Signs of water currents and sediments are seen in the latest photos NASA’s Curiosity rover sent home from Mars, the space agency said Monday. The images suggest “ancient Mars maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting lakes,” NASA says.
In the huge Gale Crater where Curiosity has been exploring, the water and sediment flow might have been massive enough to build a mountain — the three-mile-high Mount Sharp — NASA researchers say. But they acknowledge that they’re still working to solve the mystery of how the mountain formed in a crater.
“If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars,” said Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “A more radical explanation is that Mars’ ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don’t know how the atmosphere did that.”
