A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or near the shoreline of an ancient lake.
It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn’t expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit,” said Patrick Gasda, of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Space Science and Applications group and lead author on the study.
“On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions…Story continues…
By: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Source: New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars
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