found manganese oxide, which is a mineral that is often found in lakes on our planet.
00:23On Earth, it occurs during oxidation, meaning oxygen must be present when the crystals form.
00:28If the same process once happened on Mars, it could mean that the planet once had enough oxygen for life to survive.
00:34Geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Patrick Gazda, had this to say about it.
00:39On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere,
00:43produced by photosynthetic life and from microbes that help catalyze these manganese oxidation reactions.
00:49However, he also says that because we don't yet have evidence of life on Mars or how oxygen would have been produced there,
00:55this discovery raises as many questions as it does answers.
00:58With planetary scientist Nina Lanza saying,
01:01the Gale Lake environment as revealed by these ancient rocks gives us a window into a habitable environment
01:06that looks surprisingly similar to places on Earth today.