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0501 ancient mars
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New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars

Manganese-rich sandstones indicate there were once habitable
conditions in the Gale Crater

May 1, 2024

2024-05-01NASA's Curiosity rover continues to search for signs that
Mars' Gale Crater conditions could support microbial life. Photo
credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

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. The results were published today in Journal of Geophysical
Research: Planets.

"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.

"On Mars, we don't have evidence for life, and the mechanism to
produce oxygen in Mars's ancient atmosphere is unclear, so how the
manganese oxide was formed and concentrated here is really puzzling.
These findings point to larger processes occurring in the Martian
atmosphere or surface water and shows that more work needs to be done
to understand oxidation on Mars," Gasda added.

ChemCam, which was developed at Los Alamos and CNES (the French space
agency), uses a laser to form a plasma on the surface of a rock, and
collects that light in order to quantify elemental composition in
rocks.

The sedimentary rocks explored by the rover are a mix of sands,
silts, and muds. The sandy rocks are more porous, and groundwater can
more easily pass through sands compared to the muds that make up most
of the lakebed rocks in the Gale Crater. The research team looked at
how manganese could have been enriched in these sands--for example, by
percolation of groundwater through the sands on the shore of a lake
or mouth of a delta--and what oxidant could be responsible for the
precipitation of manganese in the rocks.

On Earth, manganese becomes enriched because of oxygen in the
atmosphere, and this process is often sped up by the presence of
microbes. Microbes on Earth can use the many oxidation states of
manganese as energy for metabolism; if life was present on ancient
Mars, the increased amounts of manganese in these rocks along the
lake shore would have been a helpful energy source for life.

"The Gale lake environment, as revealed by these ancient rocks, gives
us a window into a habitable environment that looks surprisingly
similar to places on Earth today," said Nina Lanza, principal
investigator for the ChemCam instrument. "Manganese minerals are
common in the shallow, oxic waters found on lake shores on Earth, and
it's remarkable to find such recognizable features on ancient Mars."

Paper: "Manganese-rich sandstones as an indicator of ancient oxic
lake water conditions in Gale Crater, Mars" Journal of Geophysical
Research: Planets.

Funding: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Contact

Nick Njegomir(505) 695-8111nickn@lanl.gov

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