In a groundbreaking discovery, NASA’s Curiosity rover has found signs of an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars, providing new evidence that the Red Planet may have once been habitable. The rover’s latest findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that Mars may have had lakes and streams that persisted for millions of years at a time, with conditions that could have supported microbial life.
The research team analyzed two dozen powdered rock samples collected by Curiosity’s percussive drill from a variety of locations within Gale Crater. They found that nearly half of these samples were enriched in carbon-12, the lighter of the two stable carbon isotopes, compared to previous measurements of Mars meteorites and the Martian atmosphere. These high-carbon-12 samples came from five different locations within Gale Crater, all of which are believed to have been lake-and-stream systems billions of years ago. The researchers suggest that this enrichment in carbon-12 could be a sign of ancient life, but they caution that more evidence is needed to confirm this hypothesis.