Manganese was found in an ancient Mars lakebed, suggesting that the environment could have been highly useful to lifeforms.
Ancient Mars may have been surprisingly similar to planet Earth, a NASA rover has revealed.Using the ChemCam instrument on NASA's Curiosity rover, research teams from the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Space Science in New Mexico, and Applications group, made a strange discovery in the lakebed rocks of the red planet's Gale Crater. This crater is likely part of a dry lake, and is estimated to be around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years old.
'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,' Patrick Gasda, of the Los Alamos group and lead author on the study said in a statement.'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.
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