Washington D.C., April 21 (ANI) — Research from NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of a carbon cycle on ancient Mars, bringing scientists closer to an answer on whether the Red Planet was ever capable of supporting life.
Lead author Dr. Ben Tutolo, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Energy and Environment at the University of Calgary, is a participating scientist on the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover team. The team is working to understand climate transitions and habitability on ancient Mars as Curiosity explores Gale Crater.
A paper published this week in the journal Science reveals that data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites contained siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, within sulfate-rich layers of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater. “The discovery of large carbon deposits in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars,” says Tutolo.
Reaching these strata was a long-term goal of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. “The abundance of highly soluble salts in these rocks and similar deposits mapped over much of Mars has been used as evidence of the ‘great drying’ of Mars during its dramatic shift from a warm and wet early planet to its current cold and dry state,” Tutolo adds.
Sedimentary carbonate has long been predicted to form under a CO₂-rich ancient Martian atmosphere, but identifications had previously been sparse. NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars on August 5, 2012, has now traveled more than 34 kilometers across the Martian surface.
The discovery of carbonate suggests that Mars’s atmosphere once contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water on its surface, and as the atmosphere thinned, the carbon dioxide was sequestered into rock. NASA says future missions and analysis of other sulfate-rich areas on Mars could confirm these findings and help scientists better understand the planet’s early history and atmospheric loss.
Tutolo says researchers are ultimately trying to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life—and the latest paper brings them closer to an answer. “It tells us that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct,” he notes.
“The broader implication is that the planet remained habitable until this time, but as the CO₂ that had been warming the planet began to precipitate as siderite, it likely affected Mars’s ability to stay warm. The question looking forward is: how much of this atmospheric CO₂ was actually sequestered? Was that potentially a reason we began to lose habitability?” Tutolo added.
Small changes in atmospheric CO₂ can lead to huge impacts on a planet’s ability to harbor life—a lesson that resonates both on Mars and here on Earth.
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