Extract from ABC News
NASA's Perseverance rover takes a selfie with some of the sample collection tubes it deposited onto the surface of Mars. (Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Mars could have enough liquid water for a global ocean, researchers have found.
Little did scientists know that in November 2011 NASA's Curiosity Rover would take flight from Cape Canaveral and successfully in August 2012, helping to reveal that Mars could have supported ancient life.
Nor did they know that in 2024, deep in the Red Planet's outer crust, NASA's Insight lander would find a large underground reservoir of liquid water — enough to fill oceans on the planet's surface.
Then in September this year the Mars rover Perseverance uncovered rocks that hold the strongest signs yet of ancient life on the planet.
Perseverance, which has been living up to its name and roaming Mars since 2021, cannot directly detect life past or present, but it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for having hosted life billions of years ago.
"All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see," lead researcher Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University told The Associated Press.
"It would be amazing to be able to demonstrate conclusively that these features were formed by something that was alive on another planet billions of years ago, right?"
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