NASA’s Perseverance Rover is finally collecting rock samples on Mars, and its latest discovery is rather exciting. After coming up empty-handed on the first rock collection, NASA researchers have analyzed the latest samples, and the results indicate that water was present on Mars for a very long time at one point.
So yes, this is more evidence that there was plenty of water on Mars at one point. Furthermore, the analysis mentions that water could have been present for tens of thousands or potentially millions of years. In fact, there could have been huge rivers, and as a result, salt sediments appear to have formed on the collected rock samples when water flowed through the rocks.
More importantly, those salt sediments preserved on martian rocks could even have preserved signs of life. However, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has only retrieved two samples from one rock, so it will take a long time to gather more, then even longer to investigate and research the samples.
Currently, NASA is expected to travel back to Mars in roughly a decade, where it’ll retrieve the rock samples that Perseverance Rover left behind. Once we get our human hands on the rocks, real science will begin.
What’s especially exciting is these findings could not only redefine our understanding of the martian planet but encourage more missions and research in the future.
via Hypebeast
