Data from NASA's Mars rover suggests that an ancient lake bed on Mars may be filled with gemstones.
According to a study published in December, these opals could be proof that water and rock have been interacting beneath the surface of Mars.
Water is important for life as we know it, so scientists focus on it when searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. Scientists have to look for geological signs of the water that used to be there. There are signs in the Red Planet's rocks and soil where water and rock interact.
In the past few years, researchers have seen one such sign. There are "halos" of lighter colored rock surrounding some of the fractured areas. The rocks need to interact with water.
Researchers dug into the archives of the rover and found that the halos are not isolated. They appear to be all over the 96 mile wide ( 154 kilometer wide) ancient lake bed that has been explored by the mission.
The lead study author, a research physicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said that the new analysis of archival data showed striking similarity between all of the fractured halos. It was amazing to see that these fractured networks were so widespread.
Gabriel and his colleagues were looking at old images from the traverse around the crater when they noticed a light halo of rock surrounding a fractured skull. The halo looked similar to halos found recently. The data from the ChemCam instrument, used to analyze rocks, showed that some of the light rocks studied were likely to have some sort of minerals.
Gabriel's team ran an analysis on another set of halos in a different location within the crater to confirm the chemistry of those rocks. The team used the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument to measure the amount of high-energy particles coming from outside the solar system. The bouncing neutrons slow down when hydrogen is present. There are more water-bearing rocks in a given area when DAN discovers a higher proportion of slow- moving neutrons.
The lighter-colored halos on the ground at the Lubango site were found to contain opal.
The data, along with the pictures of the halos from earlier in the mission, show that water must have existed in the past.
Gabriel said that it's reasonable to expect that these potentially habitable subsurface conditions extended to many other regions of Gale Crater. After the ancient lakes in Gale Crater dried up, these environments would have arisen.
The researchers said that life could have held on for a bit longer if they had known that the water was still there after the lake evaporated. The planet Mars is thought to be around 4.5 billion years old.
Water was once widespread on Mars, according to these results. To better understand the planet's watery past, the study authors propose a new location for collecting geological samples.
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