NASA’s Curiosity Rover Discovers Major Clue that Suggests Mars was Once Habitable

An artistic model of NASA’s Curiosity Rover traversing the surface of Mars. (Image Credits: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

In a climb over the slopes of Mount Sharp – a 3.4-mile-high mountain located at the center of the Gale Crater on Mars – NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered large deposits of carbon locked away in carbonate minerals.

Carbonate materials are formed when carbon dioxide interacts with rocks and water, making them an important marker for the interpretation of past environmental conditions on the planet.

“It tells us that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct,” said Ben Tutolo, an associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary.

According to Tutolo, reaching these carbonate 0rh rock layers has been a long-term goal of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. The deposits suggest that Mars had once been a planet with a warm and wet environment, rather than its current cold and arid state. This supports that liquid water could have been supported on the surface of Mars.

Curiosity, which landed on Mars on August 5m 2012, has not traversed over 34 kilometers across the Martian terrain and gathered remarkable data to help scientists reconstruct the planet’s geological timeline.

NASA believes that the discovery of these carbon deposits is just the beginning.