NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered high levels of manganese oxides that may indicate that oxygen was once abundant there. With last year’s discovery that the red planet may have been home to ancient lakes, it now seems more akin to our blue one, RT reports.
“The only ways on Earth that we know how to make these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes,”said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, while commenting on the potentially groundbreaking discovery.
The researchers point out that, judging by the geological setting in which the oxides were found, water and oxygen likely existed on Mars at the same time, particularly in the Gale Crater, where the Mars rover landed on August 6, 2012. The new discovery shows that, at some point in its development, Mars may have been rather similar to Earth.
“These high manganese materials can’t form without lots of liquid water and strongly oxidizing conditions. Here on Earth, we had lots of water but no widespread deposits of manganese oxides until after the oxygen levels in our atmosphere rose,” added Lanza, discarding arguments that microbes may have played a role in producing the compounds.
Although the researchers don’t know exactly how oxygen ended up in the Martian atmosphere, Lanza suggests it was produced as water was split into hydrogen and oxygen when Mars’s protective magnetic field was disappearing. The light hydrogen atoms disappeared due to Mars’s low gravity, while oxygen was stored in the rocks, giving them the rusty red color that is Mars’ signature – and apparently forming manganese oxides. Interestingly, the amount of oxygen needed to make manganese oxides far exceeds the amount needed to turn the planet red. The new finding brings previous estimates of the quantities of oxygen that had been on Mars into question.