Tuesday, December 9, 2014

NASAs Curiosity rover finds a 96-mile-wide crater, possibly a dried up lake, on Mars


NASAs Curiosity is on track to solve the mystery of whether Mars, the Red Planet, ever had water on it. Hence, its latest find of a huge 96-mile (154-Km) wide crater tends to lend credence to the theory that Mars indeed had water, plenty of it, in the form of lakes.
Scientists have discovered stacks of rocks that contain sediments that appear to have been deposited by water and these are inclined toward the center of the crater – this now reveals a three-mile (5 km) mound called Mount Sharp. Therefore, it is quite possible that Mount Sharp was not there during a period of time roughly 3.5 billion years ago when the crater was filled with water.
Of course, researchers are baffled as to why Mount Sharp that stands about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall with its lower flanks exposing hundreds of rock layers, sits in a crater.
From these latest findings, a conclusion can be drawn that billions of years ago, a lake once filled this huge crater and as NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity continues to dig up new data, they bolster the thinking that the Red planet was most like the Earth in the solar system and was suitable for microbial life.
These new findings combine more than two years of data collected by the rover since its sky-crane landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012. NAA has plans to send humans to Mars by 2030 and results of such studies could throw up probable areas that would need to be focused upon.

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