NASAs Mars Curiosity Rover finds Mount Sharp was once a huge lake

Mount Sharp on Mars was once home to huge lakes that remained for up to 10,000 years at a time - long enough to support life. This is the latest discovery by NASAs Curiosity Rover that had landed in Gale Crater in August 2012. The rock formations that have been photographed by the rover would suggest that long ago a transient water system of deltas and lakes had dominated the landscape of Gale Crater.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 9 October 2015.

The images show evidence of sediments transported southward by shallow streams to the boundary of an ancient lake. It may be recalled that recently NASA scientists had confirmed that current water flows on Mars.
As explained by scientists - the Gale crater floor today is the lowest topographic depression for over 1,000-Km in any direction, including the northern plains. It seems water collected there, in surface and subsurface reservoirs. And that had been happening for a geologically and perhaps biologically relevant period of time.
Moreover, observations from the rover tend to suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago. These delivered sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp.
Obviously, a conclusion can be reached that there were ancient lakes on Mars.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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Martians getting curious - NASAs Curiosity rover has been on Mars now for 3-years

#NASA #CuriosityRover #Mars NASA's Mars rover Curiosity had landed on the Red Planet Mars on 5 August 2012 and, has now been an integral part of the Martian landscape – that must have caused furrows on the foreheads of Martians up there. Anyway, Curiosity has trundled across the Red Planet for three very productive and eventful years and has sent back useful information.
This has been reported in space.com dated 5 August 2015.

The six-wheeled robot named Curiosity had a dramatic and unprecedented touchdown on the Martian surface with the aid of a rocket-powered "sky crane" that lowered the 1-ton rover gently by using cables. And, once on ground, the robot set out on its mission of whether its immediate environs — a 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) crater named Gale — could ever have supported microbial life.
Based on the initial findings, scientists concluded that Gale Crater could have supported a potentially habitable lake-and-stream or water system for long stretches of time — perhaps for millions of years at a time.
The progress has been slow and NASA has to keep requesting for more and more time to carry on its investigations – Curiosity is, after all, a robot and it has to be guided on occasions to perform intriguing tasks that had not been visualized earlier.
Anyway, the man-and-machine team is carrying out work for the future of mankind and needs to get full support and cooperation from all quarters.
(Image courtesy wikimediacmmons.org)

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There is methane in Gale Crater, can life be far behind – Mars Curiosity rover update

#nasacuriosity NASAs Curiosity Mars Rover has identified mysterious spikes of methane in the Gale Crater and scientists believe that this find could indicate evidence of life on the Red Planet. It is a fact that plumes of methane have been identified on the planet in the past, but none as sudden as the "venting" measured at Gale Crater.
Curiosity has made this discovery by means of an instrument and these spikes in the gas cannot be easily explained by geology, or by organic material brought to the planet by comets or asteroids. In the opinion of scientists, the source of the gas could be bacteria-like organisms.
However, they have cautioned that they do not know what caused the spikes that followed studies of gas samples by Curiosity's Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TAS) – this instrument uses light to carry out chemical analysis.
It is understood that the instrument initially recorded low levels of methane, which then spiked 10-fold over a period of 60 Martian days. The spikes were recorded within 200 and 300 meters of each other, and within a kilometer of where the lower readings were recorded.
Scientists believe that the low background level of methane can be explained by the Sun's rays degrading organic material possibly deposited by meteors but, the spikes of methane could mean that there are possibilities of an additional source – and, it was unlikely to be caused by the impact of a comet or asteroid.

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.