http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/10/09/nasa-confirms-ancient-lake-existed-on-mars-2-to-3-billion-years-ago.htmlBillions of years ago, there were lakes shimmering on Mars. That is the conclusion from the team behind NASA's Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity, who used data from the Curiosity rover to determine that water helped deposit sediment into Gale Crater. Three years ago, the rover landed at the crater and it has been exploring the area ever since. "Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago, delivering sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp," said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, and co-author of the new Science article to be published Friday, in a press release.
The findings build upon previous work that suggested there were ancient lakes on Mars and offers the latest proof that the Red Planet was wet. Last month, NASA scientists confirmed that water flowed on Mars. "What we thought we knew about water on Mars is constantly being put to the test," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a press release. "It's clear that the Mars of billions of years ago more closely
resembled Earth than it does today. Our challenge is to figure out how this more clement Mars was even possible, and what happened to that wetter Mars."
The findings of a wet planet don’t exactly match up with models developed by paleoclimatologists – a similar conundrum in trying to understand Earth’s ancient past. “Aside from the shapes of the continents, geologists had paleontological evidence that fossil plants and animals in Africa and South America were closely related, as well as unique volcanic rocks suggestive of a common spatial origin," John Grotzinger, the former project scientist for Mars Science Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of the new report, in a press release. “The problem was that the broad community of Earth scientists could not come up with a physical mechanism to explain how the continents could plow their way through Earth’s mantle and drift apart. It seemed impossible. The missing component was plate tectonics. In a possibly similar way, we are missing something important about Mars.”
